Edgefield Church Nashville – Sermons

When God showed his love for us in the life and death of Jesus, an old command became new. And that command is at the heart of what it looks like to follow Jesus.

When we know God through Jesus, we will come to want what he wants and trust what he commands.

God is light. In him there is no darkness. So how can sinners, who have reason to hide in the darkness, know friendship with God in the light? Only through honest confession of sin.

John wrote his letters to help his friends tell the difference between genuine and counterfeit Christianity. But why did John feel the need to do that? And how can you recognize true Christianity?

Psalm 23 has one central theme: The LORD is my shepherd. It is a statement that comforts the people of God, recognizing that God promises to provide for us, to protect us, and to give us what we need most--Himself.

A righteous king--an authority over us who always does what is right--is to our lives what rain or rich soil is to the grass. We were made to depend on such a king for our lives to flourish. This psalm shows us what a righteous king looks like, and how we can serve him.

When the powerful use their power to do whatever they want no matter who gets hurt, it makes sense to ask the question underlying this psalm: Who rules the world? And when you've felt the weight of that question, you're prepared to celebrate the good news in this psalm's answer.

God gives grace to his people to show his saving power to all peoples. This psalm shows us that those who know God's grace and presence are responsible to share those blessings with those who haven't experienced them.

We are called to a lifetime of praise that is built on trust in the Lord, the only one faithful to His word.

Thanksgiving psalms like this one show us how to relate to God as if we have history together, as if he's been good to us when we've needed him. What do we need to see about God so our gratitude about the past fuels hope for the future?

This psalm of David gives us a profile of inner peace, and where we can find it.

Everyone struggles with anxiety for one reason or another. This psalm identifies a couple common reasons we worry, and the only sure path to rest.

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, we decided to work through Psalm 118, the favorite psalm of Martin Luther. And it isn't difficult to see why he loved this psalm so much. It captures the heart of the gospel Luther helped to clarify: everything depends on God's steadfast love, which is freely available to all who believe.

This psalm uses four different examples to make one powerful point: when the hopeless cry out to God, he hears them and delivers.

When you recognize the truth about human life, that all of us flourish then wither like grass, the psalmist's response is the only one that makes sense. "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days."

Psalm 88 has been called the saddest prayer in the book. It begins with unanswered cries to God. It ends in deep darkness. And in between it offers a profound look at what despair feels like.

How can Israel's history help our relationship with God today?

Everyone experiences envy. No one enjoys what that feels like. But how do we overcome our tendency to envy the good things other people enjoy? This psalm helps us see that envy always comes from overvaluing what other people have, and from undervaluing what it is to have God's presence in your life.

This praise psalm celebrates the irreplaceable goodness of knowing God from personal experience. But how can we experience God as the psalmist did?

This psalm is one of many that pray for the destruction of Israel's enemies. If you don't live with enemies close at hand, psalms like these can be hard to connect with. And given the brutal language, psalms like these can seem totally out of step with Jesus's call to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. How should we respond to prayers like these? Should we rejoice in vengeance?

How can we learn to worship God with our wealth rather than worshipping wealth as our god? We need to see what death does to wealth, so that we can see what Jesus does to death. Then we can see more clearly what Jesus means for our wealth.

What should we do when God feels absent? This psalm models three crucial steps.

What does it look like to be honest with God about our sin? David offers a powerful model. He shows us what it looks like to genuinely recognize our sin, to repent of our sin, and to experience renewal after our sin.

You can try to cover your own sin, or you can let God cover it for you.

All relationships depend on communication. If God exists, our only hope for knowing anything about him, much less knowing and loving him, depends on his willingness to speak to us. So where can we hear from God?