The Joshua Victor Theory

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. The Apostle Paul was engaging in what we might call “street evangelism” in our reading from Acts 17. Paul was in Athens, Greece, the famous ancient city known in part for its great philosophers Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Paul found opportunities to speak to Jews, people at the local markets, God-fearing Gentiles, and here he goes to the Areopagus or “Mars Hill”, and found the debaters and local armchair philosophers. Everywhere he talked about faith in the True God.  Paul had to choose a different starting point with this crowd because they didn’t share the common background of the Old Testament, as the Jews and God-fearers did. Paul was provoked in his spirit--he was passionately upset--by all the idols he saw there. Worshipping false gods lowers our human dignity, because it’s a sham, and God’s first commandment is that we shall have no other gods before Him. It should stir up our e...

Sermon Outline: ·          The conclusion of a conversation (begins vs. 9): “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him says the Holy One.” Isaiah 40:25-31—God is asking, Have you considered His greatness? The size and reach of the universe? We have the most meager and inadequate measurements to try to grasp it. Man has not instructed God in wisdom or understanding, as if we could teach Him anything—neither about justice or knowledge. Compared to God, we are utterly nothing—dust, a drop in the bucket, nothing and emptiness. God is incomparable to anything we might compare Him too, and the thought of comparing Him to idols and false gods is an utter insult and foolishness. He is the One who laid down the foundations of the earth and stretched out the heavens like a tent. Our existence is momentary in comparison. ·          Don’t like to think of ourselves this way, as dust and nothingnes...

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). In the Name of the Father of Lights, and of Jesus Christ His Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Father’s day, like Mother’s Day, is not really a “church holiday”, but a national holiday that’s always on a Sunday. Even though it’s not a church festival, per se, God’s Word and the Church obviously has much good to say about the roles of fathers and mothers. But for some people, they can also be painful or awkward days for many reasons—we’ve never had a father in our life, or the father we had was bad, or because you were never able to be the father you wanted to be, or because I have fallen far short of my hopes and desires in being the “ideal dad.” But whether it awakens painful memories and awkwardness, or whether it fills you with great respect or admiration for a wonderful earthly father, for whom you are thankful,...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—the God who by His almighty power and spoken word created the heavens and the earth! Amen. The Creation account in Genesis 1 & 2 is such a rich passage that we can only scratch the surface in a single sermon. It answers the deep questions of our existence, “How did we get here? And who are we?” The simplest answer is, God created us, and we are His creatures. To be a creature means that we were specially created by our Creator—we are not self-made, we are not accidents of nature, we are not eternal—we have a beginning and an end. That relationship of creature to our Creator is a very important one, and to scratch the surface of this reading, we’re going to reflect on what was “very good” about God’s original creation and mankind’s place in it, and what is very good about our relationship as creature to Creator. We’ll contrast that to what went wrong, and how God in Jesus came to restore the good in creation. As Go...