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Sermon on 2 Samuel 7:1-16
The craziest thing about our Christian faith is that it is completely built upon God’s decisions for us, not ours about God. Our faith derived from a God who comes to us in Jesus, without us asking, and brings peace and reconciliation with God, without our input. He dies for your sin without your suggestion. Coming, as Paul writes this morning, to bring warring parties to an end. No more can there be us and them. In Paul’s day it was the circumcised vs. the uncircumcised. It was one group who said that they had right access to God because of some fleshly thing. Something changed in them that that could be seen so people will notice. Then Paul comes in and says, all flesh means nothing. What you see of yourself that you think makes you more god-like than others? Nah. Every law you think that makes you right in the eyes of God is gone. Now your righteousness is based on Jesus and his flesh being broken, his blood spilt for you.
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Sermon on 2 Samuel 6:1-19
Let me set the scene for you. Watford, England. Late 1990’s. Soul Survivor Church, which is part of the Anglican Church but built around youth and college ministry. Modern worship. Matt Redman is the worship leader. Mike Pilavachi was the pastor and he began to notice something in the church. It had become something else. Something other than what he thought church should be. It was built on the props. The show. The music was great. The feeling of euphoria it left for the people was amazing. But he realized that the worship had become almost stale. Going through the motions. Something to do. The worship time, the music and the feeling it gave to people had become the thing. Basically, like King David here, except no one died because of it. Sermon on 2 Samuel 5:1-10 - "The Way of the Heart, Part 7"
We like to pretend we don’t like kings and kingdoms. We just got done celebrating the anniversary of a day in which we wrote a break-up letter to a king. We like to think of ourselves as a democratic people. We want to democracy. We want many voices coming together for consensus. However, there is a war amongst us. In us. A war between freedom and oppression. We yearn to be free. To see the dawn of a new morning without tyranny. Being told what to do. But we also are those who more often than not think we know what is best for others. If only the nation would do or try such-n-such. If only you had my ideals, my morals. If only everyone would live in a particular way. We pretend we don’t think that, and yet we do. Sermon on 2 Samuel 1 - The Way of the Heart
Part of me this morning, as we return to our trek through Samuel and Kings, wanted to say something like – When we last left our heroes… but there aren’t very many heroes here. Last time we were in Samuel it was 1 Samuel and Israel had rejected God, rejected Samuel, wanted to be like everyone else. They wanted a king. And now we have the death of that king and the rise of the next. Much has happened while we have been gone. It’s been a couple of weeks. Let me catch you up. |
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