Trinity Evangel Church

Selected Scriptures Series: Centers and Circumferences #17 # Introduction This is a very important message and, if the Lord does not return soon, containing much possible application for when I'm dead. I pray that many who hear it would sense a calling to the many ministry opportunities that the medical field allows, and that all who hear it would be thankful for God's good gifts to us in Western...

Revelation 21:22-27 Series: Just Conquer #61 # Introduction This coming Thursday is the anniversary of Mo and I's move to Marysville twenty years ago. Marysville hasn't always been as great of a city as it is these days, and Lord willing will be still to come. But one of the things it's always had going for it in my mind, other than the number of auto parts stores, is how often it rains. We moved...

Revelation 21:9-21 Series: Just Conquer #60 # Introduction When God decided to create something *other*, when He made the world and all that is in it, His purpose was to show His glory. The end for which God created the world is to show off His greatness, which, considered from our angle would be difficult, because there is no greatness like His greatness. He is infinite, and so every one of His a...

Revelation 21:1-8 Series: Just Conquer #59 # Introduction What is your greatest longing? What comes to your mind when you imagine the best future you can? For most of us I’m assuming that the Bible animates most of that picture, as it should. We have a “scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited” (Lewis, “The Weight of G...

Selected Scriptures Series: Centers and Circumferences #16

Revelation 20:11-15 Series: Just Conquer #58 # Introduction We have come to the end of human history on earth as we currently experience it. We are almost at the end of the book of Revelation, and we have just considered the last battle (20:7-10), which turned out to be lopsided to the hilt against the rebels and the devil. We have also come back, after a long journey between chapters 4-20, to a p...

Revelation 20:7-10 Series: Just Conquer #57 # Introduction One of the greatest, tongue-in-cheek, self-defeating but still quite edifying quotes is from Friedrich Hegel about history: "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." Applying the observation to itself we would not learn this reality, but it does remind us that we're not good at seeing. As Solomon sagely...

Selected Scriptures Series: Centers and Circumferences #15

Revelation 20:1-6 Series: Just Conquer #56 # Introduction Many years ago at a Shepherds' Conference I heard John MacArthur describe the work of John Calvin in a way that planted a mental seed which still bears fruit every week as I study the Bible. John Calvin wrote his _Institutes of the Christian Religion_ fairly early in his life (27 years old). He continued to revise it, editing and adding, fo...

Revelation 20:4-6 Series: Just Conquer #55 # Introduction The study of the end times is not just a study of prophecies but of *promises*. The result of such study is not just (hopefully) a more detailed accuracy about what is going to happen but a *deepened hope* in what God is going to cause to happen. He is a God of promises, a God of hope, and He is always faithful to His Word. From the beginni...

Revelation 20:1-3 Series: Just Conquer #54 # Introduction Of the reasons that I chose to preach through the book of Revelation, a fair summary would be that I thought it would be good for us. It's not that I have end-times fever. There was a decent amount of eschatology talk among us *before* 2020, and it's easy to see how numerous events, and some of the commentary on those events, have promoted...

Revelation 19:17-21 Series: Just Conquer #53 # Introduction Is living by faith the easiest thing to do, or the most difficult? We are saved by faith *alone*; salvation is *God’s* work that we receive. The Father chose a people to save, the Son made the sacrifice to purchase salvation, and the Spirit regenerates and then works and wills that salvation in us. The believer's identity is just that: a...

John 11:25-26 Series: Easter # Introduction When grapes die they are glorified. Without any external energy applied, a grape that has lived to the full becomes more potent every fall. I learned about this reality from Robert Capon, in a chapter titled "Water in Excelcis," water in the highest. Because of the way that God made grapes, and because He sustains the chemical processes that grow and rip...

Revelation 19:11-16 Series: Just Conquer #52 # Introduction At a minimum it is a great disappointment when you learn later on that you’ve been missing a key perspective that would have at least changed how you thought about what you were doing even if it didn’t change what you were doing itself. It’s like when I realized that manliness, and marriage, are meant for fruitfulness. Relational/romantic...

Revelation 19:6-10 Series: Just Conquer #51 # Introduction What sort of message could you imagine receiving that would cause you to fall on your knees and start worshipping the messenger? Imagine you were the apostle John, and you had already been given visions of heaven and of the worship of angels and the redeemed, as well as visions of beasts and falling stars and great earthquakes, what remain...

Revelation 19:1-5 Series: Just Conquer #50 A few days ago I came across this observation about the necessity of *principles* from Abraham Kuyper from his inaugural sermon as pastor to the church in Amsterdam, 1870: > [A]nyone entering a house in ordinary times is not thinking about the foundation on which it rests; so also in Jesus’ church there can be times when people dwell together and labor to...

Selected Scriptures Series: Centers and Circumferences #13 # Introduction I have always believed in the value of naming things well. When we arrived in Marysville in 2001, the name of the youth ministry was "GY" - Grace Youth. I thought we could do better. A website I really liked at the time was called * antithesis.com * (which, for what it’s worth, is where I read “What Would Jesus Drink?” that...

Revelation 18:21-24 Series: Just Conquer Part 49 # Introduction Revelation is not only the last book in God's Word, it is God's Word on the last things. Revelation is the *apocalypse*, which at least in Greek (and before all our modern novel accoutrements) means *unveiling*. This is an apostle-written, Spirit-given unveiling of eschatology: the last things. Future things can be hard to study. Men...

Revelation 18:9-20 Series: Just Conquer Part 48 # Introduction The great antidote to materialism is not becoming a monk or a missionary. Ironically many monks and missionaries still define themselves in relation to money and stuff, but in terms of living in austerity rather than luxury. It still signals a man's spirituality according to his possessions, it still defines spirituality in earthly ter...

Selected Scriptures Series: Centers and Circumferences #12 # Introduction It's hard to imagine anything so obvious and obscene, so laughable but heart-breaking, so inarguable yet argued, as those who can't (or won't) tell the difference between the sexes. We are in a very bad, not good day when male and female are subjective, debatable, pliable, and at times indiscernible. At least we're moving to...

Revelation 18:1-8 Series: Just Conquer Part 47 # Introduction One question that I don't remember being asked over these last ten years is why I usually use a second title for each sermon. There is a title, then an "or" subtitle. I've been doing it for lo, these many years, and it has a couple connections in my mind. More than anything, it is a titling shout out to many of the Puritans who regularl...

Selected Scriptures Series: Our Worship #7 # Introduction There is a great phrase that occurs a couple times in the Old Testament related to God's intentions to regrow His people (2 Kings 19:30; Isaiah 37:31). He promises that they will "take root downward and bear fruit upward." The Lord says He will provide them with stability, as with deep roots, and with productivity, as they see extending bra...

Selected Scriptures Series: Our Worship #6 # Introduction The philosopher-critic Friedrich Nietzsche used to use the Latin pun, *aut liberi, aut libri*. When thinking about what mark one leaves behind, what one can produce that matters in the long term, the pun offers the alternative: either children or books. Nietzsche was not a family man, nor a man of faith. For him the choice was not that diff...

Selected Scriptures Series: Our Worship #5 # Introduction I get the impression that most professing Christians in the United States make their decision about which church they prefer based on the style of songs sung during corporate services. The number of things we could pick at in such a practice would be like picking a long road rash scab; where do you want to start? We probably ought to sympat...