Friday, September 21, 2018

Sermon on the Holy Spirit in Joel

Welcome!

Click this link for a sermon which I recently preached in New Haven. I am working my way through the minor prophets with a view toward building Biblical literacy.  Be blessed and be His hands today!


Monday, September 3, 2018

Three Doctrines: God is Sovereign

God is sovereign

The sovereignty of God provides a foundational principle for a better life. Not a better financial life, or a healthy life, or even a happy life. It’s a solid foundation for dealing with reality from a position of strength. A person might respond “what good is your god if he does not make for a better life?” Cue discussion on what that really means, right? Everyone has a different standard. But you can grapple with life and its issues from a position of strength when you live in light of the fact that God is always going to accomplish his plan.

Sovereignty itself requires that God be omnipotent, or all powerful. When I say “all powerful,” I don’t mean that he can make a rock even he can’t move. That’s self refuting! There are lots of things God can’t do: He can’t tell a lie, or break a promise, for instance. Omnipotence means he can do anything that is in accord with his will. In other words, if he wants it to happen, he will bring it about, no matter what.

That said, if God is sovereign, that means what happens to me has already passed across his desk. He stamped “Approved” on it, it came to be either by decree or his permissive will; he’s never blindsided by anything that comes into my life. And because he is good, that means I can depend on the fact these things happened for my future benefit, even as I am being formed in the image of Jesus Christ. Yes, everything that happens is shaping me to become more like Jesus. And when I say benefit, I am talking about heavenly rewards and likeness to Christ. This world is full of sorrows, and God never promised us a rose garden.

The fact of the sovereignty of God is rooted deeply in the scriptures. A core verse for the sovereignty of God is Psalm 119:16: “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Every day, all day, all things that happen were in God’s script book before you came to exist. In that “book,”—and yes its likely to be a figurative statement—is all the days of your birth, your sickness, your education, the crime committed against you, and the one you committed. That book contains the day of your death. And the life story written there has God as the hero, you are the victim he has freed from the dominion of darkness; and in the end, he is forming Christ in you. That’s the story, and you end up a huge winner in it. 

Because God is sovereign I can know that the universe is solidly in his control. I can understand that all things that happen to me are part of his plan to form Christ in me and in other fellow Christians.

It does not mean that all things that happen to you are good. Not at all. It just means that God uses even the evil that the world, the flesh and the devil throws at us to make us more like Jesus. Remember, he suffered terribly, and completely unjustly—all in the father’s plan. Should we expect to be any different? 


Because he is good, I can also understand that his plan for me is going to be good in the end.