Asbury Church

What was the last trial or challenge you went through? What happened? How did you move forward? Did you press in closer to the Lord, or did you choose to withdraw? Are you in a trial right now? James, in an intriguing manner, encourages us to find joy in our trials, assuring us that they lead to perfection and completeness. How can this seemingly contradictory advice be true? What if the reward is...

The Tenth Commandment is the one about “coveting.” You can pass a law against murder and even a law against working on the sabbath, but how do you pass a law against desire? More importantly, why would the Lord include this command in the Ten? The Tenth Commandment is there to teach me about the importance of learning to discipline my thought life, because desiring that which I have no legitimate...

The 9th Commandment tells us to be truth-tellers. Here are ten truths about lies.

The 8th Commandment is really simple: “Don’t steal.” As everyone knows, stealing is taking what doesn't belong to you. So, what's interesting about the 8th Commandment is that it implies that some things belong to me and some things don't belong to me. Hence my question: “Which things are mine, and which things aren't?” If you live your life trying to have control over the things that aren’t yours...

This week in our Ten Commandments series, my wife joined me for our discussion about the 7th Commandment, the adultery one. But rather than just talking about adultery, we talked marriage more broadly. What makes a strong marriage? The reason this discussion is for everyone is because when marriages are strong everybody wins. Now, we don’t claim to be experts on marriage. In fact, we call ourselve...

What If We Really Believed the Holy Spirit Could Transform Anyone's Heart? For many of us, our lack of faith is not a failure to trust Jesus with our lives or a failure to believe he raises the dead. No, for many of us our lack of faith is in believing that other people can change. And yet, Pentecost is proof that the Holy Spirit can transform *anyone’s* heart! In Ezekiel’s great vision of the val...

What does it mean to honor your father and your mother? At the very least, it means to be grateful that the Lord used them to give you life. Procreation is a partnership with the Lord; obviously, a man and a woman have to come together for there to be conception, but it’s God who makes life possible. The Lord has delegated power to fathers and mothers to make procreation possible. So, every human...

On the face of it, the utility of the Sabbath Command seems relatively obvious: it’s good to take a weekly day of rest. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That kind of thing. But I think that’s exactly backwards—I’m convinced that thinking of the sabbath day as a day of rest is missing the point. Of all the commandments, maybe the Sabbath Command is the one that we ignore the most, whic...

Tim Tennent, President of Asbury Theological Seminary, preached at Asbury Church on Sunday, April 28, 2024 about the last chapter of John’s Gospel.

What if you had a low-level carbon monoxide leak in your bedroom? A significant amount of carbon monoxide would obviously kill you immediately; exposure to a low-level leak would make you sick with mysterious symptoms, the cause of which might take a while to pinpoint. Can you imagine how bad something like that would be? You’d be sick, but unable to immediately find the cause. This is what idolat...

The Ten Commandments aren’t rules we have to obey. Rather, they are guiding lights we *get* to follow. At Mount Sinai, the Lord gives the Israelites the Ten so that they can live well and be an example to the nations. These Ten principles are still rules for life that the Lord has given us, and #1 is the foundation: Put the Lord first and serve only him. Let’s talk practically how to do that.

Our lives changed drastically in 2020—do you remember how everything affected you and the people you love? Churches were forced virtual, businesses shut down, and lives were lost. How did you make it through? Was there grumbling? How did the Lord deliver you? Do you remember? In the Scriptures, we see God do a mighty work to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, through the Red Sea. They celebrate th...

We are spiritually sick in America these days. We are sick because we lack hope in the future; without hope, life is not possible. The signs of the sickness are all around us: In our paralyzed creative culture. Haven’t you wondered why no one makes any original movies any more? In the despair among our young people. Our young adults have less hope in the future than any generation in the last 50 y...

We conclude our series on the Plagues, the Passover, and the Parting of the Sea by looking at the moment when Israel finds itself trapped between the sea and slaughter by Pharaoh's advancing chariots. Moses reminds the people that the Lord will fight for them. That's, of course, true (as we see when the waters part). BUT, God also then tells the people to 'go forward.' This is what it looks like t...

In Exodus, God is constantly moving in miraculous ways to defend and deliver the Israelites. No matter how many times God moves, the next time they face an obstacle they doubt and despair. Why are the Israelites so quick to forget what God has done for them? If we are honest, we are so often like the Israelites. Is there anything we can do to walk with greater faith during difficult circumstances?...

Even the most casual reader of Exodus will wonder: Why does the Lord harden Pharaoh's heart? How is that fair to Pharaoh? A close reading of Exodus chapters 4-14 will help answer those questions, but honestly the question I'm more interested in is this:   What about the state of my heart? What is going to keep me from becoming as stubborn and stiff-necked as Pharaoh?   Why are so many people stubb...

Have the “gods" of Egypt returned? Are they even real? One of the things that the Lord is doing with the ten plagues is showing that the so-called gods of Egypt are powerless against Him. It’s obvious why this would be important in the ancient world, where people believed in the unseen realm. But, in our day, does this really matter? YES. This is because there are dark powers that still keep peopl...

Why does it take ten plagues? If the Lord knows—and he does, as evident from his conversation with Moses at the burning bush in chapter 3—if the Lord knows that Pharaoh will never relent, then why drag out the process over ten plagues? For that matter, why not fast forward the whole thing and just get the children of Israel into the Promised Land as soon as possible? The reason is that the process...

What is Freedom FOR? What’s the purpose of freedom? Many people today believe that freedom is an end in itself; that is, that the point of freedom is just to do whatever you want. But what if freedom has a purpose? What we learn when Moses squares off against Pharaoh is that God makes us free for a larger purpose. The fact that our broader culture is in the mess that it is in is because we have fo...

The reason so many people are struggling these days is because the internet has led us to believe that the only thing that matters is our thoughts, our opinions. So, we stare at screens and consume content that interests us, and yet we’re not happier. Why is that? This is because a person isn’t just a brain on a stick. No, we are embodied creatures. That is, the Lord created us with bodies and min...

Have you ever thought that your calling in life might be as simple as taking one step at a time, just like building with Lego bricks? Consider Moses and how he responded to God's calling. What might be God's next step for you? How will you respond? Remember, every step matters in building a fulfilling life.

It’s my birthday, and so I’m in a reflective mood. This is what the story of Moses on Mt. Sinai means to me this year.

The Bible tells us that Moses saw that the bush was burning, but not consumed. This is a profoundly important detail, because it tells us something about God—it shows God’s “non-competitive transcendence.” That’s a ten dollar phrase that really matters.

We continue our series on Exodus by looking at an essential part of the story: courage. How did Moses’s mother know that he would survive being set adrift in the Nile River? Answer: she didn’t. It’s the same with us today—if we are going to be part of what the Lord is doing and step into the purpose he has for each of us, it will require courage to act without certainty of the result.

We begin a new year with a new study of a biblical book: Exodus. In this kickoff sermon series, we will be looking at the making of Moses, and how God uses Moses’s past to shape him for the future. Our problem is that we can’t see the future, and so we wrongly assume that bad current circumstances will lead to bad future circumstances. But the story of Joseph is a good reminder that God can even t...