Lincoln Avenue Baptist Church

While serving God is a beautiful and essential expression of love, it must be fueled by sitting at the feet of Jesus, our true source of life, peace, and supernatural provision for all our responsibilities. What does it look like when our service to God becomes disconnected from our love for God? In Luke 10:38-42, we find Martha and Mary offering two very different responses to the same extraordin...

What does it truly mean to love our neighbor? That question sits at the heart of one of the most familiar and yet most challenging passages in all of Scripture. In Luke 10, a legal expert approaches with a question about eternal life, and what unfolds is a masterclass in how we so often try to shrink the demands of love rather than rise to meet them. The parable of the Good Samaritan confronts us...

What does it look like to truly encounter Jesus? In Luke 7:36-50, we find two people sitting at the same dinner table with very different hearts. One is a respected religious leader who has organized the entire evening, yet approaches Jesus with a critical, evaluating eye. The other is a woman the whole town knows as a sinner, uninvited and unwelcome, who crashes the party for one reason alone: to...

What does it actually mean to love an enemy? Not merely tolerate them, not simply avoid retaliating, but genuinely love them? In Luke 6:27-38, Jesus lays out one of the most countercultural commands in all of Scripture, and he does not leave us to guess what he means. He defines it clearly: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. These are not...

What does it really mean to be blessed? Most of us instinctively reach for the same answers: financial security, good health, a comfortable life, the approval of the people around us. But in Luke chapter 6, Jesus takes everything we assume about blessing and turns it completely upside down. He calls the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the rejected the blessed ones, while issuing sobering warnin...

What happens when the Son of God faces the full force of temptation? In Luke 4:1-13, we find one of the most gripping and instructive passages in all of Scripture: the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. But this is far more than a story about Jesus resisting the devil. It is a window into the nature of every temptation we face and the only reliable weapon we have against it. The passage reveal...

What does it truly mean to prepare our hearts for the King? In Luke chapter 3, John the Baptist steps onto the scene with a message that is as urgent today as it was then: the King is coming, and we must get ready. But this preparation is not about polishing our outward appearance or pointing fingers at others who need to change. It is about something far deeper. John calls us to repentance, a gen...

What does it mean to lose the fire we once had for God? In Revelation 2:1-5, Jesus addresses the church at Ephesus with striking words. He commends them for their hard work, their doctrinal soundness, their perseverance, and their refusal to tolerate evil. And yet, in the very same breath, he delivers a sobering charge: they have left their first love. This message walks us through that tension an...

What does it look like to carry the full weight of the gospel into the hardest moments of our lives? The book of Philemon gives us a rare and intimate look at exactly that. In this short but remarkably rich letter, we are drawn into a real conflict between real people -- a runaway slave, a wronged master, and an apostle writing from prison -- and we discover that the gospel is not just a message t...

What does it mean to truly be kept by God, and what role do we play in that process? The book of Jude brings us face to face with one of the most profound tensions in the Christian life: God is our keeper, and yet we are called to keep ourselves in the love of God. This is not a contradiction but an invitation. Drawing from Jude 20 through 24, we are reminded that genuine faith is not passive. God...

What does it really mean to contend for the faith? The book of Jude pulls no punches in answering that question. Written by the half-brother of Jesus, this small but powerful letter confronts a danger that is just as real today as it was in the first century: the distortion of grace. When we twist the grace of God into a license for sin, we are not embracing the gospel, we are gutting it. True gra...

What if the greatest joy available to us is not found in a breathtaking mountain view, a perfect meal, or even the deepest human friendship, but in something far more profound? Third John opens a window into the life of a man named Gaius, and what we discover there is a portrait of someone who has tapped into a joy that the Apostle John describes as unmatched by anything else life has to offer. Th...

In this exploration of 2 John, we're confronted with a timeless tension that feels remarkably urgent for our generation: the inseparable relationship between truth and love. The letter, though brief at only 13 verses, packs a powerful message about standing firm in the truth of Jesus Christ while simultaneously loving one another deeply. We discover that truth isn't merely an intellectual exercise...

This profound exploration of Psalm 139 invites us into a transformative encounter with God's character that fundamentally changes how we view ourselves and our relationship with sin. The psalm reveals three essential attributes of God: His omniscience—knowing everything about us including our thoughts before we speak them; His omnipresence—being with us in every circumstance from the heights of he...

Psalm 141 presents us with a powerful prayer for spiritual transformation that moves from the outside in: from our mouths, to our hearts, to our relationships. We discover that our words are often the quickest pathway for sin to escape our hearts, making them incredibly dangerous when left unguarded. The psalm teaches us to pray for divine intervention in three critical areas of our lives. First,...

What if the most life-giving blessing available to us has been right under our noses all along? Psalm 133 opens with a stunning promise: there is something that is simultaneously good, pleasant, and life-giving. In a world constantly marketing counterfeit satisfactions, the Bible points us to something genuinely transformative—dwelling together in unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Thi...

This powerful exploration of Psalm 127 confronts us with a liberating truth: unless the Lord builds, we labor in vain. The message challenges our culture's obsession with self-reliance and reveals how God overlays physical parenting with spiritual parenting, making both equally significant in His kingdom work. We're reminded that children—whether biological or spiritual—are not burdens but arrows...

This powerful message confronts us with one of the most challenging aspects of our faith journey: the danger of hypocrisy. Drawing from Luke 12:1-3, we're warned about the leaven of the Pharisees—that subtle, corrupting influence of pretending to be something we're not before God. The sermon takes us back to an intense dinner scene in Luke 11 where Jesus exposes the religious leaders as polished c...

What does it mean to live without fear of bad news in a world that seems saturated with it? This profound exploration of Psalm 112 reveals a counterintuitive truth: the blessed person is not someone who avoids bad news, but someone whose heart remains steady when it arrives. The psalm paints a portrait of a person whose righteousness endures forever, whose legacy impacts generations, and whose hea...

What does it look like to have a truly calm and quiet soul in the midst of life's storms? Psalm 131 offers us a beautiful and challenging picture: the image of a weaned child resting contentedly in their mother's lap. This isn't about a nursing infant demanding what they need, but a child who has learned that simply being in their mother's presence is enough. The spiritual parallel is profound. We...

The sermon explored Psalm 103 and David's urgent call to "forget not his benefits." We discovered that forgetting God's benefits doesn't mean we can't recall facts about what Jesus did—rather, it means the glory and bigness of God stops being the engine of our lives. Just as the Israelites repeatedly forgot God's power despite witnessing miraculous deliverances, we too can fall into patterns of an...

The sermon explored David's psalm of commitment, where he declares "I will" ten times in just eight verses. These aren't empty New Year's resolutions, but trajectory-setting commitments about the kind of kingdom—and life—he would build. For us today, this psalm speaks directly to how we're building our marriages, families, businesses, ministries, and personal walks with Christ. While David himself...

The sermon explored the promise of Psalm 84:11—"No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly"—and its implications for our spiritual life. We examined how God's goodness isn't measured by the absence of hardship or the presence of earthly comfort, but by His faithful provision of grace, His skillful turning of tragedy into glory, and ultimately by the gift of Himself. Walking uprig...

The sermon explored Psalm 71 and challenged us to aim to be people who grow old on the outside but are renewed with spiritual fervor on the inside. Drawing from examples like George Mueller and John Wesley, who experienced their most fruitful ministry seasons after age 70, we were reminded that spiritual vitality in old age doesn't happen by accident—it requires intentional decisions made througho...