This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Genesis 1-6” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, January 15, 1978.
About this sermon
Scripture resists any easy division between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sins, and God never authors temptation, as Christ’s own temptation in Matthew 4:5-7 shows. Adam’s sin is far graver than we tend to admit, and that is why Christ’s success on our behalf matters so much.
Sermon transcript
There is a faculty of all kinds, including science theory and education, through a high school of theory, to administration, and yes, to his birthright. because it seems that he had no power against sexual temptation. Not only was there confusion in the temptation, but there was confusion in his prayer. And in his dilemma, that very unbelieving belief that God was closely with him, He said, how unmercifully God is willing to do that, and how the Father God is yet in temptation, and yet in grief.
How He should do for us to come to Him by a back-bone voice. There are these debilitating sins—not of ritual intelligence, but those kinds of sins that creep up on us, not the kinds we seek out, not the kinds we look for. The time that creeps up on us, that takes us unaware, is time. God is grandmother, a will, who devotes herself in good work, thanks to prayer, and who, after a particularly wonderful time in prayer, finds herself in conversation with her neighbor, and in the midst of a character assassination with her own son. Find yourself there before even realizing what is taking place.
The unimportant things, the things that are unimportant in our eyes, because they’re so small, and certainly God can’t be so small as to be concerned with them. What does it matter to Him that I put Him on my debt account and owe Him a loan, simply so that I can raise money from the bank? What does it matter to Him that I am helping to support my family? In my spare time, I’m wheeling and wheeling in the neighborhood. There’s no record of my encounters, no keeping track of it.
You can’t be a priest if you’ve got at least $1,000 worth of unreported tears in your eye. You’ve got to have faith and confidence to be a priest, to be able to be a priest. five feet above our skin in the precipices of time to begin. Then there are our drastic reactions to sin.
Ah, very good. No response in this division. You’re the one that made me die at the coming of this world. Really, Mary, this is setting none other than wonder. Powerful and solid, and obviously, you’re the most responsible for this being in this existence. If there’s anything chivalrous, offensive in the service of beauty, it’s not to take the pain of death.
I’m trying to give a certificate of power, but because we are convinced that we didn’t have the ability to extend, we start praying to ourselves, well, let me just, anyway, I’ll extend again tomorrow, and I’ll probably do the same thing, but I just won’t. There’s nothing more there than self-care. This is self-care.
Knowing God’s holy writings and calculating the facts and tactics and how a person can get out of those things, that’s how a man is made human. We take Luther’s advice to be true. Luther told us to be bold with it. Then he would try to be bold with it, and that’s great. That’s how I read it. And then Luther, he doesn’t preach on it, but I will continue to preach about it soon. You think that a blind man is a virgin. Yes, but he may just be at a cross, but he can still be a Christian if he’s a virgin and he’s right.
Necessary, I think, for us to get a little bit excited in that, regardless of his natural instinct and temptation, And it might be well worth a look at a few passages. Let’s look at his name, Jasper Morgan. But they tell us that we always have to have a campaign, and that makes a lot of sense to all of us, that the author is not the author of the campaign speech, and that we should at least have that go internally fixed in our minds. For as well, the lesson is that if a man perseveres under strife, notice the use of strife in the fact of his work. For once he has been approved, will the future sound wise towards those who love him?
Let no one say with his tempted eye that he is tempted by God. God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself cannot tempt anyone. of each one, and tension can be carried away when the body holds up. And when one has continued to disperse the skin, and when the skin accomplishes its aim for death, do not be confused by the other. That’s it. But here are two things that are strange.
God is not the author of temptation. We are not tempted by Him, and He does not put the blame in that temptation, nor our humbling unto Him. It shows no benefit for a sentient being. In temptation, God is not working against us, but in His mercy He’s working for us.
For notice, He always says in the verse 13, no temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful. who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but in your temptation will provide a way for you also that you may be able to endure it.
Thus, sovereignty and mercy is displayed itself kindly even in the temptation, if we by the Spirit can discern them. It is God who is powerful, and who is powerful in that temptation, living in his power. So that being my thought, he’s always on the mind. A great blessing is this, for it is Joseph, the Lord’s captain. And there we find that Satan, in his temptation of Joseph, He is not limited with his power as he was with you, but he is limited with my power. By God’s power, he can change that. That’s his power.
