Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

In his rebellion, man looks to dethrone Christ. He has attempted to cast away Christ’s cords from marriage, legislation, and the economy. But there is no greater place where man is tempted to burst God’s bonds apart than in human emotions. Conversely, the Christian insists Christ is Lord and desires to see the crown rights of Jesus materialize. But you will find this far easier to accomplish in th...

In literature and in movies, an Easter egg is some little detail that is hidden away. It might be an inside joke, or secret point, or something else that is not immediately obvious on a first reading. The metaphor comes from our custom of hiding Easter egg for our children. And so what could be more fitting than finding just such an Easter egg in one of the gospel’s resurrection accounts?

In order to understand the Triumphal Entry properly, we need to grasp the fact that the Cleansing of the Temple was the culmination of that Triumphal Entry. It was all of a piece. Reading it with the flow of the story in mind, it should remind us of the conclusion of The Odyssey, where the entire build up is learning into the justice that Odysseus will bring to his house. It is a fitting and satis...

In order to address the subject of ambition rightly, we have to remember some other things first. There is a certain kind of desire that every human being has to deal with, and this is a desire that tends to veer toward envy. If God has not given us the grace of being able to see this in ourselves, we will come into competitive situations motivated in the wrong way entirely. And the same thing is...

To date we have looked at Salvation by Grace, after which we considered Sanctification by Grace. We have now come to the third message in this series, which is Glorification by Grace. We have been taken out of the miry clay (salvation), and we are in the process of being cleaned up (sanctification). But where are we being taken to? What is our destination?

Psalm 132 is one of the Psalms of Ascent, sung by the people of Israel when they traveled up to Jerusalem. I take it to be penned by Solomon, given that the language of this psalm is similar to Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple (2 Chronicles 6:41). You have to keep in mind when reading the Psalms of Ascent that the saints of old sang them on the way up to Jerusalem, but you sing the...

This morning, we’re going to talk about envy. This is one of the most subtle and unrecognized sins that we face as Christians. Envy gets into everything, and it’s like a cancer of the soul. Proverbs 14:30 says “Envy makes the bones rot.” And when it takes root, it overpowers us. “Who can stand before envy?”

So Malta is due south of Sicily, and so they have come all the way to the west. They then sailed to Syracuse, which was in Sicily, and then to Rhegium, which right at the toe of Italy’s boot. They made their way up north to Puteoli, a port on the west coast of Italy, about 150 miles south of Rome. They came to Three Taverns, which was about 30 miles south of Rome. Some believers came out to welcom...

As we have gone through the book of Acts, we have had numerous occasions to notice just how tough the apostle Paul was. The shipwreck recorded in this chapter occurred about four years after the writing of 2 Corinthians. And in that book, Paul mentions three times he had been in shipwrecks, including one night and day adrift on the sea (2 Cor. 11:25). And that means that this shipwreck was his fou...

In this chapter, we learn the basic structure of Paul’s evangelistic message. What was the content of the gospel that he preached? And what was the process through which unbelievers were brought to faith?

As the crow flies, Caesarea was around 47 miles from Jerusalem. But because of terrain and available roads, it was around 65 miles to travel. Paul in Roman custody down in Caesarea was out of the reach of the Jews. But he was not far enough away to be out of their thinking. Two years later, he was still very much on their minds.

Lying is not just something that people do when they are little boys getting into the cookie jar. We sometimes naively assume that greater responsibility means that there must be greater levels of integrity. But it is often the case that the higher up you go—whether in civil or ecclesiastical government—the greater the incentives and pressures to give way to deceit. The cookie jar is much bigger,...

We see in this passage how the sovereign God moves all things in accordance with His purpose and will, and He turns the machinations of the wicked back upon them. God had told Paul that he was going to bear witness to Christ in Rome; he need not worry. All plots against him would misfire.

In the current climate, a large swath of secularists would be nervous if they knew we were considering the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua. The remainder would be fascinated as they attempted to understand the Christian way over against their own unbelieving assumptions. Their fascination would not be misplaced, nor their fear. Granted, many of them would speak of a Christian jihad, and w...

The Lord saw fit to give us three distinct accounts of Saul’s conversion on the way to Damascus. The first (Acts 9:1-19) is a third-person narrative by Luke. The second is our passage here today, a first-person defense to an angry mob (Acts 22:1-21). The third is Paul’s first-person defense to King Agrippa (Acts 26:1-23), which we will consider in detail in due course.

As it happened, all the warnings that Paul had received on the way to Jerusalem came true, almost immediately. If the thing was going to happen, there was apparently no sense in delaying it. We have before us the account of Paul’s attempt at conciliation, and the riot and arrest that happened anyway.

So Paul is resolved to go to Jerusalem, and apparently a sense of destiny rests upon him. He is repeatedly warned what will happen if he does, and Luke records the warnings carefully. This is not to make us think that Paul was disobeying the Spirit. The prophecies did not say, “You must not go,” but rather, “This is what will happen if you go.” This warning happens in “every city” (Acts 20:22-23)....

As human beings, we struggle to even comprehend the meaning of the word “eternal.” To begin, we need to make some distinctions. First, we need to distinguish God’s eternity from our eternity, or timeless eternity from everlasting eternity. His life is so full that he doesn’t experience it in a succession of moments like we do. Our eternity is better thought of as everlastingness. Everlasting means...