Tag: Sermons

God Knows

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Happy New Year! We’re finally back and will pick back up our Romans journey tomorrow morning, Lord willing. For today, here is the first part of a quick New Year’s series reflecting on the extent of God’s knowledge of us and how we should react to that knowledge. Today as we dive into Psalm 139, we will marvel with David at God’s intimate knowledge of us and talk about some tools for remaining in that knowledge. Enjoy!

God Knows

A paradox is when two ideas which seem contradictory of one another are nonetheless simultaneously true, and we live in a world that’s full of them. Consider one particularly glaring one. We live in a world full of people screaming to be known. Depression and anxiety are off the charts these days in part because so many people feel isolated and alone, like no one really knows who they are. In response to this, and with the help of social media, many will invite the world into their most intimate spaces and times just so they can feel like somebody, somewhere, knows them. Of course, just because you show someone something intimate or personal about yourself doesn’t mean they really know you at all. Really knowing another person and being known by them takes relational investment over time. Without that, the presumed knowledge is merely a mirage. It may be a mildly comforting one (which is why so many people clamber for it), but when we are forced to face the truth, the shock of the cold water of reality can be debilitatingly intense. 

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The Miracle of Mundane Moments

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We look to stories in the Bible as incredible tales of amazing people doing utterly remarkable things. The truth, though, is that most of them lived most of their lives in moments that were utterly mundane. That wasn’t just the case for characters in the Scriptures. It’s the case with our lives today too. And yet, as ordinary as most of our lives are, we long to experience the extraordinary. We want to be special, to know that we are more than we seem. This is where the wonder of the Christmas story comes racing to center stage. As extraordinary as we imagine that story to be, most of it was very, very ordinary. What made the difference in these ordinary moments was the movement of God in their midst. Today, as we wrap up our series, When Heaven Met Earth, we are talking about the ordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people, and how things can become entirely more extraordinary than that. Let’s get started.

The Miracle of Mundane Moments

Sometimes the most extraordinary things can happen out of the most ordinary circumstances. Consider something that every single person in the room has in their kitchen, and which most of us have used at least once in the last 24 hours. In 1945, Percy Spencer was working as a radar researcher at Raytheon Labs. Raised as an orphan who never finished elementary school, Spencer taught himself physics and advanced mathematics, joined the Navy, and through that discovered his penchant for science. One day, Spencer was working in the lab with a radar magnetron. That’s basically a tube that converts electrical signals into electromagnetic radiation. It had been invented a few years before and was essential to the invention of modern radar. As Spencer worked with this magnetron, he noticed that a bar of chocolate in his pocket had melted. 

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A Cosmic Christmas

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This week we continue our Advent series, When Heaven Met Earth. As promised, we are going to be taking in a story of Jesus’ birth that probably doesn’t fall on your radar when you think about your favorites. Yet this story, for as different as it is, may be the most important of all the stories of Jesus’ birth in terms of giving us a bigger, fuller picture of the reality of what was happening in the universe at large when God came to be with us as a baby. Read on (or listen!) as we marvel at the fact that Christmas is bigger than we realize.

A Cosmic Christmas

Paul Harvey was famous for telling “the rest of the story.” He would take a story that many people know a little bit about, and then explore some surprising or encouraging element of it that not nearly as many people knew. The combination of the creativity of his reporting with his absolutely classic voice made his stories a true delight to all those who got to hear them. Sometimes his stories introduced people he thought should be better known. Sometimes they gave details about something or someone that made it even more impressive than it already was to most people. They always left you feeling not just better informed, but encouraged about the state of the world than you were before listening to them. Harvey was doing Gospel good with his reporting. A good story that lets us see things from a different angle or a bigger picture often does that. 

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A Case for God’s True Justice and a Call to Mission

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Something a little different today since I didn’t preach yesterday morning (our choir presented their excellent Christmas cantata instead). I recently heard about a small kerfuffle happening in the world of evangelical culture and theology. I was first alerted to it by a Facebook post from a church member. I don’t often pay very much attention to news stories I hear about on Facebook, though, so at first, I didn’t pay it any attention. But then, listening to a couple of different news podcasts from Christian sources I trust, I heard about it again and in more detail. Apparently, in a recent podcast episode with his son, Kirk Cameron espoused a heterodox theological view that has a fairly long historical pedigree called annihilationism. The basic thrust of the position is that one day God will annihilate—that is, blink out of existence—all of those who are in Hell. This view is framed as a better picture of the justice and mercy of God. Rather than making people suffer in Hell for eternity, God will mercifully end their suffering one day. They will simply cease to exist. When a seminary professor or anonymous pastor spouts off something like that, the world mostly ignores it. When a leading figure in the world of evangelical culture espouses it on a popular podcast, a great many more people pay attention. I don’t normally respond to things like this, but I actually wrote a paper on the subject explaining the whole debate as well as defending the historically orthodox position. This doesn’t have very much to do with the Advent season except that this is the fate Jesus came to save us from, but because the debate is hot, I thought I’d chip in my two cents. The paper is almost 20 years old, but my position hasn’t changed any in that time. This may not be for everybody, but some may find it either helpful or interesting or both. Because it is longer than usual, I’ve gone the extra mile and recorded the audio, so you can just listen to the paper if you would prefer. In any event, here you go, complete with a bibliography in case you really want to track down any of my sources.

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For Our Good

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After a few days off, it’s good to be back. The Advent season is a time for preparing for the arrival of Jesus into our world and into our lives. For the next few weeks, as we take part in the preparation, we are going to spend some time looking at the stories of Jesus’ arrival. When Jesus arrived, heaven met earth in a way that left earth forever changed for the good. These classic stories give us some insight on how that happened. They may be familiar, but there is nonetheless great wisdom here if we will have it. Let’s get started with Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth and see what the Spirit has to say through it.

For Our Good

Many of you know that I enjoy building metal models. They are all over my office. I think what I enjoy most is following instructions carefully and winding up with a neat-looking finished product in the end. There are enough things in this world that don’t have nice, neat endings where you can see and physically hold in your hand the results of your work. These metal models give you just that. And these days, the more complex they are, the more fun they are. I think my last model had somewhere near 200 pieces and 8 double-sided pages of instructions. That felt good to finish. 

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