God's Creation: God's Works

Praise the Lord. I will extol the Lord with all my heart in the council of the upright and in the assembly. Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them. Glorious and majestic are His deeds, and His righteousness endures forever. He has caused His wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate. He provides food for those who fear Him; He remembers His covenant forever. – Psalm 111:1-5

He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations. The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy. They are established for ever and ever, enacted in faithfulness and uprightness. He provided redemption for His people; he ordained His covenant forever—holy and awesome is His name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow His precepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise. – Psalm 111:6-10

Welcome! Today we continue our series called Sound Doctrine and look at God’s works. Obviously this is quite a huge topic. I think we can broadly classify God’s works into three categories: God’s works of creation, God’s work of upholding His creation, and God’s works in dealing with man and creation, most notably His work of redemption accomplished through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We could spend forever on these topics, and we will talk about redemption in detail later in this series. For this reason, I am going to primarily focus on the first of these topics, God’s works of creation.  I will also touch on the second topic, God’s work of upholding His creation, although we will really deal with it more next week when we talk about God’s sovereignty.

God's Nature: Threeness in Oneness

Aloneness.  I can’t imagine anyone who’s never dealt with aloneness.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, married or single, a teenager or elderly.  It’s one of the things we all have in common.

When I was a teenager I felt really alone.  I went to school, worked each week at an assisted living facility, ran a small lawn care business, worked around our family’s farm, spent time with my family, and went fishing, hunting, and camping, mostly by myself.  As I did all these things I had a nagging feeling, just wishing some guy from the church would just call me and spend some time with me.  

After a while, I did invite myself into a friendship with a couple guys in the church. We began to spend time with each other outside of the Thursday night men’s prayer meeting.  On Monday nights we spent time building unity through a very time honored tradition in the mountains of North Carolina. We watched the completely real sport of professional wrestling.  Some of you might call it “wrestling” but it is more accurately pronounced “wrastling.”  It may have seem silly from the outside looking in but it was important to me.

Throughout the whole Bible we see that God has provided solutions to this need that all of us have.  He’s provided a relationship with Him, a relationship with others in the church, marriage, and friendships in general.  But a friendship with God is foundational to all the other relationships.  In 1 John 1:3-4 it says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”  God is giving us an invitation to be in fellowship with Himself and with the other believers.

God's Nature: Like Us

 

How many of you were excited when you saw that we would be doing a series on doctrine? To some people, doctrine sounds like a boring and impractical subject – the kind of thing that theologians sit around and debate academically. However, as Carl said at the beginning, it ought to be intensely practical and indeed vital to our Christian life: What do we actually believe and why? And what difference should it make to the way we live our lives day by day? How do we apply what the Bible teaches us? And how do we answer people who question our core beliefs?

So I actually love talking about doctrine. It can be a controversial subject, as you probably know. Devout and well-meaning believers have disagreed over several points of doctrine that are not clearly explained in the Bible. But these are not central to our understanding of who God is, what salvation means, and how we should live as followers of Jesus. We don’t need to be afraid of the areas where true Christians disagree. I really like the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.” 

The Bible: Living By God's Word

Welcome! Today we look at a tremendously important topic: what it means to live by God’s Word, the Bible. Because this is part of our series called Sound Doctrine, I want to start by talking about what theologians call the necessity and sufficiency of Scripture, and then we will talk about some practical principles and steps towards growing in the process of living by God’s Word.

So let’s start with the necessity of Scripture. In what sense is Scripture “necessary”? What does this mean? Well, one sense is in knowledge of the gospel, the good news that Christ died to save sinners, and that by believing in Him, in trusting Him, we can be forgiven and reconciled to God and experience eternal life with Him. I think of what Paul writes in Romans 10:

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” – Romans 10:9-13 

The Bible: The Nature of God's Word

Last week, Carl launched us into a new series entitled Sound Doctrine.  Our foundation verse for this series is Titus 2:1, 

You, however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine. 

