The Kingdom Perspective

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! In the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet details God’s judgment against the remnant of Jerusalem. In preparation for the judgment God sends a man dressed in linen to mark those that will be spared from the pending judgment. God commands him: “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible tells us repeatedly that God is good. For example, Psalm 106 commands: “Praise the Lord! Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 106:1) And again in Psalm 145:9… The Lord is good to all, And His mercies are over all His works. And Psalm...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible tells us that true freedom is the ability to love God and obey His law. This only makes sense. If we were made by God and for God, then we are free only to the degree that we are in union with God and His will for us. This is the reason why, even when we are controlled by our desires, if...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible tells us that essential to God’s character is His goodness. God is good and, as Psalm 145 reminds us, “The Lord is good to all, and His mercies are over all His works.” In the broad narrative of the Bible, this goodness is seen both in the original creation and in the in the new creation—...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. There is a lot of talk these days about justice, and when we come to the subject of justice and righteousness, we are definitely in the center of biblical territory. This means that it is critical we not assume what justice is, but think long and hard about what the Bible says about it. We must wal...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   You know the expression: Be careful what you ask for? Well, this is certainly true spiritually speaking. Sometimes what you want is the very opposite of what you need. Indeed, what you want can often destroy you.   One of the clearest Bible passages on God’s judgment is found in Romans 1.   The se...

Transcript: Hello. This is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Does God want us to know Him? Is God deeply desirous that we would be in a personal relationship with Him? Well, the Apostle Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God created all people on the earth “so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for him and find him….” In other wo...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   With all the changes in Western culture’s view on sex, we often miss the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Many of the changes we see all about us are really not so “new”, but something quite old. Much of the contemporary sexual ethic is simply a return to pagan Rome.   This...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Historically, the Christian church has been very serious about the issue of teaching and training. To be a Christian is not something to be dabbled in but is more akin to being on a sports team, even a Division I college team, requiring significant amounts of conditioning, training, and team prac...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! In the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet details God’s judgment against the remnant of Jerusalem. God’s judgment sweeps through the city slaughtering those who do not mourn over its sin. We learn something of how injustice overtakes a society by the way God describes the city. He says, “The gui...

Transcript: Hey Friends and Supporters of Christ Redeemer Church! This is Pastor Don from Hanover, NH. Hope all is well with you!    Just a quick update on CRC’s building project… God is on the move here in New England. We’ve already cleared massive legal hurdles to become the first new church approved for a building in this Ivy-League town in over 60 years. Now, the only thing standing in the way...

Transcript:   Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   According to the Bible, ultimate reality is love. The source of all that exists is the eternal love relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The God we learn from Jesus is a God who from all eternity is Triune—Father, Son and Holy Spirit living in eternal self-giving love without any hi...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The gospel is good news for sinners. This is both its attraction and its irritation. If I think of myself as a pretty good guy who only needs a little self-improvement here or there, then I am going to be offended at the notion that the Son of God had to die on a bloody cross to take away...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective!   There is no question that we live in a time of tremendous change in society’s views on sex, gender, and marriage. For many, this is heralded as progress. For others it is troubling and confusing. Either way, we often forget that there is nothing new under the sun. Many of the changes we see all a...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Over the past hundred years or so, Christians in the West have tended to view the Christian life as steps in a process. Like a manufacturing process, Christians are “developed” step-by-step. Now, there are some aspects of this paradigm that can be helpful, as it recognizes the fact that living the...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The problem with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it brings us both the worst news we could ever receive and the best. First the bad news. The apostle Paul sums it up this way: We are dead in our sin (Ephesians 2:1). By “dead” he does not mean that we are inactive. No. Rather, in the con...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   One of my favorite ancient creeds, the Athanasian Creed (c. 6th century), though not written by its namesake is nonetheless appropriately attributed to him. Athanasius (A.D. c. 296-373) was the great 4th century church leader who defended the Trinity against false views of God. These false views f...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   The Bible tells us two truths that may seem contradictory: 1) there is only one God, and 2) this God exists eternally in a relationship of three persons.   Our Jewish friends, rightly emphasize the “Shema” of Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (“Shema” is the Hebre...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective!   What is humility? Increasingly in our historical moment, we confuse humility with a relativistic view of truth. We falsely think anyone who believes that there is objective truth or is too confident in what they believe about the truth, by definition, cannot be humble. We assume that the truly hu...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Many indications suggest to us that the church in America is not in good shape. What should we do? We should weep over our worldliness and put our trust in God alone. This sense of brokenness—of knowing our neediness as sinners before a gracious but holy God—should characterize the whole of our liv...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to “The Kingdom Perspective”. Philosophers speak of two different kinds of freedom. The famed thinker Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) called these: 1) Negative Liberty/Freedom FROM and 2) Positive Liberty/Freedom TO. “Negative Liberty” or “Freedom From” is perhaps best seen in the political freedom we enjoy in the U.S. We have the...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Have you ever noticed the tendency of your soul to swing from prideful delight to hopeless despair and then back to pride and then back to despair, and so forth. I don’t think I am alone in this. Whenever we feel like we are measuring up to some standard of moral or social performance, we swell wit...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Are you stressed out? Feeling overwhelmed by all your responsibilities? Does it feel like the world’s going to fall apart if you don’t hold it all together?   Or perhaps, it’s not so much that you’re stressed out as you feel left out. You feel hurt—forgotten, unrecognized, or underappreciated.   O...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Historical observers have noted that Western civilization has, what we might call, a “progressive” element—it tends to be positive toward the future. There is an assumption in the West that history is going somewhere good—that we expect things to get better and that the best is yet to come. Where d...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. An argument could be made that the most critical quality of a truly Christian life is humility. Jesus said that the kingdom of God belonged only to those who were “poor in spirit.” The kingdom of God belongs to those that mourn over their sin. By Jesus’s estimation, only the meek shall be...