Steady On: Hebrews Preaching Series Sermons

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Melchizedek

I am grateful for the opportunities to preach various messages from Hebrews in our church’s current sermon series, “Steady On:”

A Great Priest for Weak People — Hebrews 4:14-16

The Superior Priesthood for Times of Distress — Hebrews 5:1-10

Maturing Past Apostasy to Assurance — Hebrews 5:11-6:12

Prepare Me A Body — Hebrews 10:1-18

“Prepare Me a Body,” Bob Hurd

Getting to the Present of God Together — Hebrews 10:19-25

 

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Why Study the Book of Ephesians?

Crossway Publishers kindly invited me to answer, “Why Study the Book of Ephesians?” for their Why Study series. My answer corresponds to the Crossway study guide.

Is God Ever Ashamed of My Depression?

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depression and the Christian

Moody’s Today in the Word allowed me to contribute to this month’s Q and A. I answer three questions, one of which is, “Is God ever ashamed of my depression?”

Is God ever ashamed of my depression?

To speak of the Lord Jesus being “ashamed” of you is to suggest that there might be something you are doing that is displeasing or embarrassing to God, or that you are not living up to God’s standard by intentional choice. Clinically speaking, depression comes about not so much by our choices, but by factors such as our genetics. Depression sometimes runs in families. Biochemistry, personality, and environmental factors also may contribute to depression. These are all things we do not choose.

The Bible gives us an example of a depressed individual. The writer of Psalm 88 begins the psalm confessing, “Day and night I cry out to you” (v. 1), and he ends the psalm saying, “Darkness is my closest friend” (v. 18). Throughout the psalm, he declares that he is “overwhelmed with troubles” (v. 3), “without strength” (v. 4), his “eyes are dim with grief” (v. 9), and he has “terrors” and “despair” (v. 15). Yet we can’t say that God disapproves of the state of the psalmist. Instead, the Lord had the words composed into a song and placed into the book of Psalms by the collaborative efforts of the Sons of Korah and Heman the Ezrahite, songwriters and leaders of music in ancient Israel (1 Chron. 25:1–6; Pss. 42, 44–49, 84–85).

When Israel sang this psalm in worship, they expressed the feelings of depression. The Lord brought these words for us as part of the inspired Word of God—as part of His speaking to us.

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Also: MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and MA in Counseling Psychology @ MTS-Chicago.

Election and Grace All Over Scripture

 

After preaching through Heb. 2:10-18 this past Sunday, a friend from our congregation said encouragingly, “You manage to see election in every passage.” In the message, I mentioned that “the offspring of Abraham” did not refer to ethnic Jewish believers only, but to those who are Abraham’s offspring by faith. The blessings in this passage come to the offspring of Abraham uniquely.

I replied to my friend by saying, “That’s because election is everywhere in Scripture. It is important to see election because election is about the grace of God. If we do not embrace election, we embrace doing salvation by our own work.” My friend agreed enthusiastically. 

I am grateful to Pastor Gerald Hiestand for providing me opportunities to stand in his stead at Calvary Memorial Church. I am grateful for a people who respond to the word in meekness.

The De-Condensation of Humanity

I found this interesting enough to re-blog:

via The De-Condensation of Humanity

Dr. Eric Mason, Sermon: “Seeing Through the Lens of the End” (Rev. 7:9-12)

Dr. Eric Mason’s Founder’s Week sermon, “Seeing Through the Lens of the End,” is powerful, bold, and poignant for this time in American society. He preaches the gospel of grace, and courageously applies it to the American Dilemma.

I hope Pastor Mason will gain other opportunities for evangelicals in every corner of the country to hear this message. I was blessed tremendously by this word.

#Charlottesville: Some Gospel Thinking on White Supremacy, in Themelios

Themelios 42.3 posted today, and it includes the article, “#Charlottesville: Some Gospel Thinking on White Supremacy,” co-written by Walter J. Redmond, Jr. (my father), Charis A. M. Redmond (my daughter), and me. I am grateful to the editors of Themelios for their kind inclusion. I hope that an article in an evangelical journal co-written by an evangelical who works for two evangelicals institutions might gain a hearing among evangelicals.

On Making the Abnormal Good

Source: On Making the Abnormal Good

October 10, 2017

This morning on NPR, I learned of a documentary about a pioneer in the transgender movement. When the interviewer asked about her life, the documentarist calmly replied that for a time she worked in “the sex industry” in Times Square. She then took a twelve-year-old, lesbian runaway “under her wing.”

Leaving aside what rights transgender people should have, think about these descriptions. “Sex industry” makes normal prostitution and all its degradation–the scaring of intimacy, the reduction of intercourse to commerce, the diseases that plague the promiscuous, and the chains the pimps put on the prostitutes, the abortions the pimps demand. “Sex industry” indeed–remove the stigma, the sin, the pain; it makes normal the abnormal and wrong.

What does it mean to take a twelve-year-old girl “under her wing.” I’d rather not think of it. Perhaps this woman helped this girl in some ways, but not in the best ways.

This world of woe is abnormal because of the fall. We are all damaged goods, but goods we are. Prostitution and gender dysfunction are the sad effects of the fall, not things to celebrate. Without the norm of heterosexual monogamy, there would be no Western Civilization. But now, the pillars shake, threatening an old foundation (See Psalm 11). Gender is divorced from biology and the abnormal becomes normal and even preferable to many. The healing balm of Jesus Christ is denied since the bleeding wound is ignored.

Transgender people have rights because they are human beings, created in God’s own image. We should love them and anyone who cannot seem to find a home in their biology. As Francis Schaeffer wrote in The God Who is There, “We should have compassion for the homophile,” using a word no longer in the cultural currency. Love, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “rejoices in the truth” (I Corinthians 13). We should speak “the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) in the power of the Holy Spirit. We should not speak lies in love, thinking the abnormal to be normal and good. We should not speak the truth in hate, thinking that our correctness justifies bitterness. We should weep, but not let the tear corrode our Christian conscience.

Book Note at WTSbooks: The Institutes, even more readable

At WTSbooks.com, they write about Calvin’s Everyman Edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion–a book I commend to all as a classic of Christian history and of Western Literature:

Also available at Amazon.

 

Word-Centered Church, Jonathan Leeman

I am excited to see Jonathan Leeman’s, Word-Centered Church (Moody Publishers), in print as a repacking of a very good earlier work, Reverberation. Leeman especially does a great job of helping the church member understand how God uses the preached word to conform our lives into the image of Christ. His work is a good place to start in order to see a case for enjoying Scripture daily as a joyous love exchange between the believer and our Lord. (“Is that in the book?” Yes, if you read it prayerfully and with discernment.)

I also am excited to see O Palmer Robertson’s, The Christ of Wisdom. Reading Robertson’s understanding of the literary structure of the Psalter and individual psalms was so rich that I am eager to see how he complements that study as he goes through the rest of the major books of biblical poetry.