Calvary: the Hill Sermons

C.R.E.A.M. = "Christ Rules Everything Around Me". Enough said?

The Holy Spirit is present today to guide the church. What churches does he guide? Churches that prioritize Jesus. What does he guide them to do? Proclaim and embody the gospel of Jesus. What does success look like? It looks like trust, faithfulness, and joy in the midst.

The Holy Spirit has plans for each of us as individual Christians in our day-to-day lives. In participation with Him, he partners us with people we see and people we can't see. But the reality is that it is we who are partnering with Him in His mission to glorify Jesus.

God loves all people, and therefore he gives his Holy Spirit to anyone who claims the name of Jesus. It doesn't matter your background, your history, your race, your sins, your strengths, your family, or ANYTHING. What matters is that you know your need for Jesus, God's Indiscriminate gift of love for you.

In order to respond to the needs of the church today, we need to be full of the Holy Spirit and Scripture, and it turns out that the Spirit is the one who wrote Scripture.

The Holy Spirit is not a force, he is a person. He is a person of God, he has a personality, and he wants to be personal to you. He wants to empower you for his purpose to glorify Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is present amongst all who call upon Jesus. And he has a purpose: the spreading of the gospel of Jesus. This happens through prayer, persecution, and bold proclamation of the good news.

A few weeks after Jesus ascended to Heaven, the promised Holy Spirit arrived at the church in Jerusalem. In one fell swoop, he undid the curse of the Tower of Babel, and enabled the people of God to reach the world at large with the clear articulation of the gospel. He is doing the same thing today, and he is available to all who call on Jesus for salvation. He wants to empower us for his purpose,...

Jesus, after resurrecting in power, and before ascending in power, promised to send the Holy Spirit to empower us in his name and for his mission. The Holy Spirit is now available to all who call on Jesus for salvation!

The author of Ecclesiastes maintains that everything done "under the sun" is meaningless. So where does that leave us? To find our meaning elsewhere. Perhaps in God's kingdom, which is not of this world. In Christ's kingdom we get to participate in what God himself is doing, and in that there is deep meaning, and much better than the kingdoms we build for ourselves.

We all want success, and we all define it differently. We also all want a full life. The problems arise when we equate the two. Jesus offers us a full life, and a success story that might look different than we expect. But it's a true life that is lived with him at the center.

God's great plan on earth is to build a Temple through his Spirit and bring everything under Jesus as head. Paul calls us here to participate in that work, knowing that what we do matters.

Paul exhorts us to walk in wisdom. Why does God care about us living wise lives? Because Jesus is king over all of life, and we should seek to glorify him will all that he has given us and every opportunity he has set before us.

Jesus referred to himself as the Light of the world. He also called his followers the light of the world, but how does that work? Paul calls us to live out our new nature in our new relationship with Jesus, extending his light into the darkness around us.

What does it look like to be a child of God? It means to walk in love, like Jesus did, and to no longer walk in other ways. To do so we need to understand our identity as God's children, be satisfied in his love, and know his truth.

What happens when we look at the Resurrection through the eyes of Doctor Luke? We get a better understanding of just how significant the Living Jesus is. God is doing something new in our world, and it changes everything.

Paul has laid out a paradigm for Christian change by putting off the old and putting on the new through the renewing of our mind. But what does that look like in life? Here, Paul gets concrete and shows us what the New life in Christ should look like, and the truths that lead us there.

The Christian walk involves both a crisis and a process. Because we have died and been raised with Christ we have new life, but we must continuously apply that new life in Christ by putting of the old, renewing our minds, and putting on the new.

We have seen that the church is to grow more like Christ, but how does that happen? By more and more becoming a community that speaks the truth in love to one another. It is the two together that grows a Christian, and the two together that grows a church.

There are certain gifts that Jesus has given that take priority in the church. This is not because they are more important, but because they are foundational. Evangelists, pastors and teachers exist to equip the body so that the whole body does the ministry and become a mature body of Christ.

God has made the church one, but we must constantly review what it is that makes us one church. Paul lists what defines the body and therefore what unifies it.

Paul begins his exhortation (based upon all the truths of his letter so far) with a call to social virtues that will sustain the new community God has formed in the church. We need to cultivate humility, gentleness and patience as a proper response to what God has done for us and what he has called us to.

Another reason we need the wilderness is because it is a place of repentance. Hosea gives us many reasons why we should repent, but at the heart of all of them is the loving God who awaits our return.

God himself is the original desert father. In the time of Israel's wilderness wandering he was at work. By learning what God does in the wilderness we can cultivate a desire to go into the wilderness ourselves knowing that God will be found there.

Paul's doxology here is central not just to Ephesians but to all of Christian life. For us to live the Christian life we must remember that it is a life of worship, dependence and relationship with Christ.