Cities Church Sermons

The real essence of the Reformation wasn’t the doctrine of justification — vital as it was, and is. The real essence of the Reformation was access to, and personal encounter with, God himself through his word. The Reformers took the Catholic Church’s closed book and opened it first for themselves — to read and preach and write and sing — and then for all to hear.

Abraham prayed in Chapter 18 that God not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of the small number of righteous people who lived there. This is presumably Lot and his family (if we connect the dots), but the story makes a lesser deal about their righteousness and a bigger deal about Abraham’s intercession. We’re supposed to see Chapter 19 as an answer to Abraham’s prayer.

A prophet, however, is more than a servant and more than a ruler. The prophet is the friend of God. Yahweh has a Divine Council, made up of angels (like the two with him here in Genesis 18). A prophet is one who has been admitted into the Divine Council. Like Joseph in Pharaoh’s court, or Daniel in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, the prophet is the advisor and councilor to the King of kings.

This is a strange sign. The bloody cutting of part of the body is the sign of God’s covenant? Why? What does it mean? In order to answer that, we need to understand the rest of Genesis 17. There is still more newness and detail. In the second half of the chapter, we discover something else about the promise of Abraham’s offspring. Not only did God not forget Hagar, he didn’t forget Sarah either.

God never gave a schedule to Abram for when he was going to fulfill his promise, but apparently for Sarai ten years was the schedule she had given God — and since she still didn’t have a child according to the schedule she had given God, she concluded that God had prevented her from bearing children.

In other words, Abram’s faith in God and his refusal to seize the promise before the time, his trust in God’s goodness and wisdom and his patience in waiting for God to bring his promises to pass in his own time—these demonstrate that Abram’s ultimate hope was not in any earthly homeland. Abram doesn’t ultimately want an earthly country.

In other words, God says to Abram, I am your payday. Which means Abram didn’t need the stuff from the king of Sodom because the promises are God were enough.

So living by faith in God’s specific promises makes us open handed, rather than self-asserting. It frees us from trying to seize what we want on our own, and frees us to submit to God and his good timing.

This is something that shows up over and over again. We know that God calls his people out. Every time God calls us to himself, he is calling us to leave something else.

There’s a lot to say about these two, but for our purposes today, I want to highlight the simple claim that grace (or super-nature) glorifies nature. Grace brings nature to its highest and proper perfection. And I want to demonstrate this by focusing on the three elements in today’s worship service—child dedication, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Let’s begin by highlighting the natural features o...

When it comes to this joy in God that we want restored, we should ask, restored for what? What’s the point? Because there is a point. There is a purpose, and it’s two-fold. First, our joy is about the glory of God. And then second, our joy is about the good of others.

Which means that right now, God is not dwelling at Minnehaha Academy. Last Sunday morning God was dwelling at the Riverview Theater, and then at Hiawatha School Park, and right now God is dwelling here, in this room, where his people, filled by his Spirit, are gathered in his name. And when we leave here, he goes with us. Because now, God’s presence isn’t a holy place that his people must go to, b...

But what’s amazing about what we mean when we say “heart” or “soul” or “gut” is that we’re talking about a fact that humans have known since the very beginning of humanity. The idea of the “heart” — the idea that humans have this unseen causer in them, this inner self, this energy at the center of who they are — this is an ancient idea that goes back thousands and thousands of years ago, and you s...

Jesus is the true vine. Which means, he is the truer and better Israel — so in all the places where Israel wavered, Jesus will hold fast; in all the places where Israel sinned, Jesus will overcome; in all the places where Israel forsook God over and over again, Jesus will trust God all the way to the very end.

Jesus is not one lamp among many. He is the singular source of the light of the glory that illumines the world to come. He is the way, the truth, and the life. To believe in the true God is to believe also in Jesus (verse 1). He is in the Father and the Father is in him (verse 11). Jesus is the only way because he and God the Father are one.

Jesus is the resurrection in that, if we believe in him, he will resurrect our physical bodies from the grave at the end of time. And Jesus is the life in that, if we believe in him, he gives us spiritual life now so that we will never spiritually die.

But, the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, has power. Jesus has power that no one else has. He says, "I choose when I lay down my life, and when I am ready, I will pick it back up again. I have the power to choose when I die and when I will come back to life, because I am LORD over life and death."

Where every other religion tells you what you must do now in order to make it to heaven, Christianity tells you what you have now, because of Jesus, and that you will have it forever.

In other words, “Don’t stumble over the sign. I’m the real bread. I don’t just want to fill your belly for a few hours. I want to give you eternal life. I want you to come to me and eat the bread of life. I want you to eat living bread, to feast on me, and be truly satisfied forever.”

At the broadest, most basic level, prayer is when we humans talk to God (which is not complicated). When we speak or communicate to God, we’re praying. That’s the basic definition. But what James does here is show us that we’re all coming from somewhere, and therefore we’re all praying from somewhere, which means that prayer isn’t just talking to God, but it’s talking to God from within our earthb...

And when we say “until he comes,” we mean his coming is near. We are living in the last days. The Judge is standing at the door. The Lord of heaven’s armies “is near, at the very gates” (Matthew 24:33). As we eat this bread together and drink this cup together, we say, “God, make us the kind of people who live in light of the nearness of your Son’s return. Strengthen our hearts and make us patient...

James says, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit…’” This way of talking is problematic for James, but it is not ultimately the problem. This way of talking is more like a symptom of the real problem. He explains the real problem further down in verse 16. James calls this kind of talk about tomorrow boasti...

Because we are relational beings, sin creates collateral damage. You do not sin in isolation. These wayward desires may originate inside of us, but they come out, and when they do, the results for those around us are often tragic. James says specifically that they cause quarrels, fights, and even murder.

If you think about it, peace is both a quality and a result. As a quality, we can be peaceable, verse 17, and then out of being peaceable we can do peaceful things — we can sow in peace (verse 18). And when we do that — peaceable people doing peaceful things — it will lead all kinds of good.

James, like Jesus is warning leaders: 1 ) The heart overflows into all of life. 2) The heart refuses to be silenced.