America 250 - Build This House Upon the Rock - 1 John 2:12-14

America 250 - Build This House Upon the Rock - 1 John 2:12-14

1 John 2:12-14 Our country was discovered by Europeans in the name of Christ. Many of our founding documents speak of God as our guide. The idea was to found it under Christian principles.  We're rich in resources, surrounded by allies north and south. We've experienced multiple great awakenings, won two world wars and could have taken over the world, but we didn't, because it wasn't the right thing to do. We are so blessed! We have freedom of speech, religion, self-defense, to elect our own leaders. Thank God for what he's given us! Today we have climate control, advanced medicine and technology... So... Is the foundation for the next 250 years as strong as the foundation for the last 250? We've become successful... and in doing so, we've unfortunately become rather self-sufficient. There's less need to rely on God.  We're shifting away from the God who has provided our prosperity!  There is no morality without religion, without God. Satan's influence is seeping into the highest levels of government.  We must embrace the One who caused our prosperity, and reject the one who seeks to destroy us! We must return to the Lord.  V12... - Children: new converts  - Young men: laborers - Fathers: mature Christians The children, v12... They're the newcomers. We never actually mature beyond this, just build upon it! Their sins are forgiven! They understand and acknowledge the bad news of their own sinfulness before welcoming the good news.  Their sins are forgiven, and why? For his name's sake. Any righteousness in us is a gift given by God, not of your own doing. It's only because he chose to love you! There is no boasting in our own righteousness.  They know the Father.  You can only know him once you've come to the Son! Jesus tells us to pray not to him or to the Holy Spirit, but to God the Father!  The fathers... v13-14 They're marked by one defining thing: they know him who was from the beginning! The self is not involved... it's all in who they know. The teachings of great men of God tend to become more simple over time. It shows perspective. The church consistently needs to hear the character and attributes of God, simple, foundational truths! The church needs great, faithful men who preach the Word of God. This is what America needs! Mature faith is built over a lifetime. It's about daily faithfulness in the Word. Compounded over a lifetime! But the time hasn't passed for you; it's never too late to start. There's still time! They're are treasures waiting for you.  Young men... v13-14 These are those who are laboring for the Lord... They have strength. The Word abides in them. Every chapter points to Jesus! This is where the Fathers are made. This means to live God's Word! You know no biblical principle until you've lived it.  They have overcome the evil one. The overcoming is not in progress, but is finished!  We need to stop living as if Satan has won. The gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church! Christ has secured the victory. America already belongs to the Lord; every knee will bow and every tongue will confess! Our job is to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Church is not called to be accepting our tolerant of Satan. We must resist the devil. We need to call out evil.  In closing... Is the foundation for the next 250 years as strong as it was originally? No. But with God's grace and strength, it can be. Seek his face, repent, and follow him. We must reject the tolerance we're being forced to adopt. We just call good good, and evil evil! So... Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the teachings of Christ, we can continue what they started. All is not lost. He is able! Pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on us and on this country! The next generation will need you to be one of the fathers. Are you strong? Are you worth building a house upon?  Decide whom you'll serve! Where's your hope? What is your rock?  Joshua 24:15, "... As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!"

Do We Love God - John 21

The scene opens at the Sea of Tiberias; the disciples fished all night and caught absolutely nothing. Jesus asks, "Children, do you have any fish?" to demonstrate that our best efforts are totally fruitless without him. We are called to be "fishers of men," pulling people from the violent, dark kingdom of the world (symbolized by the sea) into the kingdom of light. We are the branches and He is the vine; the end of our own strength and plans is the exact beginning of God's strength and plans. At Jesus' command, they catch 153 fish... the number represents an overflowing, complete haul, yet the net does not break. Peter is actively being "pruned" during this interaction... God must wound our pride to produce more spiritual fruit. We're like grapes, but the ultimate purpose of grapes is to be crushed into wine; every Christian must eventually feel the "blade" of the Word and affliction, to grow. The actual power resides in the hand that wields the weapon (God), not the weapon itself (us). Jesus cooks breakfast on the shore; the character of God is a festive welcome! Creation was the original house of hospitality, concluding with an invitation to a grand feast in Genesis. The Church is called to act as God's hospital in an inhospitable, messy world. We gather to get "heavenized" through Christ so we can go back out into our daily lives and be bread and wine to the world. Peter puts on his heavy outer garment before diving into the water, demonstrating his reinstatement as an apostolic priest and shepherd. When they're face-to-face, Jesus doesn't scold Peter for his past lies or failures; He simply and repeatedly asks, "Do you love me?" This restoration happens around a charcoal fire, directly mirroring (and redeeming!) the previous charcoal fire where Peter denied Jesus three times. Jesus equates loving him with feeding his sheep (teaching and sharing the Word with others)! God created the universe out of divine passion and a deep yearning to pour His love onto us, not because He was lonely or lacked anything. Earth is currently estranged from Heaven, but the incarnation at Jesus's birth brought the angelic choir to earth to begin restoring that harmony. God cascades his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit to empower us to love him; we lack the natural capacity to love him on our own! We must assess our own hearts, and love Jesus for exactly who He is, not for who we want Him to be, or how we prefer him to act.

