Tag: Sermons

Bigger

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When life gets hard, we often want to know where God is. When we hurt, we want to know why God didn’t stop it. When circumstances threaten to completely overwhelm us, we want to know if God is big enough to really help. As we continue our journey through the seven signs the apostle John identifies in his Gospel as helping us to better understand who Jesus is, we are looking today at a sign that didn’t seem to benefit anybody when it happened. But when we look past the miracle itself to the thing at which it is pointing, we find reason for great hope in hard times. Let’s dive in and see what happens next.

Bigger

About fifty years ago, a man named Harold Kushner lost his fourteen-year-old son to a rare disease. It was a tragedy. All such losses are tragic. Parents should never have to bury their children. That they do is a symptom of the brokenness of sin in the world. Kushner happened to be a Jewish rabbi. As part of his efforts to deal with his grief, he channeled his emotions into writing a book. The book, released in 1981, had a major and immediate cultural impact. The title promised an insightful look into a challenging question that people have been asking for a very long time. It was called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The question of course is why. Why do bad things happen to good people? We’ve all seen it happen. We’ve seen people who seem to us to be good and faithful, kind and generous with others, conscientious citizens, and so on and so forth, but who nonetheless face tragic situations that their character seems like it should preclude as far as we reckon such things. How can there be a good and just God presiding over creation if things like this happen to people like that? 

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Satisfied

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In the superlatively successful Broadway show, Hamilton, the Founding Father’s greatest weakness is that he is never satisfied with what he has. He is always reaching and stretching for something more. When pointed in the right direction, this resulted in incredible success and achievement. When pointed in the wrong direction, though, ruin for himself and others. We all have desires that we long to have satisfied. For some of these desires, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything in this world that can do the trick. As we continue in our series, All Signs Point to Jesus, this week we are looking at a sign that points us toward His ability to satisfy all of our desires. Let’s explore the Scriptures together.

Satisfied

When was the last time you felt really and truly satisfied? What was it that gave you that feeling? Maybe it was finishing a really big project and having your contributions graciously recognized by others. It could have been working with another person, teaching them to do something, and then seeing them succeed wildly. Perhaps it was just a really good meal. There are lots of things that might satisfy us in this life. The thing about getting satisfied in this life, though, is that whatever desire it is that was satisfied has a tendency to return. You ate that great meal, but then you were hungry again. In fact, you were probably hungry again by the time the next mealtime rolled around. You finished that one project, but then there was another one behind it. And if there wasn’t, you went looking for one. That one student succeeded, but then there was another student who needed help. And when those desires returned, sometimes the same things satisfied them again, but sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes you needed more. It’s almost like underneath these more common, daily desires we have there are deeper longings that cry out for satisfaction. Yet try as we might, getting these addressed often seems to be just beyond our reach. 

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More Than Well

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Jesus wants us to see Him. He wants us to see beyond the things He can do for us, to who He really is. As a result, He reveals Himself in ways that enable and help us to do that. One of the ways He did this during His ministry was with a series of what the apostle John identifies as seven signs. As we continue in our teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus, this week, we are looking at a third miraculous sign Jesus performed. This one picks up from our seeing Him for who He really is, to actually following Him into something more than just a miracle. He invites us to follow Him into real life. Let’s take a look at this together.

More Than Well

Have you ever fallen for a gimmick? Someone came along with a really great sales pitch for a brand new product that was going to completely revolutionize your life. All it was going to take from you was a “modest” investment of capital to help get this new venture off the ground. But when you did, you were going to be on the ground floor of an entirely new cultural movement. This wasn’t just about making your life better; it was about making the whole country better (healthier, more fit, financially stabler, and etc.). This wasn’t just an opportunity you didn’t want to miss. This was an opportunity you couldn’t afford to miss. 

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Seeing Through the Fog

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Today we are continuing our new teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. Like we talked about last week, Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is. He does great and wonderful things in our lives and in the world around us in order to help us wrap our minds around the fact that He exists and what He is like. But if we’re not careful, we can focus our attention so much on the things that He does, that we can stop actually seeing Him. In the next sign John relates to us in his Gospel, Jesus invites a man to see through what He can do to who He really is. Through this story He makes the same invitation to us. Let’s look at this together.

Seeing Through the Fog

Do you remember the first time you realized your teachers were real people too? When you are young, teachers feel like these strange creatures who exist and inhabit the world of school, but don’t ever leave. After all, they’re there every time you are. They leave the world of their classroom behind every now and then, but only to accompany you to somewhere else in the maze that is the school building. Or maybe outside to recess. And if you’re young enough, your teacher is always old. She could be barely into her 20s, but she seems old all the same. But then it happens. You see your teacher somewhere other than school doing normal-people things rather than teacher-people things. And it completely blows your mind. It’s like your entire worldview framework gets shattered into a million pieces that will never be put back together again. 

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Helping Us See

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series that is going to take us from now to Easter. The question of who Jesus is, is the most important question anyone could ever ask or answer. Over the course of this series, we are going to be walking through the various signs Jesus produced which the apostle John noted in His Gospel were all pointers to His true identity. Each sign helps us to get a better sense of just who Jesus was. Let’s get this journey started with a trip to a wedding.

Helping Us See

Who is Jesus? That’s one of the most significant questions that anyone could ask or answer. The only one with potentially greater significance is the question of whether or not there is a God in the first place. Literally everything hinges on the answer to that question. And that may sound like somewhat of a grandiose claim, but think about it. Let’s say someone protests our claim here by pointing to science. “The question of the existence of God or the identity of Jesus is irrelevant,” they might argue, “because science does for us all the things our ignorant ancestors naively relied on some made up god to give them.” Okay, but why do you think science as you know it exists in the first place? Because of a belief in God on the part of some really smart men and women in the past. Actually, that’s not quite right. They didn’t merely believe in God, they believed in a specific and historically unique understanding of God that made their efforts to study and strive to understand how the world works in an organized fashion reasonable in a way that no other worldview had ever done. And, honestly, they only believed in God as they did because they and their forebears had a certain answer to the question of who Jesus is; an answer that was at least mostly consistent with the broadly orthodox position on it dating back to the very first believers. So, yes, the question of who Jesus is really is the most important question anyone could ever ask. 

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