Edgefield Church Nashville – Sermons

?Holy? is Isaiah?s favorite description of God, the one that stands behind everything else he says about him. But what does that mean, and how can we understand and love that God is holy?

Using Isaiah 1 as an introduction to our new series, this sermon aims to clarify the four questions Isaiah helps us answer: Who is God? Who are we? What has God promised us? And how should we respond to his Word?

The gospel, God?s good news that defines who we are, helps us understand why prayer is so important to our lives and to our church. The gospel clarifies why we must pray and what we must pray.

We can?t help but long for justice against evil, but we?re guilty of the things we despise. How can we be saved? That?s the question raised by Isaiah 64. We need more than deliverance from what threatens us; we need deliverance from the evil that?s in us.

In this prophetic vision Isaiah describes what the new world will be like when God comes to make all things new. Engaging this vision in light of the brokenness of the world we life in helps us sharpen our hope. It helps us long for the promise that God will deliver us from the things we fear and cannot control.

The letter to the Hebrews ends with a benediction, a reminder of what God has done and a prayer for what God will do for his children. By sacrificing the blood of his Son, God has made a covenant that promises peace and life that will last forever. By his covenant God gives to us what he requires of us, promising to transform us so we can live the lives of worship we were made to live.

Wrapping up this letter to his friends, the author of Hebrews urges them to view their leaders as God gift to their community. This passage explains how we?re to follow faithful leaders, and where those leaders should be leading us.

Because of Jesus, worship looks different. There are no more temples, sacrifices, or ceremonial cleansings; now worship is a way of life, a life defined by gratitude for what God has done and will do for us through Jesus. This passage gives examples of what should mark a grateful life.

This passage, the rhetorical climax of the letter, summarizes the major themes of Hebrews. It reminds us where we?ve come through Jesus, where we?re going, and how we get there.

Samuel said to Saul, ?To obey is better than sacrifice.? Obedience is lovingly conforming our lives to the ways of God in thought, word, deed, and attitude. The apostle John, in his last writings, put it even more simply: walk as Jesus did. We do not impress God with our obedience; we delight him. It gives us the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

If the Christian life amounts to a long, difficult, and painful race, we?ve got to work as a team to strengthen each other and bind what is broken?to create a community of healing. We must work hard at what God is working out in us; this looks like peace with each other and a fuller dependence on God. And we must take responsibility for each other?s faith, pushing each other beyond apathy, hard-he...

The witness of Israel?s heroes and especially of Jesus is this: God?s promises are more precious than the comforts of this world. But this text reveals another dimension to how we should view our pain as people of faith. Our pain is used by our Father to discipline us; it shows God loves us, it aims at our holiness, and it always bears fruit.

This conclusion to Hebrews?s list of faith?s exemplars offers a striking contrast. Sometimes faith brings back the dead, and sometimes faith costs everything. But the key point is this: if Jesus is alive, the difference between gaining or losing everything in this life doesn?t ultimately matter.

Moses?s life shows how faith is a matter of identity. Faith says that Jesus is more satisfying than the fleeting pleasure of sin. He?s more rewarding than the greatest treasures of this world. He?s more secure than the powers we admire and crave. And that?s because Jesus alone overcomes our inadequacy and makes us children of God.

The life of Abraham offers one of the Bible?s best examples of what it looks like to claim the promises of God by faith. Here our author uses Abraham?s life to call us to live as exiles in this world because we live with a homesick longing for the world to come.

If Jesus represents what God has done to redeem our broken relationship with him, faith is what that healed relationship looks like in us. Hebrews 11 is one of the Bible?s most beautiful descriptions of faith, and these first verses show us what it is and why it pleases God.

We often overlook work as a means to an end, but God created it and is glorified by us doing it in faith.

Whether or not we endure in faith makes a statement about God, a statement that means life or death. We endure by fixing our hope on our true possession in Christ.

Christian community is the key to holding on to faith and to living for the return of Jesus. This passage helps clarify what Christian community is and how it works.

This verse and the context it draws from help us to trust the faithfulness of God when faced with doubts of mind and soul.

The truth about Jesus explained so carefully earlier in the letter is brought home here with one simple command: draw near to God. But because drawing near to God is easier spoken of than acted on, this passage helps us identify why we struggle to approach God and what we can do about it.

Here, at the climax of the entire letter, we get two images that help us see that Jesus?s work for us is finished and how his work begins to change us.

We know from human relationships how disruptive it is to have displeased the other person and to know we?ve been displeasing. Israel?s relationship with God suffered from this sense that God wasn?t fully pleased with his people, and a major point of their sacrificial system was to remind them of this problem. But Jesus came to perfectly please God, to do his will once and for all, and because of J...

Everyone faces a future defined by one of two realities: death and judgment, or Jesus?s death and coming redemption. What will your future be? Are you eagerly waiting for him?

All of us possess a moral conscience, and all of us have experienced what it is to have a defiled conscience?a conscience that tells us we have failed to meet our own standards, much less God?s. This passage explains how Jesus came to purify our consciences, to redeem us from living under the dark cloud of our failure.