Month: September 2023

Sermon notes 👇

It is entirely feasible that we may concede that God is the source of all things…and at the same time believe that we are the focus of all things.

Not to John? though. To John the Baptist, Jesus is both the source and center of all things.

Jesus must increase. I must decrease.

To John, the important role that he was given – the last and greatest of the prophets pointing to Jesus – that role wasn’t the reward. Jesus was the reward. Jesus was the focus of it all.

We would be remiss to walk away from this passage this morning without hearing a call to have Jesus increase among us, and for us to decrease.

It’s not about us, it’s about Jesus.

If we want to be a church that makes the real Jesus known then we have to live and think and behave in a way where Jesus is the center and focus of it all.

And that starts not with our trying and doing better. That starts with our acknowledgment that all we have come from Jesus, and that we desperately need Jesus.

Sermon notes 👇

Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an old story from Israel’s history.

Back when Moses was leading God’s people through the wilderness, there was a scene where serpents were biting and killing the people, and it was happening because of their own sin.

But God told Moses to make a fiery serpent made of bronze and lift it up on a pole.

He said that if anybody was bit by a serpent, all they had to do was look at the fiery serpent and they would be healed.

Jesus says that in the same way, He must be lifted up, and whoever will believe in Him will have eternal life.

He is the way to healing, the way to new life, the way to be reborn…

All one has to do is look to Him.

If God wanted to condemn the world…if God wanted to condemn you…Jesus simply would not have stepped into our reality.

Jesus not coming would be condemnation.

Those who see themselves as superior and those who see themselves as inferior would both be found guilty.

But Jesus did come…because God loves us…because God loves you.

He loves you where you are and as you are – self-righteous or blatantly rebellious – He came for you there.

And He was lifted up on that cross, and He died for your sins so that you could be purified once and for all.

He rose again so that God could dwell with us, so that the Spirit could indwell us, and so that we could live the way He made us to live.

We can have life. God-given eternal life.

And we should be living in that life here and now – living from this good news of Jesus today.

All we have to do is look to Him.

Sermon notes👇

…what they came to understand was that Jesus had said and demonstrated Himself to be the new Temple.

He was replacing it.

He was taking place of the sacrifices.

He was replacing the need to build something bigger and better.

He was replacing the stone, and the wood, and the metal objects of the Temple that could never make the living God known.

Jesus was making God known in the flesh.

He was doing what the Temple had only whispered of. He was what it had always pointed to.

Jesus is the latter Temple of Haggai. He is better than any Temple that was ever built by hands.

The Temple had never restored a right relationship between God and His people. Not in the sense that they could walk together and talk together like Adam and Eve were able to do with God back in the Garden.

Jesus, the true and better Temple, made a way to know God in the flesh.

He died and rose again after 3 days and purified us so that God could dwell with us…so that the Holy Spirit could indwell us…so that we could know God more fully and worship Him in spirit and in truth.