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Sunday Sermon

  Victory from the Lord Isaiah 54:17 So no weapon that is used against you will defeat you. You will show that those who speak against you are wrong. These are the good things my servants receive. Their victory comes from me, says the Lord. In my younger days I worked with a church in Lancaster Pennsylvania on an evangelism mission in which we used a system called the Peace Treaty. The system we used stepped people through the process of explaining why we need Jesus to save us and what our response to the love of God was. I always thought the name of that system was a good name because it spoke to the very basic problem we as humans have. We humans are in rebellion against God and His authority and by definition that means we are at war with God. Most people don’t think about this but it is a hard truth that we need to consider carefully. There are two fundamental points that have to be taken seriously. First is that God is Truth. Those words have some very real effects ...
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Sunday Sermon

  Teaching of the Lord Isaiah 54:13 All your children will be taught by the Lord, and they will have much peace. Words fascinate me and they always have. Maybe that is what I am a sesquipedalian(a person who likes long words) but despite my love for words I sometimes struggle with words related to God. One of the hardest words that I deal is the word joy which seems like such a simple word but I find it one of the hardest things to really understand. Most people think of joy as happiness or at least a form of happiness but when I look at scripture I don’t find that to be true. In Nehemiah chapter eight verse ten we are told that the joy of the Lord will make us strong and that phase happens when people are weeping because they know the extent of their disobedience. Then there is Hebrews twelve verse two that tells us Jesus suffered on the cross because of the joy of the Lord. Some people say that joy is a gift from God but I am not sure about that. I can say that joy is a p...
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Sunday Sermon

  Peace Isaiah 54:10 The mountains may disappear, and the hills may come to an end, but my love will never disappear; my promise of peace will not come to an end,” says the Lord who shows mercy to you. Over the years I have talked about the nature of God but I had not really explored what that meant to the full extent that it should be until recently. This is an emerging process and it is not completely detailed because there is a lot of reading and thinking to be done. The over all outline is very simple. At the foundation we have God who is truth. Exploring what it all means that God is truth is an interesting work that challenges my basic brain. Next is we have God is life and from that we have the fact that God is Righteous and loving. Understanding each of these concepts and what flows from them will help us build a faith in the God who is willing to die to save us from our sin. Grasping that God is life itself and without God there is no life is the starting point for ...
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Sunday Sermon

  Promises Isaiah 54:9 The Lord says, “This day is like the time of Noah to me. I promised then that I would never flood the world again. In the same way, I promise I will not be angry with you or punish you again. Basic math has always come easy to me. It was like breathing, I didn’t think about it I just did math in my head. The question of how math worked never crossed my mind until a few years ago but it has now become a question I think a lot about. Why does math work and why is “this answer right” and “that answer wrong?” Dealing with this question might seem a little strange but thinking about why math works will help us understand other parts of our world. Even though many well-educated people have considered this question the basic answer is, relatively simple math just works. It seems it is merely a part of the fabric of the universe that we as humans have been able to unravel. When thinking about this it should lead us to the God who created the universe and te...
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Sunday Sermon

  Good Servant Isaiah 53:11 “After his soul suffers many things, he will see life and be satisfied. My good servant will make many people right with God; he will carry away their sins. When I talk with people that don’t believe in God about my faith in God one of the first things that come up is how prohibitive God is. And the fact is that they are right about that point. God does speak about a lot of things we are not to do. From the very start God keeps Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of “The Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The Ten Commandments are basically a bunch of things not to do. My answer to that is that is a good thing and I am grateful that God does call us to a constrained life. Our God knows what is good for us and so He gives us His wisdom about how life is to be lived. There is nothing that says that God has to teach us about how to live but our God loves us and wants the best for us so God tells us about the things that can hurt us. Look at Adam and E...
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Sunday Sermon

  Sheep Isaiah 53:6 We all have wandered away like sheep; each of us has gone his own way. But the Lord has put on him the punishment for all the evil we have done. My training as a historian has caused me to do quite a bit of reading. If I want to understand a particular time, I spend a great deal of effort learning not only the big things about that period but also the small stuff. Reading personal journals can give more information about what is going on in the time I am studying then any five hundred page history books. Learning what people thought and how people felt about what was going on helps shape how I see the big picture stuff like the stories of kings or the wars that happened. With more information I get a better understanding of the time and place. The fact is that information is critical to anything we do in life. Raising chickens has required that we learn about animal husbandry and though some of the things we have learned were from books a lot has been fr...
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Sunday Sermon

  Our Suffering Isaiah 53:4 But he took our suffering on him and felt our pain for us. We saw his suffering and thought God was punishing him. One of the most consistent misperceptions that I have run into over the years of ministry is the idea of hell. So many people do not understand what hell is and what its purpose is. When we begin to talk about hell people get scared and that is a reasonable response because hell is a terrifying place. Scripture tells us it is filled with pain and crying and suffering which should tell us this is not a place we should desire to be. In short, we could say that hell is the opposite of heaven but that would miss the deeper meaning of what hell is. First and foremost we need to know that hell is not punishment. People do not end up in hell because they have done wrong things that deserve to be punished. Yes, we have a God who does punish but the idea of punishment is to teach people that the things they are doing are headed in the wrong ...
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