Love is only love if it seeks out the good and the flourishing of the loved. If in the name of love, you simply affirm what will destroy another person, it will not ultimately feel like love to them. It will eventually feel to them something more like hate. Why? Because if love doesn’t seek out the good and flourishing of the beloved, then it isn’t love at all. It is cowardice and capitulation to evil. How do we know this? We know what love is because we know how God has loved us. [Hear the rest of the sermon below.]
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You Must Be Born Again – Part 2 – John 3:6-15
Did you know that the human condition has been so corrupted by sin that apart from grace not a single one of us would give a fig about God, the cross, the Bible, the resurrection, judgment, eternal life. The Bible says that apart from grace, all of those spiritual realities—those ultimate realities—would be foolishness to us (1 Cor. 2:14). This is the human condition, and it really is desperate. We are corrupted by sin and headed for damnation, and yet we don’t have it in us to seek out or even to want the salvation that God has provided. Left to ourselves, we open the Bible or we hear the…
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You Must Be Born Again – John 2:23-3:5
This is the miracle of the new birth. Jesus sends forth His Spirit and says to you, “Come forth.” To use Ezekiel’s imagery, he looks at your valley of dry bones, and he says to the bones, “Live.” What was once dead comes to life. The eyes and ears of your heart open. There is a blink of recognition. And in that moment, faith and love and obedience to the good news of Jesus appear. Have you ever wondered why you responded to the Gospel but your neighbor didn’t? It’s not because you were by nature smarter and more spiritually sensitive than your neighbor. You weren’t. You were dead as…
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The Serrated Edge of Doug Wilson
In a message to my church on Sunday, I gave a biblical evaluation of the so-called “serrated edge,” which Doug Wilson defines as the use of biting and satirical speech that sometimes includes obscenities and vulgarities. You can download the audio here, the manuscript here, listen below, or read below. Please be advised that the manuscript version of this address does contain quotations of obscenities and vulgarities, although I have tried to use asterisks in some of the offensive expressions. ?? Introduction The elders have set aside the last couple weeks in the Sunday School hour to address and confront post-millennialism and theonomy. If you haven’t heard those talks yet,…
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Saving the Best for Last — John 2:1-11
Excerpt: If you were a Jew, you understood that it doesn’t get any better than Moses. It’s all downhill after Moses. No one will outstrip Moses and what he has given to God’s people. What came before is always better because what came before is Moses. So what is Jesus saying through this sign? He’s not just performing some cheap parlor trick to impress his disciples. Nor is he simply showing them that he has power to do what he wants. No, this whole miracle is a parable of a deeper truth about who Jesus is and about how Jesus is going to defy Jewish expectation. They thought that the…
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Behold the Lamb of God – John 1:35-51
How many of the blessings of this life are dependent upon our ability to see what is right in front of our face? Our problem so often is not that we can’t see things but that we won’t see things. When you pull up to a red light and there are people spread out on the intersection taking up donations for a cause to which you don’t wish to make a contribution, what do you do? Do you look at them? No, you look away from them. When you’re not interested, you don’t see because you don’t want to see. When our children were little, empty-nesters would see us pushing…
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John the Baptist – John 1:19-34
“I baptize in water, but among you stands One whom you do not know. It is He who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie… Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’ And I did not recognize Him, but in order that He might be manifested to Israel, I came baptizing in water.” –John. 1:26-31
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Preaching the Trinity from John’s Gospel
I have recently begun preaching through the Gospel of John at our church. The first three messages have been on John’s prologue. (Sorry, Peter Williams, but I still think John 1:1-18 is a prologue!) As many of you already know, John’s prologue is thick with the grist of Nicene Trinitarianism and Chalcedonian Christology. I do not claim that these messages are the best there has ever been on these verses. Far from it. But I do want to acknowledge that I couldn’t have preached these messages seven years ago. For all the unpleasantness of the so-called “Trinity Debate” of 2016, the Lord has used it for good in my life.…
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The True Light – John 1:6-13
On Sunday morning, I delivered the second message in my series on John’s Gospel. It’s on John 1:6-13 and titled “The True Light.” You can listen below or download on Spotify or iTunes. [EXCERPT] John 1:13, “who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” This verse continues the thought of verse 12. All of those “children of God” from verse 12 have been “born” in verse 13. But before telling you how they were born, he tells you how they weren’t born. First, they weren’t born of “bloods” (lit. plural). Many interpreters understand “bloods” to refer…
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A Voice Plainer Than Thunder – John 1:1-5
I recently began a new sermon series at our church on the Gospel of John. The first message is on John 1:1-5, and it is titled “A Voice Plainer Than Thunder,” which is a line from John Chrysostom’s first homily on the fourth Gospel. After the message, someone asked me what resources I used to prepare the sermon. The answer is that my main resource is the text itself. I don’t mean that as a “Jesus juke” but as a description of my first and most important stage of sermon prep, which begins in reading and working with the Greek text. After that (sometimes during), I will read some commentaries.…
