Resurrection Philadelphia Sermons

Luke 3:1-18 "[John the Baptist’s message] is not good news in the sense that it will make everybody happy. It is not good news in the sense that whatever evil and injustice people have committed and still commit is no longer important. It is good news in the sense that a new reality is dawning. Thanks to the one whose coming John announces, evil and injustice will be undone...But it is not good ne...

Luke 2:41-52 Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Christ and lives there with joy and strength. It is no...

Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12 That hidden thing calling me on to the chase is the very thing that puts me in my place. It is at once invitation and caution—a burning bush beckoning and a warning that I’ve ventured onto holy ground... - Joshua Stamper, "Proverb"

Luke 2:21-38 This is what Christmas is all about - something radically new that cannot be generated out of the conditions of this world. It does not emerge. It comes. We do not extrapolate it. God promises it. If darkness has descended upon you and your world, you need not try to persuade yourself that things are not as bad as they seem or to search desperately for reasons to be optimistic. Remind...

Luke 1:26-38 "The Advent season should come as a reminder to us that we can never be, and should not be, adjusted to the world. We are here to proclaim the reality and the imminence of a wholly other world, a world in which different powers rule and different standards operate. We are here to make it possible for ordinary men and women really to believe this, and therefore to live in hope and read...

Luke 1:1-25 "Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater." - Richard Lischer, "Advent is a season of sighs, especially this year,"...

Rev 22:1-21 That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it...

Rev 21:1-27 "[I]t is the very transcendence of God - in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray - that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for 'this world.' It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven, that pushes back on our illusions that we could...

Rev 20:1-15 "For believers, the last judgment is not so much a process by which the moral quality of human deeds is made unmistakably manifest and appropriate rewards and punishments apportioned, but rather, and above all, an event in which sinners are forgiven and justified. Christ the final judge is none other than Christ the merciful savior." - Miroslav Volf, Against the Tide: Love in a Time of...

Rev 19:1-10 Am I a paragon of faith? (The honest answer is no.) While I once thought that I should labor to look and act and believe just like the other "successful" Christians in my life, I've been freed up by something Thomas Merton once wrote: "For me to be a saint means to be myself." Noth that godly person I greatly admire, but myself. I see now that I'm engaged in a creative, enlivening, one...

Rev 18:1-20 The kingdom of God is an alternative political fact that stands in tension with the empires, all of which are falling away. If this is true, then the hostile and belligerent partisanship among American Christians might be compared to a fistfight over table manners on the sinking Titanic . - Lee Camp, Scandalous Witness

Rev 13:1-18 To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, "I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;" to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary, - this is the victory that overcometh the world. - George MacDonald, "Life," in Unspoken Sermons

Rev 12:1-17 Jesus and other early Christians were not executed because they were spiritual. They were executed because their politic was a threat to the powers that be. - Lee Camp, Scandalous Witness

Rev 7:9-17 "Imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths." - Eugene Peterson, Run With the Horses | The church in eternity will appear more lovely, but it will not be more loved. - Megan Hill, A Place to Belong

Rev 5:1-14 The gaze of God is both what we fear and what we can't do without. Scripture makes it clear that apart from God's coming to us and opening our eyes, we cannot know him truly. Talk about epistemic difficulties! For us to know him, he must know us first. Our knowing is warped, especially when it comes to knowing God, because of human rebellion against God. There is something inside us tha...

Rev 3:1-22; John 17:20–26 The life of faith revealed and nurtured in the biblical narratives is highly personal but never merely individual: always there is a family, a tribe, a nation - church . Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder

"A dissident is a person of hope, someone who imagines a better, future world, and then begins to embody that world. It's someone who speaks to promote that better, future vision and against what is wrong in the present." - Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett, Revelation for the Rest of Us Rev 2:1-29; John 17:13–19

An introduction to the context of the Book of Revelation by Professor Emeritus at Missio Seminary, Steve Taylor.

Rev 1:1-20

Ephesians 3:14-21, Psalm 103 “Dear friend, being the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit. I say this because, as soon as we catch a glimpse of this truth, we are put on a journey in search of the fullness of that truth and we will not rest until we can rest in that truth. From the moment we claim the truth of being the Beloved, we are faced with the call to become w...

Luke 14:15-24

John 15:1-11 / Isaiah 5:1-7 When we read Scripture in light of the resurrection, we understand Scripture as testimony to the life-giving power of God. The resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated miracle but a disclosure of God's purpose finally to subdue death and to embrace us within the life of the resurrection.... The God with whom we have to do is a God who wills life and wholeness for us. If...

Mark 7:24–30 You either come to the text with a view of what is and isn’t possible in the world, which won’t allow any fresh evidence - which is not, perhaps, the best way of approaching a book like John, which is all about the challenge of the gospel to all existing world-views - or you come with at least an open mind to new possibilities hitherto unimagined. This isn’t the same as being gullible...

Isaiah 55:10-13; Mark 4:1–20 With Christ as our true teacher, we are called to a lifelong journey of joint inquiry in which we seek to embody Scripture wisely and faithfully in Christian community. After all, even as we apprentice ourselves to Christ and to saintly exemplars before and around us, we are simultaneously called to live in such a way that others will want to apprentice themselves to u...