All the Sermons

1 Cor. 10:1-13 How many of you parents out there wish your kids could learn from your mistakes? How many of us today are really trying right now to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors which is what Paul is offering to us and hoping to help us accomplish? In today’s message, part of our series in 1 Corinthians exploring life in the Spirit, Paul is sharing some illustrations from the ancient past. And his point is, what happened to them can happen to us. Paul showed that just because a throng of millions was on the journey from Egypt to Canaan, that doesn’t mean they were all believers in the mission or cause for which God had called them out of Egypt. In the first part of our text, Paul emphasizes that yes, these were the called out people of God. They all experienced several blessings of God’s grace. These four verses clarify that the Israelites that left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years were saved. They had observed Passover, which was an act of faith,...

Reading: 1 Cor. 9:19-27 How often is the accusation hurled at us, “Practice what you preach?” Well Paul seems to practice what he preaches. In Phil. 2 he preaches that our attitude should be like Christ, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing.” So Paul only wants to put into practice exactly what Jesus did. Jesus is definitely free and belongs to no one. In fact he is the creator and owner of all. Yet Jesus made himself as a slave and did it all for the sake of the gospel. Jesus did everything he did in order to win the lost and that is what motivates Paul also. In Paul’s day it was the different cultures of Judaism and paganism. He could relate to either crowd. He could look like a good Jew because he was born, raised and trained as a Jew. He used to be a top notch Pharisee so he knew their Scriptures very well and used them to prove that Jesus is their Messiah. He was so go...

Read 1 Cor. 8:6-13 Today we will be eating and drinking in Church. It is Communion Sunday, the Lord’s Supper, a meal in which we commemorate Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice to the one true God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. But Paul says, “Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.” The fact is that in the Corinthian culture and city, all the butcher shops and restaurants were connected with the various idols of pagan worship. So in Corinth it was nearly impossible to get fresh meat that had not been offered to a pagan god or prayed over by a pagan priest. For Paul, you could even include the Jewish synagogue and kosher food since they usually didn’t acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and that resulted in them worshipping...

Psalm 33:10-20 Who wants to be blessed? Don’t we all? Is there anybody here who does not want to be blessed? Excuse me, ah-ah-choo! (God bless you.) Thank you. That was a fake sneeze, but I like being blessed. Do you feel blessed today, or are you having too many problems to feel blessed?   Psalm 33 teaches us about God’s blessings. God wants to pour out his blessings. He is a generous and loving God. Listen to Eph. 1:3-8, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he ...