"ministry" Tagged Sermons
1. The Christian _________________ confronted with a_________________ (v. 1).
2. An Apostolic __________________ Proposed (vv. 2-4).
3. Problem Resolved, and __________________ Multiplied (vv. 5-7).
Hophni and Phinehas turn the priesthood into something that serves themselves rather than God’s people, the exact opposite of how Christ and Paul both ministered. Their abuse of the sacrifices anticipates every later abuse of the Lord’s Supper. Ministry and sacrament are essential to the church precisely because Hophni and Phinehas show what happens without them.
Even the four men carrying the paralytic, a picture of the church’s own ministry, stand in need of Christ’s forgiveness and humbling instruction, not just the man they carry. Faith that demands a visible miracle before it will believe is, on Christ’s own terms, an inferior faith. What he teaches here is the harder, truer kind that does not require the sign to already be in hand.
The four men carrying the paralytic stand for ordained and unordained ministry working together, not for one at the expense of the other. Revisiting the ‘home’ established in the previous sermon, the church’s task comes into focus as nothing less than glorifying God through love, determination, and faith. Ministry, on this reading, is what a home like that requires.
Closing the series, Paul’s epistles fall within a clear chronology of his ministry, sorted into four natural divisions. What stands out most, tying 1 Corinthians 11:1 to Paul’s final words in 2 Timothy, is how fully Paul lives out the very doctrines of Christ he spent his life writing.
Elijah’s glory and his diminishment sit side by side in this passage, commissioned to anoint kings even as his own ministry visibly contracts. John the Baptist will later walk the same path, decreasing so that another might increase. Elijah’s and Elisha’s ministries both prove genuinely useful precisely in that diminishment, not despite it.
Five distinct aspects of the preacher’s own ministry surface across 51:17-52:15, a fuller picture than ‘beautiful feet’ alone suggests. Paul draws directly on this text in Romans 10 to make his own case for preaching’s necessity. Good preaching, on this account, is measured by faithfulness to that pattern, not by rhetorical polish.