Sermons

An epidemic has shaken relationships and lives alike, and a season drags on in which people cannot freely come to worship. Here, the sermon says, Christians must look honestly at themselves and ask whether they were ever truly people who felt their need of Christ and the gospel.

Paul was well aware that the believers in Rome already had faith, yet he earnestly longed to preach the gospel to them. Once people have attended church for many years and assume they already understand, their hearts grow hard and grace slips away. The gospel is a word that such people need to hear for themselves first, even before the world does.

Like Paul, who was not ashamed of the gospel, the faithful must live by their faith in Christ. Receiving Christ by believing, and seeing that faith grow until it shows in one’s life, are both part of the process of salvation. The sermon urges them to hold fast to an enduring faith that looks not to people or circumstances but to God alone.

Paul introduces himself as a slave of Jesus Christ. In Roman society, where slaves were not even regarded as human, this was a position he chose for himself: a place with no way of escape and no life of his own. What he proclaims is that the Messiah, foretold by the prophets over long ages, came from the line of David and rose from the dead. This is Christ, the heart of the gospel.

The law cannot save anyone. The more one strives to keep its 613 commandments, the more sin only piles up, and the blood of bulls and goats does not take sin away. Like a guardrail, the law is simply a warning that to leave this road is to die. Salvation is heeding that warning and believing in Christ, who is the safe way.

The names of those God has chosen have been written in the book of life since before the creation of the world. If God has called someone, he called that person because he needed them, so the called must look honestly at the life they are now living by their own free will. To remain in Christ whatever the temptation, as Paul did, is faith; it is obedience; it is salvation.

On the road to Damascus, Saul is surrounded by a powerful light and falls to the ground. A voice speaks from heaven: it is Jesus, the very one he is persecuting.

In that moment everything Saul had guarded comes crashing down. His standing as a Jew, his Roman citizenship, his learning in the law are no longer anything to boast of. The man who had counted Jesus a heretic and persecuted him now falls to his knees before the truth that this Jesus is the living God.

Paul’s was a life that laid aside the privileges of the world and was spent for the gospel. When the Jerusalem church was afraid of him, Barnabas stood up for him, and the man he raised up went on to proclaim Christ with all that was in him, to the very end. Grace he had received freely, he repaid with his life.

Those who believe in Jesus already have eternal life and do not come under judgment. People suppose that they will stand before the judgment seat only after death, yet salvation and judgment are already divided here in this world, according to whether a person hears the words of Jesus and believes.

The idea that salvation and reward must be earned by piling up outward worship and good deeds is a mistaken faith. Jesus has already accomplished everything; the table is fully spread. Whether a person treasures that pearl and takes it up, or tramples it underfoot, is simply each one’s own choice.

Because judgment rests not with God the Father but with Jesus Christ, those who believe need fear neither death nor Satan. Salvation asks nothing more than obedience to his word, as one looks to the cross and to the bronze serpent. Yet once saved, believers must go on in sanctification, growing into people who lean on God ever more.

Jesus told those bound by religious duty, “Do not be ones who go through the rituals.” Prayer offered to be seen by others, and the hypocrisy behind it, does nothing to bring a person closer to God. Instead, he told them to go into their room, shut the door, and pray honestly.

The Lord’s Prayer is not a form of words Jesus gave to be recited as it stands; it is a pattern for prayer. To ask that God’s name be hallowed is to ask that the atonement of the cross be accomplished. The very name Yahweh carries the meaning “behold the hand, behold the nail”, and the first letters of the four words on the sign above the cross spell out that name.

The order is to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and only then to ask for daily bread and the forgiveness of sins. Those who chase after money come to ruin, while those who pursue Jesus Christ find that money comes after them instead. Whether to be a servant of the world or a servant of Christ is a choice to be made every day.

After the feasts connected with the harvest comes the last feast, the Feast of Booths. The people build booths to remember the grace that kept their clothes and sandals from wearing out through forty years in the wilderness. With the joy of a finished year of farming, they store away their grain and fruit and eat and rejoice for seven days.

Every part of sowing and reaping happens not through human effort but only as God rules over the weather. The seventy bulls offered at the Feast of Booths carry the heart of God, who embraces even the Gentile nations as people he will save. The Pharisees tried to seize Jesus after this feast had fully ended, but before that, Jesus had already spoken of himself as the light of the world.

Bound by forms, people held on only to the picture of the Messiah they already knew and failed to recognize Jesus standing right in front of them. The hope this feast points to is that even if the tent of the body falls, there is an eternal house that God has built. Therefore the message ends with lifting up hands to bless Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.

As the Day of Atonement drew near, ten days were set aside for prayers of repentance, and on the day itself the whole people fasted and turned their thoughts to God alone. The high priest first confessed his own sins and those of his household; then lots were cast over two goats, one to be slain as an offering and the other to be sent out into the wilderness. So much hung on this single day — the forgiveness of the whole nation’s sins — that one misstep in the ritual could render the entire sacrifice void.

