Sermons on God's Nature
In our fallen nature, we want the crucified saviour without the cruciform life. But in our union with Christ, God has ordained that our path will be the path of his beloved son. If we are his and he is ours, our lives will pattern his life: and that pattern is suffering and then glory, the cross before the crown.
What is this leaven of the Pharisees? Christ leads his disciples through a catechism of questions to bring them to the understanding. Like the man partially healed, Peter confesses Christ, but it’s clear he only had a partial perception.
Mark is impressing upon us in this passage, that the crowd is made up of two different groups of people. Those of Israel, and those who are far-away ones. In this sermon, Pastor Tony unpacks Christ’s costly compassion on the 4,000. Christ has this mixed crowd–Jew and Gentile–recline at a wilderness table together, and satisfies…
We’ll finish up the section from last week before we return to the gospel of Mark. There’s some significant things coming up in the gospel of Mark that we want to give attention to, but we’ll finish up this wonderful passage regarding the fear and the anxiety and the symptoms of those things and the…
Though this Syrophoenician woman thought herself of a low estate–and those around her would’ve agreed, Christ deems her worthy, not of dog food, but of true spiritual meat: faith. Here we see the heart of Christ as he reaches out to those of low conditions.
For the ancient Hebrew, if you were to ask them about the sea, they would say that it was a place of great chaos, dread-waters, and danger. In this section of Mark, the disciples find themselves in the middle of all that water represents in the Old Testament. Christ takes on this source of evil and rebukes it. In confronting the sea, Christ is really confronting the enemies of God and his people. He says to that great enemy of our souls, “Be still, and be silent!”
Job begins and ends after the pattern that Jesus speaks of, that the Old Testament anticipates him in his suffering and in his glory. We saw the sufferings anticipated in the first two chapters and throughout the book, and now comes the glory as the Lord restores the fortunes as Job returns out from under the curse.
It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 satraps, to be throughout the whole kingdom; and over them three high officials, of whom Daniel was one, to whom these satraps should give account, so that the king might suffer no loss. Then this Daniel became distinguished above all the other high officials and satraps,…
King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand. Belshazzar, when he tasted the wine, commanded that the vessels of gold and of silver that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem be brought, that the king and his lords,…