Redeemer Presbyterian Church Sermons
Meeting with God and grasping the grace he freely gives us changes our relationship to our money, possessions, and career. When we see that salvation cannot be earned or gained through hard work, we are freed from the idolatry of wealth. When we experience this freedom, we can give with spontaneity and joy.
The story of Noah and the flood is about second chances and new beginnings; God is ready to give us another chance. God calls us into three great relationships: with the earth, with all the people on earth, and with the Lord of the earth. God never calls anyone into a covenant relationship unless it is a saving relationship.
Genesis shows us the goodness of creation, the stewardship of creation, the fallenness of creation, and the final restoration of creation. The Bible calls us as Christians to be careful stewards of creation because nature reflects God’s goodness and because nature will ultimately be restored in heaven.
You can’t make sense from facts without using them to create a story, and you can’t make sense of a story without putting it in context of a macro-level worldview. All the stories we tell as Christians fall into the gospel worldview of creational good, fallenness, and redemption.
We all need a "burning bush" to disrupt our lives and explode our paradigms of God. As we encounter God we see he is both absolutely holy and loving. He speaks to us through Christ, who was consumed in the fire for us.
To find absolute freedom in life, we must admit that life on its own accord is meaningless. True meaning in life is only found through Jesus Christ, the designer of life.
The Apostle Paul examines the concept of grace and the reason why our lives must follow Christ's example. Only through God's grace and accepting Christ into our lives will we ever find true freedom and our true selves.
Haman, who plots to kill the Jews exiled in Persia, exemplifies pride and its downfalls. His pride manifests itself in self-absorption, an inability to learn from his mistakes, a progression into more serious forms of evil, and a blindness to his own pride. Pride is overcome by forgetting oneself and clothing oneself in the overwhelming praise of the Father through Christ.
The worship of the living God gives us peace and equilibrium to face the troubles of life. Worship engages our entire being in adoration and brings us to a sense of joy in God’s ravishing beauty.
Wise people are good at choosing, forging, and keeping friendships. The marks of a true friend are constancy, carefulness, candor, and counsel. When you are liberated to be the great friend you need to be by the great friendship of Jesus on the cross, then you will find yourself getting, paradoxically, all the friends your heart needs.