Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, just outside the city of Jerusalem. It is the middle of the night. He is in anguish at the prospect of what lies before him (‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’, he says). In great distress he throws…
Category: Topical sermons
Death and Burial of Jesus
Today is Palm Sunday. This is the day when Christians have traditionally celebrated the Triumphal Entry, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, acclaimed by the crowds as a great rabbi, and perhaps the longed for Kingly Messiah. Christians focus on the kingship of Jesus on this day. But today, we are going to…
Advent – The Magi
Today let us turn our attention to the Magi, or Wise Men. A couple points before we do that: We don’t know that there were three Wise Men. We know they gave three gifts (gold, frankincense and myrrh) but the Bible nowhere mentions how many men there were. There may have been three, or only…
Saul: Decline of a king
One of the presenters at a conference I attended was recently in India. Walking along the street he saw a huge sign that had a picture of a man on it, and the words ‘a sad demise’. He asked his colleagues about it: ‘This poster, “a sad demise”… What’s that about?’ They said, ‘A great…
David and Goliath
They say that familiarity breeds contempt. If that is true, then we face an obstacle this morning. In our walk through 1st Samuel we come today to what is without a doubt the best known story of the Old Testament: the story of David, the shepherd boy, facing off against the Philistine giant, Goliath. It…
Abraham
My child. ‘Yes, Lord’. I want you to take your child, whom you love, and go to the mountains and sacrifice him for me. So, the next morning you and your child pack up and drive to the mountains. The trip takes three days. You are cherishing these last moments, but your child has no…
God the Son: His work
Today we will be thinking about what is perhaps the most important Christian doctrine. (The word ‘doctrine’ refers to those bodies of truths that make up the content of our faith. For example, the Bible reveals a number of things that are true concerning the Church. Those truths together make up what we would…
God the Son: Who he is – The Humanity of Jesus
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century. Weighing more than 380 million kilograms, it stretches over one mile between San Francisco on one end and Merino County on the other. The bridge is suspended from cables several miles in length. Each cable is three…
God the Son: Who he is – The Deity of Jesus
There are lots of differing thoughts concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Some say there was no such person. Robert M. Price of the Jesus Seminar, says, ‘It is quite likely that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual… If you could travel back through time to first century Nazareth, you…
God the Father
Some years ago, at our church’s softball practice, there were a number of small children of some of the players present. One of them, not yet two years old, kept pointing and saying, ‘Daddy!’ It was very cute. The problem was that the man he was pointing to was not his daddy. We Christians frequently…