Divisions Among You

1 Corinthians 1:10-17

Last week, we started this new series on I Corinthians, a rather lengthy letter to the church at Corinth.  I was surprised to find it’s actually a few words longer than the book of Romans.  It’s just shy of 9500 words.  That’s about twice as many words as I’m likely to say in this message.  If we read straight through it out loud, it’d take us about an hour and a half to do it.

The basis of this letter is Paul’s heart-felt and deeply personal concern for the Corinth church as a pastor.  When I say concern for the church, I mean concern for the people of the church because that is what a church is.  A church is the people, not the building.  It is the ones whom God has chosen, His ekklesia.

Introduction/Enriched in Every Way

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Welcome! Today we begin a new series on the first 12 chapters of II Corinthians. We will return, God willing, to the rest of II Corinthians early next year. What, you think I said something wrong? Well, not entirely. In Chapter 5 and Verse 9 of this book, Paul writes, “I wrote to you in my letter…” That is, the book we call I Corinthians is not the first thing Paul wrote to the people of Corinth. In fact, Bible scholars think there are actually at least four letters to Corinth. But so as to not confuse you any longer, I will refer to this letter as everyone else does and from here on call this I Corinthians.

The Future: New Heavens and New Earth

Last week, John Farmer covered the doctrine of judgment. This week, we will finish our series on church doctrine by discussing the doctrine of the “New Heavens and New Earth.”  We will examine the Scriptures to see what the Lord has to say about the New Heavens and the New Earth and more specifically the New Jerusalem.

What is heaven?  Heaven is a place, not just a state of mind. Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Our Father who art in heaven.”  Luke records in his gospel:

“When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” --Luke 24:50-52

The Future: Judgment

Good morning!  We’re closing in on the end of our long running series on Sound Doctrine.  In fact, there is just one more message next week about the New Heavens and New Earth.  Today, we are going to talk about the Final Judgment.

We’ll look at the Scriptural evidence of this coming event, its timing, who will be judged and how, and we’ll talk about why judgement is necessary and God’s justice.  We’ll look at the application of these truths in our lives today.  And we will briefly talk about hell, the doctrine of eternal punishment.

So, what does the Bible say?  Revelation 20 describes not only the millennium we talked about last week, but also the release of Satan and the great battle leading to the defeat of Satan forever.  At this point we read about the judgment:

The Future: Tribulation and Millenium

Of all the topics that we have covered our series here on doctrine these two, the tribulation and the millennium, are without a doubt the ones that historically have generated the most diverse range of interpretations and opinions. In this context, “tribulation” refers to the Great Tribulation, a time of great trouble and distress described by Jesus in what is called his Olivet Discourse in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. A “great tribulation” is also referred to in Revelation. Some interpreters also claim a connection with the “seventy weeks” mentioned in Daniel 9 and with various other passages mentioning God’s judgment on the earth.

The “millennium” refers to one thousand years of Christ’s reign on earth, mentioned specifically only in Revelation 20, though, here again, some interpreters read it into other passages. So we can certainly agree that these two topics are Biblical and that at some point in history they will happen (or have happened or are happening, according to some). However, what they will look like and how they will fit together with other events prophesied in the Bible is not explicit. Should these passages be taken literally or figuratively? Can we say with certainty how long each event will last? More importantly, why should we care about them? What is the significance of the tribulation and the millennium?

The Future: The Return of Christ

Welcome! Today we begin the final section of our series on doctrine, focusing over the next four weeks on the future. As we have gone through our series, we have seen again and again that there are some things that are quite clear and uncontroversial, things that are presented quite clearly and explicitly in Scripture, but there are also other areas, other questions, other topics, that are quite the opposite. As we move to begin to discuss future events, it should be obvious that we are moving into areas where there is a lot of uncertainty. Next week Tim has the unenviable task of discussing the great tribulation and the millennium, some of the most uncertain topics of all. The following week John Farmer will talk about the great judgement, and then Fred will close out our series by talking about the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Who knows what the acronym TEOTWAWKI stands for? TEOTWAWKI stands for the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. Survivalists use this and many other interesting terms. They try to plan for how to survive a civilization-altering event such as nuclear war, a severe disease that wipes out half the population, a complete breakdown of our economic system, an electromagnetic pulse from a weapon or from the sun that destroys electronics and our power grid, a severe natural disaster such as a comet or large asteroid hitting the earth or a super-volcano eruption that leads to something like a nuclear winter, zombies, or the election of Donald Trump as president. I’m kidding on the last two. See if you can guess what some of these other acronyms stand for:

The Church and Body Life: Sound Doctrine

You are unique, just like everyone else.  I’m especially “unique.”  I think Miriam is amazed at my “uniqueness.”  I think I probably ooze “uniqueness.”  For example, I have a special gift of remembering people’s email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers.  I’ve sent prayer letters to friends and family for many years.  I can remember a lot of their addresses.  When I run into a student on campus that I’ve forgotten to send an email to I’ll say, “Is your email firemonsterbreathingbunny45678@gmail.com?”  They look at me with an astonished look.  I know they must be thinking that I’m very “special.”  Or they’re thinking that I’m a stalker.  Miriam will say to me, “How do you do that?”  It’s a gift.  Now, I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast this morning or what I wore yesterday but I can remember all that other stuff.  Go figure.

While there are some special abilities we have that God created us with, there are also spiritual gifts that God gives to individuals after they become Christians.  The ability to read well, retain details, perform math problems, or any other mental or physical strength is something God usually gives a person from birth (although that doesn’t mean that God is limited in giving such abilities to a person later on in life, like when He heals a disease or some kind of physical weakness).  On the other hand, the spiritual gifts that God gives are given for the sake of edifying other believers, progressing the Gospel, and glorifying God.  I’ll talk more in a little bit about the details of some these gifts, but first, I would like to show how the Spirit has been working through people throughout the whole Bible.

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.