The Church and Body Life: The Lord's Supper

Welcome! He is Risen! (He is risen indeed!) Today we celebrate the resurrection of Christ. There is no greater miracle, no more important event (perhaps other than Creation) in the entire Bible. The resurrection of Christ is the foundation of our faith. Because Jesus rose from the dead, we know that we can trust everything He ever said, that through believing and trusting personally in Him, we can be forgiven of our sins and have eternal life.

I have recently been looking into wills and trusts for our family. We have a will, but we have not updated it in many years, and there have been many changes to our family and our possessions since then; as a result, we are long overdue in going back and, really, starting over, asking the big questions about what we want to happen when one or both of us is gone.  As I have thought about this personally, I have been surprised by the intensity of the emotions I feel specifically in wanting things to be arranged as much as possible for Mimi if I should precede her in passing on to the “better country” as C.S. Lewis puts it. I can imagine the stresses of having to deal with all the accounts, government agencies, decisions, and so on, on top of the stresses of the loss itself, and I greatly desire to ease things, to set things into place in advance, as much as I can while I still can. The thought of not being there for Mimi to help her brings on unique emotions, emotions I find hard to even name.

This has made me think of Jesus. He loved His disciples and friends (and by extension, us) infinitely more than I could ever love my wife or children. But He too thought about leaving them behind. Everything comes to a head at the last supper. I want to go through some of the account of it starting at John 13:1.

The Church and Body Life: Baptism

Good morning and welcome!  We’re now in a new phase of our Sound Doctrine series.  Let’s look at the overall sections.  We began the series back in the fall covering topics like the Bible as our authority about the things of God.  We moved on to talk about what the Bible says about things like God’s Nature, His Creation, us, humanity as the pinnacle of His Creation, Jesus and what He has accomplished for us.  Our previous segment looked at the affect that our salvation in Jesus has on us in several topics on Redemption.   As evidenced by the number of sermons devoted to the topic, the heart of this series on doctrine is Jesus, and what He accomplished for us when we are redeemed through faith in Him.

Now, we are in the section on the church and body life.  Tim taught last week on the true church.  He mentioned how our church is part of an association of churches.  This association is called Great Commission Churches.  We are connected to other churches through this association, and it is organized regionally.  There is a high degree of autonomy or independence in the Great Commission Churches.  One way that we have independence is in how we choose what series we teach on whether topical or expositional (that is from a book of the Bible).

The Church and Body Life: The True Church

What do you think of when you picture a “church”? Do you think of a tidy, white building with stained glass windows and a steeple? Or do you think of something grander, like a cathedral? We tend to associate “church” with a building, in a certain location. But the building itself really has no significance. “The true church” must refer to more than a building. Some churches don’t even have buildings. Or they have very ordinary buildings. Our church building here, for instance, is nothing special. It wasn’t even built as a church originally.

Redemption: Death, Resurrection, and In Between

We are in the heart of our series on Sound Doctrine.  If you’re new to the series, you may be wondering why are we talking about doctrine?  Or where are we in the journey?  Or maybe even, what is doctrine?

The word doctrine comes from Latin roots and means “teaching”.  In the context of Christianity, a doctrine is a teaching of what the Bible has to say about a particular topic.

The title of the series alludes to Titus 2:1, which says,

You, however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine.  Titus 2:1

The “however” comes from warnings Paul wrote to Titus in chapter 1.  People inside the church were teaching unsound doctrine, and it was having strongly negative effects on the church.  This kind of thing happens still to this day.