Bearing the sins of the people, the goat was led away to a cliff in the wilderness and fell from it. Yet this did not mean that sin had been wholly taken away; it had only been set aside for a time. That is why the same sacrifice had to be offered again year after year, and it was into that very place that Jesus Christ came, through a cross offered once for all.

The temple, the priest’s garments and the whole ritual were accepted not because anyone was holy, but because they were kept according to the Word. Whatever people do, they cannot make themselves holy; only the blood of Jesus Christ makes them clean, once and for all. To believe this, and to live in repentance day by day as one washes one’s hands and feet, is the life this feast sets before God’s people.

The Feast of Trumpets falls on the first day of the seventh month in the Jewish calendar and is Israel’s New Year. On this day a ram’s horn is blown to announce the beginning of the feast, and the people stop their work and keep a holy assembly all day long. The Jews believe the Messiah will come on this day and make ready for him, yet they hold that he has still not come.

The Feast of Trumpets points to both the beginning and the end of human history. When Jesus Christ returns at the sound of the trumpet, all people will be divided into sheep and goats, to the right hand and to the left. Whether he comes on that day as Judge or as Redeemer depends on how each person lives now, and no one can escape that day.

Going to church is not, in itself, grounds for feeling secure. God does not accept worship and offerings given without a sincere heart; what he desires is not outward form but the knowledge of God. To see and know the cross of Jesus Christ: that is eternal life, and that is salvation.

Jesus overturns the tables in the market of Annas. Pilgrims had raised their animals with great care, yet here those animals were turned away as blemished, and only the ones the traders themselves sold were allowed through. It was a place for wringing money out of the people.

Every room and every feast of the tabernacle is a shadow of Christ. The fire on the altar of burnt offering was never to go out, but Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorized fire and died in the very garments they wore. They had met God, yet they did not put away the habits of the world, and they treated the ordinances he had set as a light thing.

The temple can fall, and so can church offices and people. But Jesus Christ tore the veil at the cross, and so we now enter the Most Holy Place and walk with God. We are those justified by faith alone, with no works of our own. Our hope is that the worship and prayer we offer before God will be without the slightest deviation.

At Solomon’s Porch in Herod’s temple, Peter and John come upon a beggar at the temple gate. When the man will not stop asking for alms, Peter has him fix his eyes on them and tells him that, though he has no silver or gold, in the name of Jesus Christ he is to rise and walk. The man gets to his feet and, walking and leaping, goes into the temple praising God.

There and then Peter declares that this was not done by any power of his own but was the work of Jesus Christ. Peter had denied Jesus when his own life was at stake; only after witnessing the resurrection did that word become truly his, and so, whatever came to pass, he could give all the glory to God. In the Court of the Women within the same temple, Jesus tells those who have dragged in a woman caught in adultery that whoever is without sin should be the first to throw a stone, and before the treasury he teaches that giving to the poor is to be done in secret.

Every part of the temple points, in the end, to Christ. True faith does not sound a trumpet to win the approval of others; it stands before God alone, face to face. Because Jesus Christ is risen, we live, and it is by feeding on his word that we come to eternal life: this is the conclusion the sermon draws.

The temple Herod built was magnificent, yet when the Roman army took Jerusalem it was utterly destroyed and burned. The day it burned was the very day on which Rome itself would later fall.

This man set God’s name at the front of the temple he raised, but in truth he piled it up out of a craving for recognition. And so, though it took eighty years to build, it passed away in the end as a dead building. Jesus said of that temple that if it were torn down he would raise it again in three days, meaning that his own body was the true temple.

A temple that is only a building will fall, but we who have life because of Jesus Christ are ourselves the tabernacle where God dwells. Rather than losing heart and dwelling only on how much we fall short, we must believe that, whatever course the world takes, God already knows its history and is guiding it, and so live without fear.

From the story that the dust from which Adam was formed came from Mount Moriah, to the altars of Cain and Abel, Noah’s sacrifice and the place where Abraham offered up Isaac, everything is bound to this one mountain. David bought a threshing floor and so made the site ready, and his son Solomon built the temple upon it.

Just as Isaac carried the wood up the mountain, Jesus Christ bore the cross up to Calvary; and just as the ram took Isaac’s place, Jesus Christ died and rose again. The worth of a temple is not measured by its splendor or its size. Solomon’s temple, and Herod’s temple, built on a far grander scale, have meaning in the end only when a right meeting with God takes place there.

Uzzah’s death as the ark was being moved came from pressing ahead by human reasoning, without repentance, and David was not permitted to build the temple because of the blood he had shed. Even so, it was because of David’s faith that Solomon was able to raise it. The temple, in the end, is the person themselves; whatever befalls them, they do not fall when they search out their own sin before God and repent.