Grace & Peace PGH

"The name of God is not a combination of the letters G, O and D. The name stands for the person who bears it, for his character and activity. So God's 'name' is God himself as he is in himself and has revealed himself. His name is already 'holy' in that it is separate from and exalted over every other name, but we pray that it may be hallowed, 'treated as holy,' because we ardently desire that due...

"This address lends a twofold character to the entire prayer. On the one hand it pervades it with a childlike trust ("Our Father"), on the other hand, with reverence and an awareness of distance ("in heaven"). Such a frame of mind grants God the honor that is His due and grants the person praying the certainty that he will be heard."- Herman Ridderboss

"We have good biblical and theological reasons for our fasting and abstinence. Through our fasting we are acting as living sacrifices, living memorial stones, asking God to heal our world, a world that we can surely see is in desperate need of His healing touch."--Tim LeCroy, _And When You Fast_

Encouraging believers to more frequently consider God's holiness and mercy.

“The issue is not the method or frequency of prayer… but the attitude of faith which underlies and inspires it.” – R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, 240-241.

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time – waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.” – Quote from Shadowlands

“Christians should daily remember their baptism as a seal of the promises God has made to them.” – Rodger M. Crooks, Salvation’s Sign and Seal, 39.

This is a sermon from guest preacher, Derek Bates.

“A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who go blithely through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to li...

This is a sermon from guest preacher, Joseph Bianco.

“Mary was a mere Palestinian peasant girl, but God chose her as an agent through whom the divine promise would be fulfilled in the person of Jesus, the Son of God… She is blessed, not because she is pregnant, or because of any intrinsic holiness or merit but because God’s salvific purposes are being accomplished through her. Mary thus becomes one in a long line of recipients of God’s grace and mer...

“Christmas highlights for us the failures and the futility of all our kings, all our heroes, and even our own lives; which would make for a sad holiday if it weren't about the coming of a greater King, a greater David, Jesus Christ the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings; everything David should have been and was not.” – Joshua Reitano

“The forward-looking character of faith lends solidness to the realm of Christian hope. Faith celebrates now the reality of future blessings which are certain because they are grounded in the promise of God. For the Christian it is the future, not the past, that molds the present.” – William L. Lane, Hebrews: A Call to Commitment, 158-159.

“Despite the vicissitudes of history, God is keeping his promise to provide a seed to destroy the serpent.” – Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis, 101.

“The final verses of the book tell us that the mark of those who have been immersed in the grace of God is compassion and love, not contempt, for people who aren’t like them. God challenges Jonah for confronting profane, ungodly people without weeping and compassion. Certainly error and evil must be denounced. However, God is both just and loving, and he rebukes Jonah for preaching to the city wit...

“A Jonah lurks in every Christian heart, whimpering his insidious message of smug prejudice, empty traditionalism, and exclusive solidarity. He that has ears to hear, let him hear and allow the saving love of God which has been outpoured in his own heart to remold his thinking and social orientation.” – Leslie C. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah, 234.

This is a sermon from guest preacher, Gavin Breeden.

Sunday's open discussion.

“Man must completely despair of himself in order to become fit for the grace of Christ. The proper preparation for the grace and goodness of Christ is the awareness that I need them.” – Martin Luther

“Jonah had come face-to-face with death, had experienced God’s grace toward an obstinate rebel, and had affirmed that ‘salvation comes from the LORD.’ Yet he still had the audacity to deny certain groups,… faced with the same reality of death, that same mercy. Thus chapter 2 plays a vital role in the author’s characterization of Jonah by showing, in the larger context of the book, just how inconsi...

“… if there is a God who cares about us, and who wants to reveal himself to us, and to use supernatural events as a pointer to his revelation (which is the most common purpose of these events in the Bible), it makes plenty of sense to suppose that he did so in such a way that there would be testimony, and there is no need to suppose that he would do it afresh in each generation.” – C. John Collins...

"God is love. This means more than ‘God is loving’ or that God sometimes loves. It means that he loves, not because he finds objects worthy of his love, but because it is his nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what he is. He loves us because he is that kind of God, because he is love.” – Leon Morris, “1 John”, in New Bible Commentary, 1406.

“If we say ‘I believe in Jesus’ but it doesn’t affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven’t truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.” – Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, 124.

“…individualism is a cultural system with many advantages. Yet recent culture seems to have crossed the line from individualism to hyperindividualism. For example, the self-focsued phrases are not just individualistic – they’re also, well, wrong. ‘Just be yourself’ sounds like good advice at first, but what if you’re a jerk? What if you’re a serial killer? Maybe you should be someone else. ‘Believ...