Sermons

As Mark watches Peter die a martyr’s death, he resolves that the ministry of Jesus must be written down. The Gospel he left behind is the story of the Son of God, who came in the form of a servant, served, and gave his own life as a ransom. John the Baptist proclaims a baptism of repentance at the Jordan River, and even among those who came out to be baptized were Pharisees who said they had nothing to repent of.

The phrase “the beginning of the Good News” means that all the law and sacrifices of the Old Testament came to an end at the cross of Jesus, and a new age began. Water baptism is confessing one’s faith within the church community. Baptism with the Holy Spirit is meeting God personally through grace that he gives on his own initiative. If a person’s words and actions do not change even after baptism, that person cannot be said to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Mark records that on the night Jesus was arrested, someone ran away in fear, though Scripture does not say for certain that this person was Mark. Mark later grew in faith, falling and getting up again and again, and he preached the gospel, filling the place Peter and Paul had left. Faith takes a different amount of time to grow in each person, so the church must wait in love for a brother who is weak.

The disciples ask Jesus how they ought to pray, and he answers them with the Lord’s Prayer. His instruction to ask for the forgiveness of sins is more than a call to repent of moral wrongs; it is a call to restore a relationship with God that has been broken.

Adam’s sin in eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil lay not in the fruit itself but in setting himself up as the judge of good and evil, and so overturning the order God had made. Jesus healed this rift by shedding his blood on the cross. When he died, the curtain of the sanctuary was torn, and a way was opened for anyone to come directly to God. As Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus visits his disciples on the day of his resurrection, that is, every Lord’s Day, and says to them, “Peace be with you.”

The Lord’s Day is not time to be filled out of habit. It is time in which each person’s relationship with God is restored, one to one. When the whole heart is given to praise and to the Word, the wounded spirit is healed and strength is found for the six days ahead. God’s people must therefore be those who enjoy peace and freedom with the risen Lord.

His brothers’ jealousy sold Joseph into slavery, and his refusal of Potiphar’s wife’s advances landed him in prison. There he met Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer, who later brought him before the king. After interpreting the dream, Joseph became governor over Egypt.

The hardships Joseph endured were no accident. Through them God was carrying out his plan to fulfill the promise he had made to Abraham. Joseph neither complained nor sought revenge. Instead, he comforted the very brothers who had sold him and told them not to be distressed. Such obedience and self-sacrifice point ahead to Christ, who gave himself up for us.

Laying aside worldly desires and stubbornness to obey God’s will may look like suffering, yet at the end of that road God has prepared protection and blessing. Christ’s sacrifice now lets the faithful stand without blemish, and they must hold that grace dear, as one guards every drop of water in the desert.

In the church, the false teachers seemed outwardly to be preaching the truth, yet in reality they were servants of Satan. When two servants went to draw water, one idled along with a small pail while the other labored to fill a large one. The master did not need to watch them: the water standing in the jar told him the difference.

The difference between those who have the Spirit and those who do not is the difference between those who overcome their nature and those who live according to it. Salvation rests on faith in Christ, but what follows is a good conscience and an earnest effort to live by the Word, and God judges by the whole of that life. Since he does not weigh sins as great or small, even a single evil choice is already a turning away from his good law.

A brother who doubts is not to be judged but shown mercy and embraced. Where faith has become hypocrisy, one must rise resolutely from that place and cast sin aside; only then does one come under Christ’s protection. The faithful need to build themselves up on their most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit, making the love of God known.

Jude warns that false teachers are leading the faithful astray by denying the humanity of Christ. He then reminds his readers that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, had long ago prophesied the return of Christ and the judgment of the ungodly.

Enoch walked with God for three hundred years and was taken up into heaven alive, without seeing death. Only when this is believed can what he proclaimed about Jesus also be believed: the atonement, the resurrection, the ascension and the second coming. Enoch’s faith, received from Adam, was handed down to Methuselah and to Noah, and it laid the foundation for Noah’s immediate obedience when the judgment of the flood was at hand.

Every word the ungodly have spoken and every deed they have done is recorded in full, to be brought before the judgment seat on the last day. But just as every prophecy written in Scripture has come to pass exactly as foretold, so the return of Christ and the judgment of the world will certainly come. Christians must therefore live with a pure and upright faith, boldly proclaiming that day.

Love and care are growing cold in the world, and more and more people live by instinct alone, like unreasoning animals. A soul that has lost God’s protection finds no place of rest and drifts through life like a wandering star.

This is Satan’s attempt to divide people from God. Cain, unable to give thanks to God, killed his brother out of jealousy; Balaam, unwilling to let go of his greed, prayed again and again against the will of God; and Korah, dissatisfied with his own place, challenged the authority of Moses. All three knew God at the beginning, yet each gave way before greed and pride.

False teachers follow this path of rebellion, stirring up trouble among the faithful without any sense of guilt. Yet God’s people are beautiful stars that reflect the light of Christ, and they must lead to him those who carry heavy burdens and have nowhere to turn. Looking beyond this passing world to the eternal Kingdom, they need to stay rooted in Christ to the very end.

Though God commands him to go to Egypt, Moses cannot bring himself to obey. Even after witnessing miracle upon miracle, he keeps refusing on the grounds that he is slow of speech, until at last his elder brother Aaron is appointed to speak for him in his place.