A third thing that we need is grace. In addition to the fact that God is not an office of creation, in addition to the fact that God, even in that case, is the exercising power of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the first thing to do is that you must always maintain that attention as God.
Temptation is something that arises from Satan, and it is something that is furthered by our own lust, but quietly, quietly something is done. In fact, the Scripture teaches us that it is God’s right to choose that path. And in the midst of that trial, the evidence of progress and the evidence of endurance is the lack of complaint against God for putting you there in the first place.
That’s one of the great lessons given in the words of the Pentecost of Matthew 4. The specialty of the Second Catechism is something that might include us. If we aren’t sensitive to what is going on, we only take the text Christ as its cause, verse 5.
Then the devil proclaimed to the holy city, and to you on the table of the temple, and said to you, if you are with the Son of God, throw yourself down before His presence, He will be the name of Christ and serve you. And on your hands, there was a very large, I think it was a striking point, there was a stone, Jesus said to them, on the other hand, he said to them, you shall not put forward your God to the temple. What’s the point? What’s the fulcrum?
The fulcrum of Satan’s power in temptation. Jesus is the son of God who finds himself in the division, there in the wilderness of trial. Jesus is being tried by His Father, and He’s been driven out of the world in a fiery spirit. What Satan is suggesting is, He is a trial. He’s a demon. He’s a trial. You shouldn’t be out here in the place of trial. You shouldn’t be on trial. The damnation, then, you see, for Satan is to reverse the whole situation, so that it is no longer the problem of nonviolence at all.
We see the principle of Solomon for the trouble he was faced with, I believe, and even has been received by the youth of Christianity. His life, you see, is for the sons. His life is for the sons, to be on God. And in the midst of that place of trial, our response as sons is not to be the weight against God who has placed us there. to begin to question God’s right to keep a court on the throne, but to question that right is to put God at risk. What right have you, God, to put me at risk? in the world.
Before this son, spoken of here and back before, there was another son. The son was a Christian, whom God had called to serve salvation. He was in the wilderness. And there, at the point of time, there is a book of God, and a living God, and a returning God. We must learn to change the experiences of our lives in the God who tries us, in the heat of hell. Think about it for a second. How many times do you notice that the factors are not the ones you need? Go into the details of the factors. You know that.
If I could analyze the gifts, first of all, theologically, and secondly, psychologically, I think you can allow things to align out of the text. That would be a great help to us in this effort. And you’re thinking, what’s the issue with theological freedom in the present? That’s no mystery. I suppose what many of you know is that in 2001, it fell to you right away that the issue is that you want to say something that’s capitalized immediately, capitalized upon immediately by Satan. It’s a mystery.
Theologically, the issue is the word God, and for that matter, that issue does not change. for the trial in the wilderness of the children Israel, and neither does it change with regard to the trial of the Son in the wilderness of Judea, later, after God has received his redemption. Theologically, the issue is the word of God. Will man live by the word of God alone or not? Is the word of God enough for you?” is that man must live by every service that proceeds out of the life of God. And that is a prohibition. It wasn’t something that was originally intended. He was merely prohibited from doing it. And what should have sustained him in the beginning of his life?
God’s word is law, and what is law means that it establishes the situation under which we live. It makes demands, and demands upon us that our finding for our present situation, bound by which, beyond which we cannot go, God’s law is His word, and His word is law.
His word is His law. That’s the value of it. That’s the value. So he’s noting that. God’s word and law is also sanctioned. Word and stipulation is sanctioned, and you declare to us with certainty what will surely come to pass if we violate that law. that God’s Word sets the values of your life, and that God’s Word tells you that there is a result that surely comes to pass. I give you my blessing.
For me, as a Catholic, I have been working philosophically for years in this life, more or less some hundred years. I have been inspected by the Catholic reptile community. For a contemporary Canadian man, for a vicious world to perform its part. They call you a doer with a guilty heart. That’s all I have. That’s all I have. There’s a progression. And I think that progression is really what I’m doing, talking about the conception of what?
Can the person see it that way? Who? First, Those who may not be conscious of it, there is this question. And how cleverly things say they are to begin this assault with the question. First, there is question. There is fighting with regard to the standards that have been set, the words, the law. Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it enough? Will it take care of me? Is it certain?” of God.