The Love of the Trinity - John 3:16

A sermon not about how much we love the Trinity... but how the triune God loves us! 1. The Father... "For God so loved the world that he gave" - this is God the Father. Our Father is a loving father! Love is an action, according to God; God's love GAVE us his only son.  Love isn't feeling, but doing! God is a giver.  The Lord's prayer... We ask God for a lot! Because we have a good father who loves to give to our children. Luke 11:9... ask and it will be given. Our Father is quick to love, to give, to forgive us. His love is action! Abundant, sustaining. He provides, he gives!  For he so loved "the world"... He loves all of sinful mankind! He gave his son to the unlovable world! 2. The Son... He gave "his only Son"...  John 3:16 shows us HOW God loves us.  His son would be crucified and lifted up. He loves me so much that he sent me his son (so that we may kill him instead of dying ourselves!) Christianity is all about the cultivation of our private relationship with God. We must make sure we're spending time with God, or we will spiritually shrivel and die! We should be like a tree planted by the water! (Psalm 1) Go to God, who freely gives! He even sent his Son.  3. The Holy Spirit... "Whoever believes in him"... You're going to heaven ONLY because you believe in him.  "Believes" is present tense. It must be ongoing, not just a decision you made in the past! An ongoing belief. If you're a Christian, go to church, read his Word, repent of your sins continually.  Once saved, always saved, yes! But... if you walk away from the Lord, it may be that you're an example of bad soil rather than good. You may not have really been converted. If your belief isn't ongoing, in the present tense, it's not genuine. How do you continue to live your life? You'll know a tree by its fruit.  Yet it's not about your works; it's about the state of your heart. True belief results in faithful endurance to the end. Be all in! The Father so loved the world, that the Son came, and the Spirit awakened us. 4. Why must we believe? God is good, and we are not. He is perfect, and we are imperfect. The wages of our sin is death! We deserve to die when we meet the Judge. God cannot ignore evil, because he is good! Unless we receive the gift of the Son, then the holy, just wrath of God is on us!  We need help, and in Jesus, we have it! He absorbed God's wrath, so every sin we'll ever commit is paid for! This is the Gospel message! Revival... God pours out his spirit on the people, and they're induced to follow Jesus, to live righteously in holiness, following him!  But we must not yet to treat the symptoms of the world before we diagnose the disease. Symptoms would be greed, lust, poverty... The real disease of our culture is that the West has forgotten her King! We need an outpouring of the Holy Spirit! A revival of people submitting to and following Jesus Christ!  Receiving the gift of Christ gives us eternal life..  5. Humanity's hope... Eternal life!  John 17:3... To believe is to enter eternal life! Eternal life starts now, not only in the afterlife. You have access to God Almighty now!  And it lasts forever. To receive him is to have everlasting life! Through Jesus Christ, we don't have to be afraid of death.  Ps118:17... I shall not die, but live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.  We enter Heaven, and our first words will be "Thank you!!!" We start singing about the cross!  To receive the Lord is also to be under the love of the Son. A decision for Christ is to live eternally in his love!

