Church of The Word | Sunday Sermons

The Beatitudes build upon one another as a picture of the Christian life. It begins with poverty of spirit—recognizing sin, need, and helplessness before God, and crying out for the riches of grace given at Christ’s expense. Then comes mourning, where sin, death, and the shortness of life teach the soul to seek comfort from God. Meekness follows as strength brought under the hand of God, power res...

First, there is an important overlap between men and women: both are created in the image of God, both are fallen in Adam, and both need to be saved by grace through Jesus Christ. Men and women share equal dignity before God, equal need of redemption, and equal value as image-bearers. But equality in worth does not erase distinction in design. God created men and women differently, with different...

God is merciful, and He favors the merciful with mercy. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” This Beatitude calls Christians to reflect the character of their God by becoming compassionate, forgiving, patient, and kind. God’s holiness and justice must never be forgotten, but neither should His mercy. He cares for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and those who suffer....

Every person is hungry for something. Nobody is neutral. Everyone is filled with thoughts, driven by desires, pursuing something—going to bed with something on the mind and waking up chasing it again. And Jesus is going to press that issue in the Sermon on the Mount: what is the appetite of your life? What do you crave? What do you daydream about? What do you pursue when no one is watching? That’s...

Matthew 5:5 gets slowed down on purpose because the Beatitudes aren’t just beautiful sayings—they’re a portrait of what a Christian is supposed to look like. There’s a time to dig into typology, complexity, and deep doctrine, and that matters. But there’s also a time to lean into orthopraxy—right living—because right doctrine that doesn’t produce a right life becomes hypocrisy. And hypocrisy doesn...

Matthew 5 is introduced with a warning most people don’t expect: the Sermon on the Mount is not meant to make people feel safe in themselves. It’s meant to leave people astonished, exposed, and emptied. When Jesus finishes, the crowds aren’t comforted—they’re stunned, because He teaches with authority, not like the scribes. And the sermon doesn’t wrap up with a soft landing. It ends with a dividin...

A disciple and a Christian are not two different categories in the New Testament. That’s one of the big mistakes people make—thinking, “First you become a Christian, and later, if you want to get serious, you become a disciple.” But Acts 11:26 flips that: they were disciples… and those disciples were called Christians. In other words, disciple is the definition, and “Christian” is the name the wor...

Matthew is about to move into the Sermon on the Mount—the most famous sermon Jesus ever preached—and the sermon frames it like this: Jesus has been calling people to repent, and now He’s going to start showing them what repentance actually looks like in lived obedience. The Sermon on the Mount is packed with practical instruction, but it’s not random moral teaching. It sits inside a bigger story M...

Around this time of year—right after remembering Passover and celebrating the resurrection—Matthew 4 lands with real force because it’s describing what happened at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. The timeline is framed like this: John the Baptist is preaching in the reign of Tiberius, Jesus is baptized, and immediately afterward the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness where He is tested...

The sermon shifts from Matthew into John 5 to focus on what is called “the incredible claims of Jesus.” “Incredible” is explained in two senses: it can mean unbelievable—a claim too wild to accept—or it can mean astonishingly believable when supported by real evidence. The point is that Jesus makes claims so sweeping that no one can remain neutral; a verdict has to be reached, because eternity is...

It’s Palm Sunday week. People love the picture of Jesus riding into Jerusalem like a king—until they realize what kind of King He is. A donkey, not a warhorse. A crown, but first a cross. And Matthew 4 fits that perfectly, because Satan offers Jesus the very thing everyone wants Him to take: A kingdom. Authority. Power. Glory. But with one condition: No suffering. No obedience. No cross. Just bow…...

Matthew 4 opens with a sober, steady theme: Into the Wilderness. The wilderness is not an accident. It is a place God leads His people on purpose. The point is simple but weighty: God is sovereign. He will test His sons. The response must not be testing God, but trusting and obeying Him. The sermon explains this through everyday analogies. A teacher tests students—students don’t test the teacher....