He explained that doctrine is teaching, and, Biblical teaching or doctrine is both practical, applicable, and includes the theology behind it.

The basis of what we teach is critical.  If we have the wrong foundation behind what we teach, it is worthless.

Jesus quoted the book Isaiah, saying, 

“… you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.  You hypocrites!  Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings [doctrines] are but rules taught by men.’”

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’”  --Matthew 15:6-11 

According to Jesus, wrong teaching or teaching things contradictory to what the Bible says makes our worship vain, without purpose, worthless.

The Bible: Introduction

Welcome to our new series, Sound Doctrine! What is a doctrine? In English, the word “doctrine” comes from the Latin word docere, which means “to teach,” and this word leads to doctor, which means “teacher,” and this word in turn leads to doctrina, which 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 our series alludes to Titus 2:1, which says,

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

To understand the “however” in this verse we need to look back in chapter 1. Here we find the following:

For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. – Titus 1:10-11

Living Expectantly

Matthew 24:32- 25:13

A Message from Jesus to the church:

“Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation* will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”—Matthew 24:32-35 *Greek translated race

What thing is Jesus saying they will see?  The fourteen things that he had just prophesied about:

Responding to the Invitation

Matthew 21:28-44, 22:1-14

Good morning and welcome.  We are closing in on the end of this summer’s series on the parables of Jesus.  Today’s message is next to last.  Fred will close out the series next Sunday.

Somewhere back when Carl was putting the series together, he mentioned that we would be grouping the parables more topically rather than reading them chronologically which is exactly what we’ve done.  That’s one advantage of the series.  Each message stands on its own.  You should be able to pick up in any message without feeling lost.

It could just be a figment of my imaginative memory, but I also thought he mentioned back in those early discussions, we would not or might not cover all the parables.

How many parables did Jesus tell?  I’ve seen estimates between 40 and 46.  You might object, “How can you not know how many parables there are!”  Well, Jesus told parables more than once.  And, there are clearly parables that are similar but not the same.  The two parables last week were like that.  So, do you count those two as being the same or different?  There are other parables which are the same parable told at the same time, but recorded in more than one gospel.  If you count in order to get the maximum number of parables recorded including duplicates, you’ll end up with more than 60 in total.

Rewarding Faithfulness

Luke 19:11-27, Matthew 25:14-30

I love the word faithfulness. It’s not a very exciting or flashy word. A faithful person doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. Maybe faithful makes you think of an old dog that maybe isn’t too smart but always wants to be with you. But to be fair to dogs, their faithfulness is one of the things that makes them so appealing as pets and leads people to become so bonded with them. They are always glad to see you when you have been away. Their love (if you can really call it that) seems so simple and unconditional. They act like their lives revolve around you – which, I guess, they do.

I’m not sure that I want to use a dog as the best example of faithfulness. I wonder if they are guided more by instinct than by a conscious decision to love. But in any case, faithfulness is a wonderful quality in any relationship. We appreciate having faithful friends that we can count on to help us and support us in any circumstance. Of course, God, with his completely trustworthiness and unfailing love is our ultimate example of faithfulness, and faithfulness is what He calls us to in our relationship with Him.

Understanding God and Self

Luke 18:1-14

Welcome! How many of you have ever had to judge? If you have ever been on a jury you should raise your hand. If you are a parent you should certainly raise your hand. I think all of us at various times and in various ways are called on to judge, to make a decision about guilt or innocence or to decide what is appropriate going forward in some issue involving people. 

 

Today we look at two parables from Luke 18, and I would argue that both of these involve a judge. In the first parable this is very obvious, but if you think about it, you will see that it is also true in the second. The Old Testament has some powerful advice for judges that I think is as relevant today as it was when it was written, so I thought we would look at this first before going into our main passages today. The passage I want us to consider is from 2 Chronicles 19, and it involves the actions and instructions of Jehoshaphat king of Judah.