Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

INTRODUCTION Part of the advantage of taking larger sections together is seeing how seemingly different laws actually fit together. Here, we have a passage that begins with worship, flows out into criminal justice, and concludes with Israelite economic policies. The overarching point is that justice and economics are always thoroughly theological matters. We are always appealing to God or some god...

INTRODUCTION We are now coming to a passage that teaches us where the spiritual action really is. Do you want to be right with God? It is not going to happen because you got all your papers in order, and then got them stamped. “Right with God” is a judicial category, but not a bureaucratic one. We must learn two things. The letter kills and the Spirit gives life. But secondly, the Spirit gives lif...

Text: Hebrews 4

INTRODUCTION Food is right at the center of world. When God created man in His own image, He put him in a garden full of food with a Tree of Life in the midst of the garden. And the recurring picture of salvation and redemption is a feast: “And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines o...

INTRODUCTION One of the basic lessons of Scripture is the lesson of gospel inversion. Humility exalts. Servanthood rules. Death lives. The underdog triumphs. The back of the line is the front of the line. And it does not matter how many times we are taught this principle, we always have to learn it afresh every morning. THE TEXT “But if any have caused grief, he hath not grieved me, but in part: t...

MOSES THE FAITHFUL SERVANT We know the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. God performed miracle after miracle, delivering the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt and preserving them throughout their journey through the wilderness. But again and again, the Israelites turn and grumble and complain against God. One incident, relevant to today’s sermon, comes right on the heels of God sendi...

In our cultural flood of iniquity, which is sweeping many away, it’s quite easy to find sins to pillory “out there.” However, the headwaters for the stream of wickedness “out there”, are transgressions “in here”. If we would have revival, we must come before God in earnest grief over our sins. Men, in particular, must lead the charge. So, some pointed words to husbands. The sin of gender confusion...

INTRODUCTION The central message of the Bible is God’s victory over death through resurrection. As the ministers of God in the Old Testament, the priests of Israel were required to picture God’s coming victory over death in a number of ways. While some of the particulars have changed in the New Covenant, the principles really have not. What the Old Testament pictured, Christ has accomplished as ou...

INTRODUCTION Christ must be worshiped by us as the ultimate yes, but we must come to understand how this works rightly. God does not come down and make promises to us directly. Rather, He makes promises throughout all Scripture, promises that are given generally to His people, and also to individuals (like Abraham) who are covenant representatives of His people. These promises are bestowed on the...

The Text: Hebrews 2

Just as your parents delight in you when you obey, so too our Father in heaven delights in your obedience. You need to have the eyes of faith to see His delight though.

The Christian life is a holy life, a life set apart from the world. God says, “Go out from them and be seperate.” Our goal is not to be unnecessarily abnormal. And neither is it to seperate from sinners in every sense. Paul says that to leave off all dealings with sinners would require one to go out of the world. Rather God would have us live in the world in a distinct way. Everything we do, we do...

If engineers could find a way to record your inner dialogue, would they discover a thrilling symphony of praise, or would they be confronted with the crackling buzz and warble of grumbling? Grumbling, left unchecked, drowns out all other inner noise. Soon enough you don’t even notice it. Instead of hearing it as an alarm, warning you of a discontented heart, it simply becomes white-noise.

Confess your sin, knowing temptation will confront you before this service is even over. Confess it as the black and vile evil that it is. Confess it to be the very sins for which God sent His Son into the world to save you from. Confess it not to make the fight against sin easier, but because confessing your sin is how you fight against and conquer sin through Christ.

THE TEXT God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, 2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; 3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our si...

THE TEXT These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth. Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods . . . ” (Deuteronomy 12:1-8) INTRODUCTION Many saints don’t know what to do on earth. They view life on ea...

Consider Nehemiah’s concluding phrase: the joy of the Lord is our strength. Which raises the question, strength for what? Strength is given for repentance & reform. The abundant joy which God fills His people with enables them to face down their own sin & gladly turn from it. It imbues them with strength to continue the work of rebuilding the ruins. The Lord’s joy brings strength to confront tyran...

Many Christians have forgotten the truth that “the most high rules the kingdom of men” (Daniel 4:17). Saints who forget this find a way to go on believing that they themselves will be saved. But they forget that Christ came so that the world itself might be saved. Amid such forgetfulness, these Christians leave off praying that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. And they also le...

Before reading our text for this morning, I cannot let this moment pass unremarked. As you have already heard in the exhortation, this last Friday the Supreme Court reversed their infamous Roe decision of 1973. That makes this our first post-Roe worship service. And if you are not yet fifty years old, this means that this is the first worship service of your entire life where Roe was not the tyran...

INTRODUCTION Modern man prides himself in not being violent and savage, and yet we have butchered 60 million babies and counting. We have high rates of drug and alcohol and porn addiction, suicide, incarceration, and so on. We sacrifice babies to our Molech, and we sacrifice millions more in the slow cooker of government programs and prisons. We have rejected Jesus and His easy yoke, calling it ha...

INTRODUCTION Because you’re confronted with it each Sunday, it might be easy to think that our musical style is high up on the list of important Christ Church distinctives. In actuality, it’s further down the list in importance. Not unimportant, but not of first importance. You could hang around for a good while without knowing the first thing about our eschatology, which actually looms large over...

INTRODUCTION There will never come a time in your Christian life where the Spirit will invite you to coast. You are not going to grow to an age where it will be unnecessary to trust God. There will always be something that you need to trust God for. We never grow out of our need to believe in the God who raises the dead. THE TEXT “For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which...

Saints from ancient days have punctuated their prayers, both spoken & sung, public & private with “Amen.” An early church father, Jerome, described the early church’s practice of hearty “Amens” this way: “Where else does the ‘Amen’ resound in the likeness of thunder of the divine heaven & the empty temples of pagan idols are shaken?” So then, adopting this practice isn’t just keeping a tradition a...

Talk 1 of 6 from Missions Conference 2022: As the Waters Cover the Sea. Consider donating to our Missions Conference fund: https://bit.ly/missions-conference-donation . — The gospel is good news for all people, in all lands, at all times. The call of the church is to obey Christ’s command to teach the nations obedience to Him, as the King of all the earth. The great promise of the prophet Hosea is...

Talk 2 of 6 from Missions Conference 2022: As the Waters Cover the Sea. Consider donating to our Missions Conference fund: https://bit.ly/missions-conference-donation . — James Rayment was born in England, but has lived in Seattle for 10 years with his wife and 5 kids. Since 2012, James has been building relationships with Muslims in Seattle and around the world. Because of this ministry he founde...