Calvary Baptist Sunday Morning: Recent Episodes
Calvary Baptist
In this passage we see what sin does to our standing before God and why we desperately need a savior.
Being a disciple of Christ means being a servant who seeks the best for others, not one who seeks to exalt themself.
Jesus talks about the difficulty of entering God’s kingdom and being in God’s kingdom when we struggle with idols in our lives.
As Christians, we are to fight against sin, but why? Yes, we should fight against sin because it is wrong and goes against God’s standard of righteousness, but as we see in this passage, our battle against sin is more motivated by our desire to worship and honor God.
What defines greatness? God’s word and our culture are often in conflict about what it means to be great.
People have different expectations of who Jesus is and what He is to do in our lives. Our expectations should be set by God’s word alone on who Jesus is and what Jesus does. When they are not, it endangers our faith or creates a false god.
Our faith is strengthened and tested when we find ourselves in challenging circumstances.
How do we live in a manner worthy of the Lord and fully pleasing to Him? Paul spells it out in Colossians 1:9-14.
As we leave 2018 and move into 2019, it is a good time to examine how we have been doing in our walk of faith and where we want to head in the coming year. This morning, we looked at Colossians 1:9-10 as Paul writes to a group of Christians, encouraging them in the purpose and direction of their faith.
Picking and choosing what we will and will not believe from God’s word is a dangerous activity. We get a false view of God and His plans for us and His world and we create a morality opposite or opposed to what God created. We must choose if we will strive to follow all of God’s word or attempt to pick and choose, which always has negative results.
The transfiguration of Christ was an awesome event where Peter, James, and John were allowed to witness the glory and power of Jesus that would shape them and Christianity.
Expectations are a big part of life. They can greatly impact our relationships and our responses. Peter, after just confessing Jesus as Messiah, made a poor choice in confronting Jesus because Peter’s expectations did not line up with what Jesus had come to do.
If we are not careful, sin can lead us to having hard hearts. Hard hearts keep us from understanding God’s word and plan for our lives and submitting to His loving authority over our lives. In the passage today, we see Jesus dealing with the hard hearts of his disciples and leading them to the cure, recognizing and submitting to Jesus for who He is.
It is often easy to limit our view of our sinfulness to the external. If we could change our actions, then we could feel better about being good people who occasionally mess up rather than being sinners who have no hope to fix ourselves. That is what the Pharisees thought. In this passage, Jesus teaches that our sin is not limited to what we do or the external, but sin starts in the heart, at the core of who we are… this is why we need a Savior.
It is God’s will that we obey Him with our whole heart and not just our actions. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they acted like they loved God with through their actions but their hearts were far from Him, wrapped up in selfishness and self-righteousness. As Christians and as the church, we must make sure we are following Jesus from our hearts and not just going through the actions.
Sin has the ability to have a huge influence on our lives, and it is never good. Our sin not only affects us but it can also affect others. As believers, we must be constantly fighting against sin and temptation and confessing and repenting of our sin because sin doesn’t just want to exist in our lives, it wants to rule.