Having disrupted, we disregard God’s Word, and God’s Word is forgotten. How many times do we find ourselves in the remorse of our sins, if having already saying to us, well, why didn’t I think of that scripture? Why didn’t I think of that verse? God is thrust there, comes down as His regard for the Word, and then they, though we may not be fully conscious of it completely, there is developed within us a false sense of independence. in which we, in our words, become a law unto ourselves. we begin to think that we can handle whatever situation that might come. And from that, from that false sense of independence comes a false sense of power in which we believe that we, in some sense, have become divine, that we can touch this evil thing and not be touched by it.
We can play with it and not deserve it. Living just spells out evil. If you have been blocked to sleep by the power and the evil that are all the day, I have become powerful to it. To the extent that you have even become a Christian, you become a Christian.
I don’t think there is anything In this world, the price now that illustrates this final point, as well as the prices of material things, can happen or not. So leave here amongst the pictures of the world. Those men have given about the girls, those yes-betters, and I don’t see this way with each of them. Among the college students who are, you know, wide-eyed, who want the world and to offer it. Why not? This is an educational experience. The men who have set up private mail boxes to give to the minister so that their wives don’t know about it, haven’t sent in their business addresses so they don’t, aren’t discovered in their families. For those who are rather open about it, finally, in their families, they wish to notice all of them who are making visits to their neighborhoods. Their shit lies on the coffee table. You see, the tragedy is that people actually believe now that they can oppose themselves to this sort of thing and not fight. We will meet at that place one day. That’s all. And this is not the end. But that’s only when we meet one day. There’s one more thing I have to say to you, and that is that today you are reading a story that warms your heart. It should be part of your afterlife.
I know that many of us are enthusiastic users of this name, of the writing of Karl Marx. So even then you wouldn’t find it, though. Now, you probably have to ask yourself this question, because oftentimes the rest of the human race, and half of it at least, half over the human race, is kind of placed down, so to speak. Though we think the consequences are great, we think it’s a rather small contribution.
Now, I want to be very clear about the fact that I am a Christian. And I want you to take the right decision in terms of both of these things. So that I can see the beginning of fear with the light of the truth. And this has to be a theory, a God theory. First of all, the man knows God. And it’s a theory. He knows Him as a theory. Secondly, this man has been given dominion in the earth, power, worship over all of the Distinguishable from the individual is suggesting that he or she is in a relationship. But this is the research effort who is now suggesting that he or she is in a relationship with God.
You have to find a way for it to be explained to you. And if you are obsessed at betrayal of unity, much more could you be obsessed with betrayal of unity. It goes to say, little suggests that there is even a greater reason for the justly-punishable character of the state. We don’t often take into consideration the time span, the time length between what happened to the woman and what happened to the man. He fell. He was still upright.
And in His uprightness, as I have tried to suggest to you, He has the perception of seeing through her and seeing now what she is in her essence. And He sees her now as He has become because of her compliance with Satan and her transgression. He sees that clearly. But that’s not all he sees. He also sees his things because of his perspective, because of the great gratitude, because of what he is in his own life, and to remedy for his situation.
And he must choose between that remedy for him or killing what he’s not. And what he sees in her now is evil, and intimate knowledge is evil, and he wants that for himself. And faced with the decision of whether to become her danger or her compatriot, if he chooses to become her compatriot in sin, he could obtain her cross.
He was innocent and was outstanding. And this intercession could have saved him. But it didn’t do it. Because it was the end of humanity. This path with so conscious, holy consciousness, holy consciousness, holy consciousness. I have completed my service to God through you, Lord. Praise to you, God. It’s hard to talk about that feeling, but I do have that feeling. You know you can’t hold on. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it.
You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it.
You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. We have to consistently and always be aware of it. This is what happens. We do not do it. This is what we are. This is what we are. All of us, great people in the universe, we occupy human and biological space. Our selfishness, our greed, our pride, how wonderful it is to die. What is love? It is my pleasure and desire to die. And while we were meditating, we died. Don’t worry about your religion. Believe in Him, and you will receive sustenance to the end. You must believe Him, and He has made His life possible. We pray this to you.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.