Text: Luke 16:19-31 | Listen to Message Is Hell Fair? “How could a loving God send people to hell?” This is perhaps our culture’s greatest objection to Christianity: it’s impossible for many to fathom why anyone would choose to believe in a God who punishes sinners…forever. Ironically, the hell most people don’t believe in bears little resemblance to the hell Jesus described in Luke 16 and elsewhere. The “traditional” hell is a pit of fire where God is hurling sinners as they beg for mercy. Everyone is scrambling to escape eternal damnation but God slams the door on them with a […]
Bad News for Good People
Text: Luke 16:14-18 | Listen to Message A Primer on Self-Justification “You justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts.” —Luke 16:14 What does it mean to justify ourselves – and how and why do we all do it? What? “To justify” literally means “to declare righteous.” Thus, self-justification refers to our attempts to acquit ourselves of wrongdoing, to vindicate our reputation, or to make ourselves appear more acceptable in the eyes of others. It’s one thing to defend your honor against false accusations, but that’s clearly not what Jesus is referring to here. He’s talking about all those times […]
The Day A Nation Looked Up
August 21, 2017 was the day a nation paused, looked up, and collectively beheld just a smidgen of a shadow of a speck of God’s glory. It took 2 hours and 38 minutes for a total solar eclipse to pass through 14 states stretching from the Pacific Coast of Oregon to the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina. In addition to the 12+ million people who live inside the path of totality, millions more traveled to witness this rare phenomenon. People in all 50 states observed at least a partial eclipse. If you didn’t realize there was going to be a […]
Money as Servant or Master
Text: Luke 16:1-13| Listen to Message Master Your Money or It Will Master You Jesus famously stated that “no one can serve two masters … you cannot serve both God and money.” Philip Graham Ryken notes: “We would prefer to do the very thing Jesus tells us we cannot do: serve God and money. If only we could serve God with some of our money and then serve ourselves with the rest of it. Better yet, if only we could use most of it for ourselves and then give God whatever is left! But Jesus says we have to choose.” (Reformed […]
The Two Prodigal Sons
Text: Luke 15:1-2, 11-32| Listen to Message Two Ways of Rejecting the Father Spoiler Alert: The Parable of The Prodigal Son is not exclusively – or maybe even primarily – about the prodigal son. In fact, Jesus himself introduced the parable this way: “There was a man who had two sons…” (Luke 15:11). Yes, the first son Jesus tells us about is the infamous younger brother who left home and squandered his inheritance partying with prostitutes. But the story is only half done. And Jesus’ emphasis is arguably on the second son – the elder brother who stayed home and always […]
Lost and Found
Text: Luke 15:1-10| Listen to Message How’d You Get Lost? Jesus’ stories about the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost (prodigal) son are some of his best-known parables – and for good reason: all three illustrate the Good News that God loves to pursue and find the lost. In fact, restoring the lost is something that makes God spontaneously and ridiculously happy! But Jesus communicates this one big truth three different ways. And in this nuance, we discover something very important. Though we’re all equally lost apart from Christ, we tend to get lost in different ways. Some get […]
Makeover or Takeover
Text: Luke 14:25-35 | Listen to Message The Startling Demands of Jesus Imagine what would happen today if a political candidate abruptly announced to a packed arena, “Many of you are only following me because of what you think I will do for you, but here’s the thing: unless you’re willing to hate your families, renounce everything you have, and go to the firing squad for me, I will not represent you.” Pandemonium would immediately break out: booing, and hissing, and jeering – and lots of 4-letter words describing what he can do to himself! Some people would storm the stage […]
Dinner With Jesus
Text: Luke 14:1-24 | Listen to Message A Life Of Disinterested Goodness It took Jesus all of one dinner to completely dismantle the self-absorption of the Pharisees. Everything they did, he pointed out, was calculated to massage their enormous egos and to enhance their status. They were obsessed with rules – and suspect interpretations along with selective applications enabled them to feel superior to “sinners” who weren’t quite as good at their hoop-jumping and hair-splitting technicalities. They were obsessed with reputation – and nothing was more important to them than being held in high regard by others. They were obsessed with […]
The Inclusive-Exclusive Jesus
Text: Luke 13:22-35 | Listen to Message The One Door That’s Different Our culture tends to make two assumptions about the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of God’s salvation: Assumption #1: If God is inclusive, that means everyone’s going to be saved regardless of what door or path they used to get to him. There are more than 4,000 religions in the world, and many of them look and sound pretty much the same. So who’s to say which one of them is right – or if there even is such a thing? All religions contain some truth, and no religion contains all […]
Independence Day
Text: Luke 13:10-21 | Listen to Message Find Rest Today Derek Rishmawy writes this concerning chronic pain: Seasons of prolonged physical pain are profoundly disorientating. At the outset, there may be confusion as well as the obvious discomfort of the condition itself. Still, there’s a sense that this too will pass, as so many other pains have. But when the days extend to weeks, and the weeks to months, panic and dread slowly set in when you realize the cramps, the shooting pain, the soreness, the headaches—whatever the pain may be—aren’t passing, and may never pass. They’re the new normal, and the new normal […]
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