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HEAVEN: A STUDY IN REVELATION (2012)
“And then you see it,” says Gandalf to an anxious Pippin in the movie The Return of the King, “white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” Most of us long for a Heaven like that. Even many who wouldn’t say they believe in God treasure some hope for a pleasant resting place once this life is done. But few of us have much more than vague notions about what, if anything, comes next. Through its own moving pictures, the Book of Revelation shows us with a fair amount of clarity just what Heaven will be like. Heaven is where you were designed to be. Not just being somewhere, but being there with someone – with Jesus. What does that mean? And how will it be for you? - will be the questions on our minds in this sermon series.
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NOT A TAME LION: A STUDY IN THE BOOK OF AMOS (2012)
Amos was written in a time when what mattered most was money and entertainment. The rich were getting rich out of any proportion to what they could need while the poor were shamelessly exploited and left to rot. Ironically, it was also a time of enthusiastic religious movements. But Amos describes all these man-centered movements and their rituals as abhorrent to God. This is what we would expect of a thumbnail sketch of the world behaving as it does. But sadly, Amos isn’t describing the world. He’s describing the Church. Amos’s rebuke couldn’t be more timely than it for us today. We need what God says to us through Amos.
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RESTORE, O GOD: HOW THE KINGDOM COMES (2012)
The God of the Bible is the God who restores. We began 2012 with sermons that focused on His plan and power to make all things new: How the Kingdom Comes. We will also learn how SPC’s vision reflects where we believe God is calling us as a church, and some of the ways we hope to see SPC experience and spread restoration in our city.
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ADVENT & CHRISTMAS 2011
The grace which Paul has been describing in Romans, and which we have preaching this past year, is nothing less than the free gift to us of Jesus Christ. During Advent we remember the gifts of the wise men in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth: gold, frankincense and myrrh. But these only point us to who Christ was and is, and how we must receive Him.
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THE GOSPEL OF GOD’S GRACE: A CHURCH SHAPED BY GRACE • A STUDY IN ROMANS, PART 4 (2011)
Paul’s theme in the Book of Romans is God’s grace – His undeserved, unearned kindness – to us in Jesus Christ. We saw in the spring that God’s grace is not given to us because we have been religious or because we have been decent human beings, but precisely and only because God has demonstrated His justice and His love towards us at the Cross of Jesus. Our un-rightness and selfishness and His rightness and compassion are all displayed there. The wonder, as Paul rejoices, is that such a God has reached out to such as us at such cost to Himself. As we come to the second half of Romans this fall, Paul moves on to this practical question: if this grace is so stupendous, why isn’t there more evidence of that grace, more signs of transformation in the Christian church? What is needed? That was Paul’s practical question for the church in his own day and it remains the question for us. Do you really want to change? What have you done with the Gospel?”
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WIVES AND THEIR HUSBANDS • A STUDY IN EPHESIANS (2011)
An examination of Christian marriage in the light of the Gospel.
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THE GOSPEL OF GOD’S GRACE: THE OVERFLOW OF GRACE • A STUDY IN ROMANS, PART 3 (2011)
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LIVING PRAYER (2011)
What happens to us when we pray? What do we learn about God? What do we learn about His desire to know us and to take initiative with us? Taking our cue from John White’s book ‘People in Prayer’, we will study the prayer lives of ten men and women in the Bible and, in the process, think about prayer in our own lives.
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THE GOSPEL OF GOD’S GRACE: LIVING UNDER GRACE • A STUDY IN ROMANS, PART TWO (2011)
The passion and power of the new life Jesus brings is described in His message of God’s good news for humanity: His Gospel. What does that Gospel say? How does it work? What does it promise? Who is it for? And how will it change us? This was Paul’s life’s work summed up in his Letter to the Romans. In the spring of 2011 we continued a year-long sermon series based on Romans, preaching from chapters five through eight, titled Living Under Grace.
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THE LAST WORDS OF JESUS (2011)
The Apostle John is famous for claiming that if all of the things Jesus did were to be written down, all the books in the world would not be enough to contain them. John says that not just to justify his own selectivity, but to remind us that everything Jesus did was of such depth and significance that volumes could be written just about what he did, let alone what those things meant. Following John’s example between now and Easter, we are going to be deliberately selective: our focus will be the last words of Jesus. Take this extended time and these 7 sermons during Lent to think about Easter, and this very specific final act in it. Think about what Jesus said on the Cross. Listen to Him.
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THE GOSPEL OF GOD’S GRACE: COMING UNDER GRACE • A STUDY IN ROMANS , PART ONE (2011)
The passion and power of the new life Jesus brings is described in His message of God’s good news for humanity: His Gospel. What does that Gospel say? How does it work? What does it promise? Who is it for? And how will it change us? This was Paul’s life’s work summed up in his Letter to the Romans. This year we plan to preach through the New Testament book, Romans. In the next several months we will cover Part 1: Coming Under Grace.
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NEW LIFE FOR THE NEW YEAR • A STUDY IN LUKE (2011)
We began 2011 with a clear focus on the transforming power of Jesus’ Gospel. Jesus’ often forgotten promise was that He had come to bring people Life: a fullness of life bursting through and breaking out in ways that would entirely change people’s lives and the ways they lived them. These sermons will investigate four aspects of how Jesus’ new life changed people in the Gospel of Luke.
