The Joshua Victor Theory

  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Happy Fourth of July! I want to preach this Independence Day on the meaning of freedom. But definitions always matter, as words are constantly redefined or changed, and you can’t take for granted that your words mean what someone else thinks, without clarification. You need common meaning to really communicate. So, what is freedom? What freedom does St. Paul mean in Galatians 5, when He says: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery… For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” Freedom gets many definitions. Do we mean the same thing? Martin Luther describes three kinds of freedom. Spiritual freedom; political or civil freedom; and freedom of the flesh. Let’s consider these three freedoms and what they mean for our nation’...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. 1 Peter 2 beautifully pictures our growth and sanctification in the Christian faith, and teaches what the Christian church is. We aren’t lone individuals, but members of the spiritual house of Christ.  Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation--if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.  Peter calls us back to the basics.  Infants crave pure milk because it is their life, their growth, and even the sharing of their mother’s immunity. The pure milk we crave is God’s Word. As a new Christian learns the words of faith, they start to explore what it means to trust in Jesus and follow Him. But even mature Christians still depend completely on God for salvation. Jesus used infancy as a picture of our complete dependency on God.  Jesus’ disciples frequently became competitive in an unhealthy way, glory-seeking, exalting ...

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...