Trinity Evangel Church

There’s a phrase in Scripture used for men who “had understanding of the times,” to know what ought to be done, especially in political affairs and intrigue (see 1 Chronicles 12:32, Esther 1:13). I’ve seen it going around the last few weeks, and, while I don’t claim to be one of those guys, I do try to pay attention. I think that it’s timely that we’re here in Romans 13, and we do have application...

Before any civil government, and long before any institutional church, God established the household. It’s not whether you’ll be part of a household, but what kind it will be, good or bad, godly or ungodly, fruitful or selfish, blessed or judged. It’s an inevitable institution by God’s doing, and after the Fall, it’s inevitable that sin will wreak damage, on any given day (and any room in the hous...

God and government is a huge and tangled subject, and Romans 13:1-7 is a fairly small paragraph comparatively. These verses include some foundational principles, and for Christian citizens in the current (covidian) climate, it has pushed its way into the spotlight. We desire to understand Romans 13, and to apply it, almost two-thousand years after Paul wrote it. That requires some thoughtfulness....

There's no coincidence that these applications for living sacrifices in Romans 12:9-21 are the Ancient Jealousable Ways. I keep puling jealousable forward from Romans 11 where Paul talked about God’s blessings to believers that provoke the right kind of jealousy in order to provoke repentance and faith in Jesus as Christ — risen from the dead, Lord of heaven and earth. God gives His people the ble...

We’re back for more *altar commitments*, as in, more of what life as a living sacrifice looks like. A bunch of this applies to body life; if the individual members of the body used their gifts for the body and then treated one another according to these “one anothers” in verses 9-21, we’d be built up and blessed. Paul gives us more of the Ancient Jealousable Ways, and verses 14-16 are particularly...

I have loved this paragraph for a couple decades. It is a kick in the living-sacrifice pants, a kick in the member-of-one-body pants, a kick in the pants for people who don’t love grammar, or the Christian lifestyle. Here is application par excellence, application for those who might want to go back to abstract ideas if *this* is what application looks like. There are really good reasons to observ...

The human body is amazing; a demonstration of God’s kindness and creativity. The church body may be more amazing; a demonstration of God’s wisdom and power, plus His kindness and creativity (Which is harder, breathing life into molded dirt or uniting depraved and disparate parts into one who will work together, beside each other, all day long?). We might take either body for granted, and it’s easi...

The point of this paragraph is that Christians are connected to one another. This is true, even if the parts and joints aren’t always healthy. It goes wrong when we think of ourselves, and especially of our abilities, either too much or too little. It goes wrong when we think we’re indispensable to the body or independent from it. It goes wrong when we forget that grace gives assignments, grace gi...

For those who fear the Lord what’s not to love about Elijah’s showdown with the 450 prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18? We read prophetic smack-talk at its finest, and we just know what’s going to happen when Elijah called all the people near to him and repaired “the altar of the LORD” in front of them. He used twelve stones to represent each tribe of Israel, then he dug a trench and put the wood in o...

It’s been a few Sundays since we’ve been in Romans, but we started this section of Romans in mid January. Romans 9-11 deserves its own tier-one heading, and it gets its own doxology. Romans 11:33-36 may be the *best* doxology in the Bible. A doxology is a word of “glory” (δόξα/*doxa*, as in verse 36), a formula of praise. In God’s Word they are all good, all inspired. This particular explosion of...

The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile. Our God is eternal, sovereign, righteous, and *merciful*. We note His kindness and severity, His perfect standard and His offer of forgiveness for all who have sinned against it. He is making His merciful name known among the nations. We are nearing the end of this section of Paul’s let...

“Jesus is Lord” is our confession as Christians (Romans 10:9), and our confession has a crescendo of consequences. I can summarize my life’s whats and whys under “Jesus is Lord” and for the glory of God, and when I think about how that looks, I think about the Kuyperian Dispensationalist. He is not my imaginary friend, but he is always talking to me wherever I go; “Hey! Look at this!” # (Re)Defini...

Last Lord’s Day in Romans 11:16-24 we saw the introductory Analogies and the first Admonition. Verse 16 offers two illustrations, dough and root are connected to the whole loaf and branches. It’s the root and branches analogy that Paul carries through the paragraph until verse 24. The branches are Jews, and though they shared an identification with the root of the patriarchs, they were broken off...

Imagine you were adopted by loving parents who gladly sacrificed for you and provided for you and raised you into maturity. As you got older, your parents described the inheritance they had been preparing for you, showing you the papers and how everything was in order. And, at the proper time, they told you that you had a much older brother, to whom they also promised an inheritance, including a p...

Four is the number of sides and corners on a square. Here is the fourth sermon for Romans 11:11-15; we’re trying to cover every square inch of it. We’ve walked through Paul’s argument: - an argumentative denial in the first part of verse 11, Israel’s rejection of Christ is not total or final; May it never be! - an argumentative sequence in the last part of verse 11, Israel’s rejection led to Genti...

I’ve been talking about being jealousable, about how jealousability itself is an argument, and have referred to the Lord’s blessings as the key. There’s more to say about all of those in Romans 11:13-15. The subtitle for all these messages (now up to part 3) has been “The Blessed Option.” But what is the “Blessed Option”? Rod Dreher published a book in 2017 called _The Benedict Option: A Strategy...

Paul builds a rhetorical argument, repeatedly and emphatically, that God has purposed to bless the world through the kind of salvation that is jealousable. This paragraph makes a verbal argument for jealousability, but it is jealousability embodied, an argument lived out, that God will use to save the Jews. What are we doing here? We’re in the Reserved section of the Romans letter (chapters 9-11),...

Some things you can’t unsee. I can’t unsee this paragraph, Romans 11:11-15. It’s only five verses. But once you get through it, it’s as if you’ve been over Niagara Falls. You will stop thinking about finding the right little barrel to protect yourself, and you’ll realize you are riding waterfalls. I said somewhere in a sermon when we started Romans 9 that these three chapters frame an entire *worl...

Here’s an illustration to start. My wife’s favorite book among the Chronicles of Narnia is _The Magician’s Nephew_. It is the sixth of the seven in publication order, though it’s actually the creation account and so first of them all in terms of Narnian chronology. The reason she likes it the most is because of the treasure of finding out the origin of the tree from which the wood came that was us...

Isaiah was the first to write that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). Habakkuk picked it up, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). There is no sea without water, and there will be no square inch of ignorance of, let alone rebellion against, God. Those who...