Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

Over the years I have preached on marriage, and family, and child-rearing any number of times. Seeing that I am about to do it again, I need to begin by noting the way this series will overlap with the others, but also to point out a significant way that it will differ. Some of the basic principles remain constant, of course, and to refresh your thinking concerning those principles, there are a nu...

The Text: Matthew 27:52-28:15 KJV

Two thousand years ago, a man who had been wickedly betrayed by the religious authorities, murderously crucified by the Roman civil authorities, did the unthinkable by rising from the dead. This was God’s plan from the beginning, and the Lord Jesus knew that this was the plan. “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I...

One of the things that happened in the medieval period was that the church calendar began to get cluttered up with numerous saints’ days and celebrations, like so many barnacles on the ark that was the church. There were many blessings that resulted from the great Reformation, and one of them was that the number of Christian holidays was pared down to what came to be known as the “five evangelical...

The Text: Isaiah 11 KJV

This is a short psalm, but it is densely packed with hallelujahs. There are twelve of them here, and one hallelu-el. Together they praise Jah, the covenant God of Israel—Yahweh or Jehovah, and El, the great God Almighty. The longest stretch of words here between any two hallelujahs is four words, with all the rest of the bridges being two words. This conclusion to the Psalter is a great crescendo...

The Text: Isaiah 11

In Scripture, praise and true authority always go hand in hand. This is because it is faith that overcomes the world (1 John 5:4), and praise always overflows from the confidence of true faith. Evangelical faith sings at the dinner table, sings behind the wheel, sings at the workbench, sings while going to war, and sings in the assembly of the saints. You are the choir militant, and you have been...

The Text: Isaiah 10:20-34

One of my favorite lines that I’ve heard from a parishioner came from a sweet, faithful lady who had followed the Lord for many years. When she would recount to me something that wasn’t quite as it ought to be, something troubling that needed sorting out, she would add, “Now, Pastor, I am not the fourth member of the Trinity.”  That is a good thing for us to remember for the Lord resists the proud...

The Text: Isaiah 10:1–19 KJV

The Text: Judges 14 NKJV

This is a psalm of praise in action. It begins in the highest heaven, and descends to the deeps, and invites everyone and everything in between to join in with this chorus of praise. Moreover, this wonderful psalm concludes with a promise that is attached to all heartfelt praise. God is exalted in a particular kind of praise, and He makes sure to exalt that kind of praise in turn. There is a recip...

The Text: Isaiah 9:8-21

The Text: Judges 13

On the one hand, we know that God is far above us, higher than the highest heaven. But we must also confess that He is beneath our feet, supporting us in every possible way. He is the God of the macrocosm, but He is also an infinitely skilled miniaturist, folding enormous libraries of information into trillions of cells—and that is just in one body. He is the God of general, natural revelation, an...

As human beings there are many things that differentiate us from the animals. First and foremost, we are made in the image of god. Our penchant for creativity and our desire to invent is derived from this. We make things, design things, prototype things, tweak, bend, and reassess. And we end up with something on our work bench or computer screen or cast iron skillet that didn’t exist the day befor...

The Text: Judges 12

The Text: Joshua 7

The Text: Obadiah

A perennial problem that comes upon the people of God is that they choose to die in the desert rather than come to the source of Living Water. Israel refused to enter into the land flowing with milk and honey. So that generation spent their lives wandering east of the Jordan until their corpses filled the wilderness. Isaiah 55 is designed that we might not go the way of that old generation. It is...

On the one hand, people have every reason to not put their trust in princes. The princes let them down over and over, again and again. You would think that people would stop doing that. Every promised wave of reforms is promising to fix all the problems that were caused by the previous wave of reforms. We are like that woman in the gospels—the more the doctors treated her, the more the problems co...

The Text: Isaiah 9

Judges 11

The nature and character of God is of course worthy of all praise and adoration. But we are finite, and sinful on top of that, and so we cannot even begin to praise Him as He deserves to be praised. Nevertheless, the effort must be made. As forgiven sinners, how on earth are we going to declare His worth? What are we going to do? Shout? Stand on a chair? One of the ways that Scripture assigns to u...