Before Jesus could begin His ministry He needed John to prepare the way first. The world at the time was in such a bad state that people could not have taken in Jesus’ teachings if John had not first prepared them and filled them with hope for Jesus’ coming. John did this by bearing witness to Jesus’ Light, so that when that light did come people could recognize it and embrace it.
Singing is one of the most powerful ways to express joy, and this is no more true than at Christmas. The teachings of the New Church tell us that going back thousands of years, the people in ancient times delighted in singing songs about the Lord’s future coming and the salvation He would bring. Today we do the same as we not only look back to the Lord’s birth but also forward to His birth into our own lives. After a short talk on the joy of singing to the Lord we will join together to celebrate the joy of the Lord’s Coming and the Christmas season in general.
As Christians is it our duty to shun wealth? Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. So should the wealthy among us be ashamed of their wealth? Should the poorer of us take pride in their poorness? Not exactly. The problem with money is the use to which we apply it. Money is heavenly when we see it as an opportunity to serve others and hellish when we see it as a way to love ourselves. All of us, rich and poor, need to take stock of the gifts we have been given in abundance and ask how we can use that abundance to make the world a better place.
What do you do after a crisis? How do you go back to normal? This Sunday we’re going to talk about what happens after Noah and his family can finally leave the ark after the flood and what we can learn from the story about how to rebuild our lives once a crisis has passed.
Two weeks ago we talked about seeing the floods, or challenges, coming and understanding that there is a better life on the other side. Last week we talked about preparing for the floods, or challenges, by making sure that we are walking hand in hand with God and following Him wherever He leads us. This week we are going to talk about being in the middle of the flood itself, coping with the challenges as we experience them. In the midst of struggle we suffer from doubt but the Lord’s promise is that He has prepared you and that He will bring you through alive, to find a new beginning. There is no challenge that you cannot overcome.
Noah has been told by God that a flood is coming that will destroy everything and everyone, except for those people and animals that God saves on the ark that He tells Noah to build. There are times when we know something big is coming. The Lord can help us to get ready and help us to keep safe what is most important.
Spiritual growth is a destructive process. Without the destruction of old habits, old ways of thinking, old wants and desires, there would be no room for the Lord to build us up as angels. Over the next four Sundays we will be exploring this topic of spiritual destruction and reconstruction using the story of Noah’s Flood. This story offers powerful insight into how we deal with the spiritual floods that come our way. In the course of this story we’ll talk about seeing the flood coming, how to get ready for it, riding it out, and then the beautiful things the Lord creates when we get to the other side. For this Sunday our focus will be on the first part: seeing the flood coming.
The New Testament is the last section of the Bible that we haven’t talked about yet in our series about getting more out of the Bible. On Sunday we’ll talk about things like how the New Testament differs from the Old Testament, whether all the books in the New Testament are equally authoritative, why there are four Gospels, etc. It will be fun and I hope it will help you to get more out of reading the New Testament.
Some of the most difficult parts of the Bible can be found in the Prophets. It can be hard to get much out of these sections. The teachings for the New Church say that this is because in the prophets the real spiritual meaning is often hidden under layers of symbolic language. So what do we do with this? Do we have to decode the prophets? Can we avoid them altogether? This Sunday we will explore how we can get more meaning out of reading the prophetical books of the Word.
A lot of people when they open the Bible find it hard to get much out of it, particularly the Old Testament. There are hard to pronounce names and strange and sometimes disturbing stories. What are we supposed to do with it? How do we make sense of it? The goal of this 3 part sermon series is to help you have a better understanding of what you’re looking at and how it can have relevance to you today. This Sunday we’re going to be focusing on the first big chunk of the Bible, the Old Testament stories in Genesis through 2 Kings.
