I preached on one of the shortest books in the Bible last week, 2John.  For this sermon, I followed up the somewhat innocuous titles of Our Doctrine, Our Sinfulness with the ever-so-creative "Our Love."  From the very first verses, we see that John is going emphasize this connection between truth and love. He is writing to the church because he LOVES them IN TRUTH.  He says ALL who know the truth LOVE this them also, because of the TRUTH is in their hearts forever.  He says grace, mercy, and peace will come from God to us, IN TRUTH and LOVE. We see then that truth and love are inseparable. In many ways, truth and love balance and qualify one another. Love and truth are both essential to any gospel-centered community.  Truth without love ends up building community that is theologically strong but relationally cold, hard, and unloving toward anyone who [...]

 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1John 1.9 The Bible doesn’t actually speak about confession of sin as often as one might think.  The New Testament speaks regularly about “confessing the gospel” or making the “good confession” of faith.  Confession of sin may be indirectly implied in the direct call to repent from sin, but such calls seem to come through faith invitations to non-believers, not necessarily calls to believers to confess their sins regularly.  In the N.T., James 5.16 and John 1John 1.9 appear to be among a select number of passages where the practice of confessing sin is encouraged. I am not sure if Scripture’s relative silence concerning confession is the reason I never developed a personal practice of confession.  The reformer in me wants to blame my aversion for the practice [...]

Today's sermon text was 1John 1.5-2.2.  An hour long-tirade on confession and sin isn’t the most uplifting of Mother’s Day sermons but, alas, honoring Mom’s is biblical and mother’s day is not.  What is biblical and the purpose of gathering as a church is to worship Jesus by preaching the gospel.  And if we don’t leave Sunday morning offended by God’s truth, the gospel probably wasn’t preached. The more I study John, the more I am coming face to face with my sin.  His words are simple to understand and difficult to misunderstand.  As he writes to condemn false teachers and refute false doctrine, I can’t help but feel like he is challenging me.  No matter how hard I try to distance myself from the text, to point the finger that “those other people”, I can feel the finger of the Holy Spirit making a dent on my chest. In [...]

I have found that whenever I preach a sermon that calls people to actively "repent", or "obey", I am expected by many to explain exactly what I "don't mean", namely, self-righteousness.  My hope is that we live and preach the gospel so regularly that it can be assumed that we always fight FROM our righteousness and not FOR it.    The truth is that we will always fall short in our obedience. We we never fully stop "hating" as we ought not, but we certainly never "love" as we ought.   That is why our salvation is secured through the perfect life of Jesus by his sacrifice on the cross.  Our obedience will never serve as an effective means to obtain approval;  it is, at best, response to the love of Jesus who, by grace, makes us more loving every day.   Praise to the Lord that our rightness before God does [...]

Caleb is one of the studliest men in Scripture.  There is not a ton dedicated to Caleb, but the short narratives in Numbers 13/14 and Joshua 14 provide a convicting picture of faith for any Christian.  If Joshua is the example of a faithful General and leader, Caleb provides us an example of a faithful soldier and disciple.  SOME OF US will be called to be Joshua’s, but ALL OF US are called to be Caleb's. We first read about Caleb well before he was a battle-hardened 85 year old; when he was a young sprite of 40 in the wilderness on the edge Canaan.  He was among the 12 men chosen by Moses, representing the 12 tribes, to spy out the Promised Land for 40 days.  He represented the tribe of Judah.  Joshua also went to represent the tribe of Ephraim.  When the group returned, a faithless majority reported that, [...]