B-Side - John 3:16

A little context before John 3:16... John 3 starts with Jesus and Nicodemus. v1-8... Jesus explains being "born again." Water birth = physical birth. Spirit birth = born of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual birth is driven completely by the Holy Spirit. Just like we didn't cause our physical birth, we did nothing to cause our spiritual birth. v9-20... In the book of John, the crucifixion is frequently framed as an hour of victory or glorification (Jesus being "lifted up" or "raised"). God's purpose in sending Jesus wasn't to condemn the world, but to save it. However, rejecting Jesus inherently means rejecting the Father, bringing condemnation. Humans naturally love darkness over light. Love and works are connected; you become what you love. Genuine faith produces fruit (walking in the light). To come to Jesus is to walk in the light! Back to v16, piece by piece... "For God so loved the world" translates best to "In this way, God loved the world." General love (love of the whole world) vs. covenantal love (love of the Church)... God loved the whole world enough to send His Son as an open invitation, even knowing many will reject Him. An example... loving spaghetti vs. loving your neighbors vs. loving your wife/kids. They are all "love," but very different kinds and depths. God's covenantal love for His people (the Church) is different; it's unbreakable and carries into eternity. Danger of liberal theology: They accept God's general love for the world but wrongly deny God's wrath, judgment, and hell for those who reject the gift. "...that He gave his only Son": Sending Jesus is the supreme act of love. Jesus is a greater gift than solving world hunger, wars, or curing cancer. He's the greatest gift to humanity! "...his only Son": Jesus is the unique Son of the Father. He was not created ("begotten" is often misread as created). He is God, the Word, from the beginning, and took on human flesh. An Old Testament parallel... Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22). Isaac was the "son of the promise." The big difference: God stopped Abraham and provided a substitute ram, but there was no substitute for Jesus. God did not spare his own Son (Romans 8:32) The order of salvation... a the theological debate: which comes first, Regeneration or Faith? Regeneration (awakening by the Spirit) must logically precede Faith. Because humans are spiritually dead by nature, God must first turn on the lights and soften the heart before a person even has the ability to believe! This is why prayer is necessary for evangelism... you can preach until you are blue in the face, but God has to prepare their heart first. So! We aren't loved because we believe. We are ALREADY loved by God, and our belief is a direct response to that love. Responding to God requires two simultaneous actions: belief and repentance. Rejecting the darkness, and turning toward the light!

B-Side - Mark 12:18-27

Mark 12:18-27 - Confrontation passages, Day 3 This is the third day of Jesus's confrontation passages in Mark. First the Sanhedrin challenged him, then the Pharisees, and now it's the Sadducees' turn! The religious leadership is challenging his teaching and authority. They denied the resurrection, didn't believe in an afterlife. They were so conservative they only trusted the first five books of Moses (the Torah). So Jesus responded to them using only those books :-) The question of "whose wife is she in the afterlife"... we explore the apocryphal book of Tobit a story of Sarah who is described as having multiple husbands who were killed before she could consummate the marriages. Despite her grief, she decided it would be selfish to kill herself. The Sadducees may be referencing this story. The Sadducees assumed that if Heaven existed, it would just be a continuation of earthly family dynamics, human drama, etc. John 11:25, an "I Am" statement from Jesus... "I am the resurrection and the life"... to accept him is to accept the resurrection! By dying on the cross, Jesus destroyed the one who held the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). Satan has no claim over a believer. At conversion, the "old man" dies. The believer is made alive in Christ, and our legal debt of sin is nailed to the cross (Colossians 2). We have no need to fear death, as we've already died! Our life is eternal, and our victory is secured. This is our hope, our song! The great and mighty acts of our Lord. Jesus says that when the dead rise, they neither marry nor are given in marriage; they are "like angels in heaven." The family of God is those whoever does the will of God, who are brought together by Jesus Christ. The last bit, v26-27... Jesus then brilliantly uses a text from the only books the Sadducees accept (Exodus/Moses at the burning bush). God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." He is the God of the living, not the dead. Jesus tells them, "You are quite wrong." The Sadducees read the Bible with a predetermined assumption (no afterlife), which threw their entire worldview off. Warning: Like a rocket ship off by one degree, bringing our own assumptions or failing to take the "whole counsel of God" (all 66 books) can lead us to disastrous belief systems. The Sadducees' question treated the hypothetical woman like property: "Whose wife/property will she be?" Jesus's answer dignifies her. In Heaven, we are not property to be owned, or objects for abuse. We are like the angels, children of the living God, dwelling in perfect harmony together, in God's presence! In his presence is fullness of joy, no more tears, no more sorrow!