Aaron himself worked as many miracles as Moses and bore a great share of the work, yet because he stood beside so great a figure as Moses, what he accomplished was never much noticed. Even so, he did not push himself forward, but served his younger brother as the leader God had raised up. The fallen angel, by contrast, came to take for granted the position God had given him, abandoned it and grew proud; and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah likewise forsook the order God had established and came under judgment.

To keep the place God has appointed is humility; to leave it is pride. Because Aaron obeyed and served, he became high priest, and the blessing reached even his descendants. Holding fast to the position God has given and pressing on toward the Kingdom of God is the road his people must travel.

Even after they had been set free from Egypt, the Israelites grumbled against God and Moses at the first sign of hardship, saying they would rather go back to Egypt. They listened to the bad report of the ten spies and lost heart on the very edge of Canaan, and the descendants of Korah, reaching for the place that belonged to Moses, fell under judgment.

This is where people end up when they forget the grace of God. They had seen the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea with their own eyes, yet when trouble came they let all of it slip from memory and fell back on human reasoning. Joshua and Caleb, by contrast, held fast to the word that God had already given them the land, and they were not afraid.

Knowing the Bible is not the same as having faith. Christians must remember the word they know and live it out, and only those who do not forget grace and endure to the end will receive what God has prepared.

Jude introduces himself as a servant of Christ and urges the faithful, too, to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to them. Those who have tasted grace and then fallen away, he says, find it hard to be brought back to repentance, and he cautions the church against people who have slipped in unnoticed, turning grace into a pretext for immorality and leading others to deny Christ.

When Christians stumble, it is not because Satan is strong but because they have yielded to temptation themselves, and that is why turning back does not come easily. God sends rain on everyone alike, yet the heart that receives that grace may become good soil and bear fruit, or it may become a field overrun with thorns and thistles through greed and lust. The words of false teachers are like springs without water: plausible at first, they only deepen the thirst and in reality satisfy nothing.

The faithful must fight for their salvation even to the point of shedding blood, and the opponent in that fight may be their own idle self, or it may be Satan. Satan does not withdraw after a single defeat but presses into every unguarded moment, so the more a heart has repented, the more watchful it must remain in the Word. Since the God who rules over Satan is our Father, abiding in Christ and overcoming sin through upright living is what it looks like for God’s people to wait for the Lord’s return.

Jesus’ brothers press him to go up to the feast and show what he can do. They hoped he would make a name for himself where the crowds gathered for the Feast of Tabernacles, yet Jesus gave signs not for his own reputation but as the Messiah. Jude was one of those brothers, and only after he had witnessed the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was he convinced that his elder brother was the Christ.

That even his own brothers did not believe at first shows that preaching the gospel does not make people believe straight away. Only after the Samaritan woman had truly met Jesus did she run to tell others; the townspeople came because of what she said, but in the end they heard him with their own ears and came to faith for themselves. The one who shares the gospel is not answerable for the outcome; it is the hearer who weighs it and decides.

Jude writes his letter introducing himself as a servant of Jesus Christ. Christians are not to blend in with the world but must keep their white robes holy, and if they are not seen living by the word they proclaim, even Christ is held up to ridicule. Since God first welcomed us, we must live in a way worthy of that love, holding fast to our faith to the end.

In their suffering the Israelites cried out to God, yet once life grew comfortable they returned to empty ritual and offered blemished sacrifices. Such worship could never win forgiveness of sin, and so God sent Jesus as the sacrifice of atonement.

Malachi pointed to John the Baptist as the last prophet, the one who would announce Jesus at his first coming, and John rebuked a merely outward religion and called the people to repentance. Anyone who hears that gospel and still wavers between God and the world is like the Israelites who would not make up their minds when Elijah stood before them. Faith must be like the animals that part the hoof and chew the cud: drawing a clear line between good and evil, and continually searching the Word.

For God’s people who fear Christ, the sun of righteousness rises with healing in its rays, and they know true freedom, like calves let loose from the stall. Because Jesus’ coming into the world is itself the fulfillment of judgment and salvation, those who do not believe in Christ now will have no further opportunity. The faithful who hold fast to the end will share in the marriage supper of the Lamb, while the unbelieving world will face judgment in the fire of wrath.

Even after the prophet had rebuked them, the people of Israel did not repent; instead they mocked God. They insisted that the wicked could prosper and never be punished. Yet there were also the righteous, who feared the Lord, and every word they spoke and every resolve they made was recorded in full in the book of remembrance that lies before God.

Daniel saw a vision of many books opened before the judgment seat, and later the disciple John saw the dead judged according to their deeds, as it was written in those books. The sins of the wicked and the good deeds of the righteous roll on together like two wheels, but when the day of judgment comes they part ways: the one into the arms of Christ, the other into judgment. Only a faith accompanied by works is inscribed in the book of remembrance, as Abraham’s was when he obeyed even to the point of offering up his son.

Christians must not suppose that heaven and judgment are unreal simply because they cannot be seen. Those who hold fast to their faith to the end, whatever persecution and tribulation may come, will share in the first resurrection and reign with Christ for a thousand years. They must repent of their sins while the opportunity remains and live honestly in the truth if they are to receive eternal blessing.