Matthew 3–4 is used to spotlight Jesus’ baptism under the theme “The Beloved Son.” At the center of the passage is the Father’s voice from heaven: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” That declaration reveals Jesus as the Father’s joy—not merely because He is “a Son” in title, but because He has perfectly done the Father’s will and receives divine approval. The sermon leans into th...

Sin is a lot like hoarding—something ugly and destructive that people gradually become comfortable living with. The story of that South City building makes the point painfully clear. From the outside it looked promising, but once inside, the reality was revolting: rooms packed with filth, rot, insects, waste, and decay—so bad it took months of cleansing and dumpsters of trash to make it livable. A...

Matthew 3 is revisited with a sharper focus on one central theme: the three baptisms. The passage presents two baptizers—John and Christ—and it distinguishes three kinds of baptism that must not be confused: water, Spirit, and fire. This matters because each baptism represents something different in God’s redemptive work, and understanding them requires tracing their meaning through the Old Testam...

Every person is only a heartbeat away from standing before the judgment seat of Christ. That is true for believers and unbelievers alike. The question is not whether that day will come, but whether there is readiness to meet the Lord. For the unbeliever, the issue is plain and urgent: repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Readiness to meet the Lord does not come through morality, religion, sinceri...

This week shook me. I had a moment where I truly felt how thin the line is between “normal life” and standing before God. I was listening to my daughter describe her symptoms, and the word preeclampsia came up. I’d heard the word before, but I didn’t really know what it meant. Then I started reading: high blood pressure, blurry vision, migraines… and she’d been having migraines for days. The blurr...

When Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd, He is not inventing new imagery. The shepherd metaphor runs throughout the Old Testament. Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” David himself was taken “from the sheepfold” to shepherd Israel. Kings and priests were called shepherds because their responsibility was to lead, feed, and protect the people. The word “pastor” simply means shepherd. God consist...

In Acts chapter 20, we find one of the clearest and most personal passages in the New Testament that describes what an elder is and what an elder is called to do. The reason for this message is practical. In the coming days, we’ll be discussing the possibility of appointing another elder in the church. For some time, we have recognized the need for additional shepherds. The church has grown, respo...

Matthew chapter two introduces a theme that runs throughout the entire Bible—the theme of Egypt, exodus, and deliverance. The story of Jesus fleeing to Egypt and later returning is not an isolated historical detail. It is part of a much larger pattern that begins in Genesis and unfolds through the life of Israel, the ministry of Christ, and even the lives of believers today. Matthew is not simply...

Matthew 2 presents a stark contrast that demands decision: Herod the Great, master of worldly power, versus Jesus Christ, the eternal King born in obscurity. Herod possessed everything the world celebrates—political mastery, wealth, influence, and fear-inducing authority. Yet his "greatness" rested on insecurity, cruelty, and bloodshed. When threatened by news of Christ's birth, he responded with...

There are moments in the life of the church when it is right to step back from the flow of sequential exposition and ask a more foundational question—not what comes next, but why are we here at all? Psalm 50 presses that question upon God’s people with clarity and force. It confronts assumptions about worship, exposes empty religion, and reorients the heart toward what truly glorifies God. Scriptu...

Matthew 2 reveals the fundamental divide Christ brings to the world—worship or warfare, submission or resistance. The wise men from the East demonstrate that Gentile inclusion was never God's afterthought but His eternal plan, fulfilling the Abrahamic promise that all nations would be blessed through his seed. These foreigners arrived first, not by accident, but by divine design. The wise men's wo...

Christmas brings us again to Matthew chapter 1, a passage familiar to many, yet endlessly rich. The title Emmanuel—God With Us captures the heart of this text and the heart of the gospel itself. The birth of Christ is not merely a sentimental moment in history; it is God’s decisive answer to humanity’s deepest problem. The point of this passage is clear: human rebellion separated us from God, and...