Category: Sermons

Growing Stronger

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This past Sunday as we continued our conversation about who God made us to be as a church, the next key element of our identity is growth.  Keep reading to see how growing people has always been a part of God’s approach to humanity and how it is, could be, and should be fleshed out in our community.  Thanks for reading.

Growing Stronger

Growth is natural.  As it was nearing the first summer Lisa and I spent in Virginia, we decided we wanted to plant a garden.  Neither of us really had any idea what we were doing.  We got some help and advice from folks in the church who were themselves avid gardeners, but much beyond help with the plowing of a 30 by 60 plot in our backyard, we pretty much did all the work ourselves.  We planted way too much.  We wound up spending almost every evening and Saturday morning pulling weeds and picking produce (and trying desperately to give away the hundreds of squash and zucchini and cucumbers we had).  We canned more green beans than would fit in our meager pantry.  But, by the time it was all said and done, we had successfully grown a pretty nice garden.  Here’s the funny part, though, and if you’re a gardener you know this to be true: The work we did had almost no impact on the actual growth of the garden.  Sure, by pruning and pulling weeds and spraying for bugs and watering when it got dry we might have extended the life of the plants and increased the size of the harvest, but there was not a single thing we did to cause the garden to grow save putting the seeds in the ground.  Once they were in the ground and covered with dirt, the rest happened all on its own.  Again: growth is natural. Read the rest…

Making Connections

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This past Sunday we began a brand new sermon series called “Who We Are.”  For the next few weeks we are going to be taking a look at who First Baptist is; at who God made us to be.  Along the way we’ll be talking about identity as a church and how we can stand firmly in line with God’s design for us.  If you want a better idea of who First Baptist is or what it looks like for a church to wrestle together with God’s plans for them, you won’t want to miss a single part of this series.  Thanks for reading and listening.

Making Connections

Do you know who you are?  We talked back before Christmas about the fact that Jesus helps us become fully who God made us to be.  As powerful a truth as that is, though, if we don’t have at least some kind of a clue as to who that might be, it’s hard to move with anything resembling intentionality in that direction.  This applies to us as individuals to be sure, but it applies every bit as much and maybe even a little bit more as a church.  The funny thing about the church is that it is made up of individuals.  It is made up of individuals who might know themselves incredibly well, but who may or may not understand who God made them to be and how God designed them to work as a group. Read the rest…

Yielding to Relationship

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In this final part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we take a turn.  We are still talking about reasons to believe, but this one is different from all the rest.  At the end of the day, a person can listen to solid answers to all of their objections to the life of Christ and still not be willing to make Him their Lord.  The reason for this is that their primary objection is not logical, but relational.  This is last and most important hurdle to overcome.  When someone becomes a follower of Jesus, the most powerful reason they do so is a relationship.  Keep reading for more.

 

Yielding to Relationship

There was once a man who hated Christians.  He hated them.   He hated everything they stood for.  He hated the things they believed.  He hated the impact they were having on his culture.  There was nothing about them he liked.  It was so bad that he dreamed about hurting them.  He thought up ways he could harass them and interrupt their activities and keep them from accomplishing their goals…all within the means of the law of course.  Now, you might be thinking, “Well that guy was dumb.  It doesn’t really do any good to focus that much effort on hating a group of people.  What was his deal with religion anyway?”  But, religion wasn’t his problem.  Christians were.  He had no problems with religion.  In fact, he was a very religious guy.  He just didn’t like Christians.  Furthermore, he was no dummy.  Actually, he was brilliant.  He had gone to the best schools and studied under the best teachers.  He was routinely at the top of his class.  The level of success he had attained for his age was simply astounding.  When peers looked at him they routinely saw big things in his future.  This guy was leadership material.  There were few positions which were going to be off-limits to him.  He merely had to apply himself in the relevant directions.  With his big brain, then, and as committed as he was to the way he saw the world working, he knew all the reasons Christians and their Christianity could and should be rejected.  He could have given you a list with sources.  He had a reason for every argument.  But then, something unexpected happened.  And that something was this: he actually met Jesus.  Not literally met, of course, but he encountered Jesus in a personal, powerful way.  And all his reasons went out the window.  Instead of reasons, he now had a relationship. Read the rest…

An Absentee God

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In this second-to-last part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we tackled what is perhaps the stiffest challenge to the Christian faith ever recorded: The problem of evil.  How do we who confess our belief in a God who is good account for all the evil in the world?  That’s perhaps a bigger question than we could answer over the course of a single sermon.  What we can do is talk about how to respond to those who are struggling with it personally.  That is exactly what we wrestled with in this message.  Keep reading to see what we discovered.

An Absentee God

I read a story a couple of weeks ago about a serial killer in Russia.  The man was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 22 women.  Recently he confessed to additional murders for which he had not been previously convicted.  Fifty-nine additional murders to be precise.  If you’re into math, that makes 81 people—mostly women—whom this monster raped, likely tortured, and murdered.  He was a police officer the whole time.  When he was off-duty, he would offer to give young women walking on the side of the road a lift home.  Over a span of more than twenty years, eighty-one times somebody’s daughter disappeared without any apparent trace.  Let’s just go ahead and ask the hard question: How, in a world presided over by a God whose goodness is affirmed over and over again by billions of His followers, is something like this allowed to go on for so long without recourse? Read the rest…

A Fount of Injustice?

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One of the challenges many critics of the church have used to write it off is the fact that we have some skeletons in our closet.  There have been several times in the last 2,000 years when the church got its mission not just wrong, but devastatingly so.  Still, are things really as bad as our critics allege?  A sharper look at history suggests perhaps not.  In this fourth part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we take a look at the church’s supposed dark past and discover that there may be a good deal more light there than most folks might think.  Read on for more.

A Fount of Injustice?

There is a story about the interactions between a powerful institution and a particular scientist from the 17th century that has come to define much about how many people view the church today.  The institution was the Roman Catholic Church.  The scientist was a man named Galileo Galilei.  Galileo, as the story usually goes, by carefully following the scientific method, discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth as was widely believed in his day.  Instead, the truth is the exact reverse: the earth revolves around the sun.  For espousing this scientific fact which violated not only their false explanations of how the universe worked, but also the theological explanations undergirding them, the Church set out on a campaign to persecute this courageous scientist into silence.  When this didn’t work, Galileo was excommunicated—a social death sentence in that day—and placed under arrest.  He spent the remaining years of his life in prison where he died a martyr for the cause of science. Read the rest…