Sermon: Paul, God, and the Gospel (Pt. 3)

“Paul, God, and the Gospel” Pt. 3 Romans 1:1-7 June 7, 2015 You don’t need me to tell you this, but our world is changing. Rapidly. This week I read a sobering article entitled, “Stage Two Exile: Are You Ready for It?” The author’s premise was that over the past thirty years or so the […]

Sermon: Paul, God, and the Gospel (Pt. 2)

“Paul, God, and the Gospel” Pt. 2 Romans 1:1-7 May 24, 2015 A few years ago I saw a book in the bookstore and was curious about the title and book, Jesus, Life Coach, so I looked it up online and found this description from the editors: There was a time when only athletes had […]

Sermon: Paul, God, and the Gospel (Pt. 1)

“Paul, God, and the Gospel” Pt. 1 Romans 1:1-7 May 17, 2015 If you’ve ever had a young teen in the house, you know that teens don’t always want to listen. They believe that they have all the answers to life and that their parents are ill-equipped and to handle life because they have not […]

Sermon: God’s Gospel

“God’s Gospel” Romans May 10, 2015 I am rarely at a loss for words. Preachers usually have something to say about most everything. And my personality is that I generally have an opinion about everything, and I often want to express that opinion. I frequently have to force myself not to say something and too […]

Is your gospel too small?

A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all […]

Repentance and the grace of God

If we understand that no man will ever genuinely repent without the grace of God changing his heart, then we will not feel that we have to dilute the demands of the gospel. We will put our confidence in God. We will remember that, if God is displeased with us, He will not bless us. […]

The gospel message

Two weeks ago we were going to have an outreach meal at the church. As part of that event, we were going to show a video presentation of the gospel as a stimulant to conversation around the dinner table. Because of the ice storm, we canceled the meal, but the video was still made. I […]

The greatest privilege

William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying: If the greatest privileges that can be bestowed on an individual in this world are the forgiveness of sins, justification and reconciliation with God, adoption into his family and the assurance of eternal glory — then there is no more highly privileged duty, no more dignified position in the […]

What is salvation?

This post is part of a series of posts on the basics of systematic theology. Why do we need theology, and what are the essential truths to know about each doctrine? All the posts are archived under the category “Theology 101.” The gospel has always been debated. Its meaning has always been argued about and […]

Declaring the Gospel

We know that we are to communicate the gospel — to speak it, declare it, articulate it, and defend it. Yet many of us miss opportunities to speak the gospel, as this chart demonstrates: Part of the reason we don’t tell the gospel is because we don’t know the gospel well enough to say it […]

Keep the gospel complicated

Randy Newman argues that perhaps we have minimized and diminished the gospel in our attempts to simplify it. Perhaps we have distorted the richness and wonder of its complexities and transcendence and in doing so have kept unbelievers from seeing their need to fall in worship of God who is greater than their comprehension. Maybe […]

The nature of unbelief

A believer in Christ might assume that anyone who truly understands the nature of the gospel would want the gospel. “Why wouldn’t they believe?” we might wonder. Yet they don’t all believe. Even when we assume that they will and should, they do not believe. A clear, but often overlooked illustration of this is in […]

What’s your message?

A message. Every commercial has one. So does every television show, movie, book, and website. All sermons have them, and so does every conversation. Some messages are obviously better and more clear than others, but every form of communication is given to convey a message. This is true of gospel conversations as well. When we […]

Gospel power

One of the great paradoxes of the gospel in the life of the believer is that while he is always dying, yet he is also ever-living (2 Cor. 4:10). So Paul says the believer is (vv. 8-9) — afflicted, BUT not crushed perplexed, BUT not despairing persecuted, BUT not forsaken struck down, BUT not destroyed […]

Grab bag

Some helpful articles from the last week: Clint Archer writes about “Celebrating Singleness” over at Cripplegate. His posts coincide nicely with what I wrote a couple of weeks ago on the same topic (“Four reasons for the unmarried to consider singleness”). Does church history confuse and bore you? Nathan Busenitz provides some insight and a […]