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THE WORD BECAME FLESH • A STUDY IN JOHN (2010)
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INTO THE LIONS’ DEN • A STUDY IN DANIEL (2010)
In 587 BC disaster struck Jerusalem when Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon suddenly captured the city, took most of its people hostage, and moved them 500 miles away to an entirely alien civilization. The Book of Daniel tells the story of a tiny handful of those people – young men whom God used to reveal to the dispersed and discouraged Jews a new vision of Himself. These slaves led the Babylonians, from the Kings on down, into encounters with God which left them radically transformed. Between our own compromised Judeo-Christian history and an increasingly pagan society, are Christians held captive between two clashing worldviews? Or are we in precisely the right place for God, if we will trust and follow Him, to use us to reach and restore contemporary culture?
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TEN THINGS I CAN GIVE YOU • A STUDY IN EPHESIANS (2010)
“The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth… The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.” So writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, Life Together, which describes the community life of those Christians who gathered in resistance to Nazism and the persecution of Jews. This Confessing Church, as it was called, found itself standing for Christ against the state and, as such, was obliged to look – as it were, for the first time – to the Bible to see what Christian community meant. In an age where for different reasons – not persecution this time, but affluence and our own indifference – the Church of Jesus is tempted not to look to Him, we find ourselves with the same needs again. We need to relearn Christian community. We need to relearn what it means to grasp: “together with all the saints….how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” We need to relearn from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians what it means to live with and to love with one another for Christ’s sake. So God has given us ‘Ephesians’.
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THE HARD SAYINGS OF JESUS • A STUDY IN THE GOSPELS (2010)
“Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies–these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.” CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 7
My children are often reminded by their grandmother that there is a difference between ‘hard’ and ‘difficult’: ‘Rocks are hard’, she reminds them, and ‘Algebra is difficult’. And, ordinarily, I would agree with her – there is a difference. Yet when it comes to what Jesus sometimes said in the Gospels, there seems to be more similarity than difference. To be sure, the sayings we are going to be looking at in this series are difficult: they are obscure or apparently contradictory or seem to support within Christianity an idea we have thought wasn’t possible. But why are we looking at them at all? Well, because they are also hard for us: there is an emotional sharpness in considering them or a leaden heaviness in trying to carry them in our minds or a wall of some kind in our way which is hard for us to break through to a better understanding of Jesus and His call on our lives.
They were hard in this sense for people in Jesus’ day. On one occasion when many of His followers heard Jesus speak and said, ‘this is a hard teaching, who can listen to it?’ and many of them deserted Him (John 6:60). So we understand that when we grapple with the hard sayings of Jesus, we’re not just entertaining an intellectual curiosity – as if to say: ‘That’s interesting, I wonder what Jesus could have meant by that?’No, we are grasping tight hold of the promises of the Gospel and the Lord who teaches us and we’re pressing into something hard, asking Him: ‘Lord, stretch me, stretch my understanding of You and of the Gospel and stretch my commitment to You.’ Reality is usually something we could not have guessed. Certainly, reality spoken by the Lord of Heaven and Earth is something we couldn’t guess at, but it is something we should yearn for that we might know Him better.
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AT CHRISTMAS, A GOD LIKE US • A STUDY IN JOHN (2009)
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FINDING OUR IDENTITY IN THE GOSPEL • A STUDY IN GALATIANS (2009)
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A WAY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS • A STUDY IN EXODUS (2009)
The Book of Exodus can be summed up in twelve little words: Misery, Moses, Plagues, Passover, Sea, Song, Moaning, Mountain, Covenant, Calf, Glory, & Gazebo (I think that’s British for Tabernacle). This sermon series examines some of the common struggles often encountered in the Christian life and how, by God’s grace, to overcome them. Our teachers are Moses and the newly liberated Hebrews as they make their way from slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, on their to the Promised Land – the Kingdom of God.
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LETTERS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS • A STUDY IN REVELATION (2009)
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WINDOWS INTO ADVENT • A STUDY IN MATTHEW (2008)
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GENDER & IDENTITY IN THE GOSPEL (2008)
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A STUDY IN PHILIPPIANS (2008)
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ADVENT & CHRISTMAS (2007)
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THE WISDOM OF GOD • A STUDY IN PROVERBS (2007)
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HOW CAN I BELIEVE (2007)
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SEX, MARRIAGE, & THE SINGLE LIFE (2007)
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EASTER (2007)
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THE DISCIPLES OF FAITH (2007)
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TOWARD ABUNDANT LIFE (2007)
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SPC VISION 2007 • A STUDY IN ACTS (2007)
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THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT • A STUDY IN MATTHEW (2006 & 2007)
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STAND ALONE SERMONS
These sermons were preached at SPC at various times and by various preachers. They aren’t part of any series, so we are lumping them together.
STEVE CONSTABLE • SENIOR PASTOR
ZAC COLLINS • DIRECTOR OF YOUTH AND YOUNG ADULT MINISTRIES AT SPC
ALAN LEE • ASSISTANT PASTOR FOR COUNSELING AND PASTORAL ADMINISTRATION
FRANK CRANE • FORMER PASTOR AT SPC
JOE GOUVERNEUR • MISSIONS PASTOR AT THIRD PRESBYTERIAN
GEORGE LACY • FORMER INTERN AT SPC
STEVE HALL • ELDER AT SPC
JOHN ANTHONY • ELDER AT SPC
ERICK BONKOWSKY • PASTOR OF CITY CHURCH OF RICHMOND
LEONARD LIU • A PASTOR AT SYCAMORE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
ISAAC WAGABA • PASTOR OF JINJA FULL GOSPEL CHURCH IN JINJA, UGANDA
SIMON GUILLEBAUD
The Adventure of Calling • Genesis 12:1-7 (October 23, 2011)
