"ChurchProblems" Tagged Sermons
Paul’s use of ‘mystery’ in Ephesians 1:9 gets careful definition, set against the modern church’s own fascination with personal testimonies as a competing source of authority. Ephesians 1:10’s claim that Christ sums up and is all in all reframes what mystery actually means here. Paul consistently places historical, redemptive-historical theology above the systematic kind, a priority this sermon defends directly.
The series opens with a survey of Paul’s dealings with the troubled Corinthian church and a short outline of the letter as a whole. Read in that context, the ‘love’ of 1 Corinthians 13 is not sappy sentimentalism but Christ himself.
Modern Pentecostalism’s explosive twentieth-century growth, accelerated by the same restless mentality that shaped the 1960s, claims Acts 2 as its own origin story. The OPC’s own defense of what Pentecost actually was pushes back directly against that claim. Getting Pentecost’s true nature right matters for how the whole rest of the series reads the Holy Spirit.
Audience analysis dominates a great deal of modern church strategy, a trend this sermon measures against how Matthew and Luke themselves actually treat their audiences. The Lord’s own denunciation of Pharisaic behavior in Luke 6 offers a different model than market research. Knowing an audience, on Christ’s own terms, is not the same as catering to it.
Philippians 2:14-18’s warning against grumbling gets read against a string of Old Testament passages, treating the Philippians as a kind of wilderness generation facing the same temptations Israel once did. A Biblical-Theological approach, rather than a moralistic one, is what makes that connection visible. Grumbling against God, on this reading, incurs real, just wrath, no minor lapse in attitude.
The real difficulty of pastoring, 2:24 through 3:9 argues, directly reflects the troubles Paul names as characteristic of ‘the last days.’ Several other passages on the last days are drawn in to fill out that picture. Churches engrossed in their own serenity, expecting ease rather than the soldier’s life Paul describes, are shown here to be operating under a real fallacy.