The Kingdom Perspective

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Sometimes we misunderstand the shorthand formula of our salvation, namely that we are “saved by faith.” The truth is we are not saved “by faith.” Rather we are saved by grace…on account of Christ…through faith. Faith is but the instrument that God uses to attach us to Himself and all His r...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Your faith in Christ is ultimately more determinative than your fears. Just because you are terrified when you ride in an airplane, doesn’t mean that you’ll fail to get to your destination. Your fear has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your objective safety or the certainty of your arr...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear is a very interesting emotion. Unlike other emotions it actually grows larger the farther we run from it, but smaller the closer we move towards it. But how are we as believers to move towards our fear? Well, we must do so with faith in the God who is bigger than any of our fears. Lis...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear is a mutually exclusive principle. To the degree that you fear one thing, to that same degree you tend not to fear another. In other words, you may be fearful of being late for an important appointment, but you are more fearful of getting a ticket. And so, you don’t speed…or at least...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. As modern Western people, we tend to define freedom as the ability to do what we please—what is right in our own eyes. However, I’d like to suggest that true freedom is not as easy as getting what we want. Sometimes what we want is not good for us—even destructive. Anyone who has ever deal...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The early church was distinctive for many reasons, but one of the most powerful was the quality of loving community found in it. Tertullian, the 3rd century church leader, wrote a number of works defending the gospel in the face of persecution (see, To the Gentiles and Apology). In one of...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. We tend to be fearful of difficult circumstances and trouble. It has been my experience that underneath this fear is not merely a revulsion to hard things, but a faulty belief system that equates suffering/pain with God’s lack of care or concern. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tr...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Remember that great line from that classic 1980’s film The Princess Bride? “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Now, we can be assured that the Bible is not trying to sell you something. It is “straight up.” It tells us that fear, pain and suffering a...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear is a controlling principle. Its tactical maneuver is to dominate. And the greater the fear, the greater the ability to dominate. It does this by promising us safety and security. It tells us that if we can just control our lives tightly enough, then we can be assured that we will be s...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear is a very powerful and controlling emotion. It is for this reason that many use fear to control others. For example, if an advertiser can make people fearful, they can drive them to purchase their product. “You don’t want to be rejected by your friends for your bad breath, do you? The...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The idea of “fearing God” seems not only unpalatable to us as modern people, but also wrong. We object: “We shouldn’t fear anyone! We should be motivated by love, not fear, especially when it comes to God!” Well, this may sound pious and nice, but it is actually very shallow and misguided....

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. For us as modern-day thinkers, one of strangest commands in the Bible is the command to “fear the Lord”. Everywhere in Scripture the fear of God is presented as the very foundation of true religion—the very beginning of wisdom and knowledge (Proverbs 9:10 and 1:7). But what does this mean?...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. What do you fear? What are you afraid of? Fear is a very controlling emotion. But the goodness or badness of any given fear is not so much the fear itself but the object of that fear. It all depends on what is driving your fear. In one sense fear cannot be avoided. Life is a trade-off of f...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Old Testament book of Judges has some of the ugliest stories in all the Bible. Why is this the case? Well, the book of Judges chronicles the cycle of sin, enslavement and salvation that the children of Israel went through, over and over again, as they first entered the Promised Land. G...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Representative John Lewis was a legend in his own time and one of the most important civil rights leaders of ours. As a young man, he led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group responsible for organizing the numerous student-led sit-ins against racially segregation. At ju...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. At our cultural moment we are in desperate need of optimism, and there is no better place to turn for that than Christianity. Christianity is an optimistic religion. Now, don’t get me wrong. Classical Christianity addresses evil head on. It does not tip toe around the ugliness of sin, the...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. In the midst of the Nazi crisis, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “A pessimist sees calamity in every opportunity, but an optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity.” Though Churchill was the leader of a country that overtly proclaimed itself “Christian”, Churchill hi...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. We were made by God and for God. Therefore, our souls are slaves to the degree that we live for anything other than Him. To the degree that our souls are centered around and driven by anything other than our Maker, to that degree we are imprisoned—barred from fulfilling our destiny and del...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible tells us that true freedom is the ability to love God and obey His law. This only makes sense. If we were made by God and for God, then we are free only to the degree that we are in union with God and His will for us. This is the reason why, even when we are controlled by our des...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. As Americans we love our freedom. However, ill-defined freedom can lead us to a very insidious form of slavery. What do I mean? As Americans, we tend to define freedom as the ability to do whatever we want. However, this pits God’s law against my liberty. This makes no sense! God, as our C...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. Science is God’s gift to humanity. It is a particular form of knowledge that is intuitive to us as those made in the image of God. That’s why, historically, modern science blossomed in a context suffused with a Christian imagination—a context where it was acknowledged that we live in an or...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. Classical Christianity provides the foundational building blocks for scientific investigation. On the one hand it acknowledges that there is such a thing as truth. We live in an orderly universe created by an orderly God, and so can know certain things about our world. But on the other han...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome the Kingdom Perspective. Science, by its very nature, is reasonably skeptical. It always considers any claim to knowledge with a “can-you-prove-it” attitude. It doesn’t just accept what we know; it wants to verify how we know what we know. It is driven by a posture of skepticism. But it is a reasonable skepticism. It...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome the Kingdom Perspective. Increasingly, many from all different persuasions are tempted to become mere critics and complainers—trying to find fault and pin blame. However, this is not the roadmap the gospel gives. Jesus’s way is not that of finger pointing or trying to score cheap political points. Rather, Jesus calls...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. The Bible suggests to us that one of the practical ways we can fulfill the biblical command to love our neighbor is through the practice of good science. Science comes from an old Latin term for knowledge. Biblically speaking, science is a good and true thing because we live in an orderly...