The Kingdom Perspective

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective!   Have you ever considered that the act of public worship is a political act? No! Not a partisan political act in the way our division-prone society sees it, but a political act, nonetheless. What is the outrageously bold political act that we partake in every Sunday? Well, we gather, publicly, and...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear wants to control us, so that we are unable to obey God and love others. Therefore, fear must be confronted. The only way you can defeat fear is to fight it. You must push against it. We all want safety and security. However, this is not a safe world. The truth is that God doesn’t promise safet...

Transcript: Hello. This is Pastor Don Willeman Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Does it really matter whether we know God or not? Does it really matter whether we have an accurate understanding of Him and have a true and genuine relationship with Him? Isn’t it good enough to just try hard to be a “good person”? Is it enough to just be “nice” and “sincere”? It doesn’t r...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don 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 riches fo...

Transcript: Hello. This is Pastor Don Willeman of Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   If a stranger were to approach you on the street and ask you to describe yourself, what would you say? What is the most important thing about you? What is your most defining characteristic?   Well, the late author and pastor A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) suggested that the most important thing about a...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Fear is a very powerful and controlling emotion. That’s why 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 bad breath, do you? Then, use our mouth wash and you’ll have nothing to fear.” The mob u...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. Death and disease are unavoidable in this fallen world. And whether we like it or not, they are a stark reminder of both our frailty and the frivolity of our way of life. The difficult reality of death can drive us to anxiety—for our health, our well-being, our loved ones, our way of life…...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. In His famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that the church is to be a “city on a hill” (Matthew 5:14). By this He means that we are to be a new social arrangement visible for all the world to see—a community of redemption in an otherwise rancorous culture (Philippians 2:14). The chu...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don 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 the 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? How...

Transcript: Fear is a controlling principle. Its tactical maneuver is to intimidate and then 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 control our lives tightly enough, then we can be assured we will be safe and sound. We will finally have the life we “need” and “deserve”, with “nothing to f...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Nobody likes someone who boasts. We’ve all been at that dinner party where one of the other guests can’t stop talking about themselves and all their accomplishments. What a bore! Yet, if the truth were known we’re all private boasters in some way. It may be our good looks. Maybe it’s our...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. What do you fear? What are you afraid of? Fear is a very controlling emotion. And the goodness of or badness of any given fear is not so much the fear itself but the object of that fear. What are you afraid of? Fear cannot be avoided. Life is a trade-off of fears. This is why two of the most common...

Transcript: Hello. This is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   Have you ever heard that old expression: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, there is a mountain of spiritual truth in this little pebble of worldly wisdom. Absolutely nothing is more important in life than knowing the One who made you. Of all the relationships in your lif...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Is fear good or bad? Well, that just depends on the context. The question is not so much whether we fear, but what drives our fears; and whether any given fear is appropriate to its object. A person that is deathly afraid of being struck by lightning, so much so that he hides out in his basement wh...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. We are easily tempted to both judge others and live under the judgment of others. This dynamic is toxic both to our souls and to our relationships. However, in the gospel, we are called to live under God’s assessment of us, and not set ourselves or others up as the judge. The theologian Dietrich Bo...

Transcript: Hello. This is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective.   “Life stinks and then you die,” so says a very cynical bumper sticker I saw one time. It makes me ask the question: Why is life in the modern world characterized by such hopelessness and meaninglessness? Does life have a purpose, and if so, what is it?   A statement by some Christians fr...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. What drives our sinful pride and inability to humble ourselves before God and others? The Bible suggests that what drives our sinful pride is worry. We are anxious for our lives and so we worry. And in worrying we are implicitly worshipping ourselves. This is the very opposite of humility....

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The scandal of the gospel is that it’s for the burn out, drop out and left out. It is not a gospel for those that deserve it but precisely for those who don’t. Why? Well, the gospel is not about our achievement but about God’s acceptance. It is not about our performance but Jesus’s perform...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Living in a pluralistic society is not foreign to the New Testament. The Church was born in such a context. And so, it is not surprising then when the Bible gives us instructions for how to live as followers of Christ in such a context. What are we to do when our values and belief are so misunderst...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. How exactly does the Gospel make us into the kind of people that seek the good of our neighbors instead of the narrowness of our own interests? Why is it that the Gospel drives us to be considerate of our unbelieving neighbors, even when they might not be considerate of our values and beliefs? Well...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Titus was a young pastor that the Apostle Paul had stationed on the First century island of Crete. Crete was a place of many challenges because of the unsavoriness of its public life. The people of Crete were known for their self-indulgence, arrogance and deception. Paul cites one of the Cretan wri...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. After Jesus and His apostles, St. Augustine was arguably the intellectual and theological giant of the first thousand years of the church. Augustine was converted to Christ in the late 300s, within just a few years of Rome becoming officially Christian. Then, like now, there was much misunderstandi...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Spiritual despair is a terrible thing. It can settle upon us like a dark cloud, obscuring our vision and leaving us feeling like a failure of a Christian. The accusations of the devil flood our conscience, and it feels like there is no way of escape. What should we do? The great Martin Luther gives...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. We sometimes have a thin and petty understanding of sin. But sin is anything but thin and petty. The 5th century Christian leader Augustine (354-430) along with the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) used a Latin phrase to explain the profoundly problematic nature of sin. They c...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Truth is absolutely critical to any functioning society. Once lies become the public and political norm, then society becomes a game of thrones. It is power bloc vs. power bloc. Cynicism rules. Truth is DOA. So, what’s the answer? Well, the answer cannot be more political power—merely more...