Author: Matthew Weber

Good morning, everyone! I hope you’re ready to get a little intense because the topic for today is Truth. Truth is especially important because God identifies Himself with the Truth. In John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is a bold statement. Especially in our post-truth culture. Here Jesus claims that He, God, is the truth, and that He is exclusively the way to the Father.

A lot of people don’t like truth claims enough as it is, but here we have an exclusive one. That’s an extra big no-no in our culture. But as you’ll soon see, truth is always exclusive, because the truth simply is what it is whether you like it or not. My hope with this sermon is to give us all a deeper regard for truth, understand that truth is found in God, and encourage us all to stand for and spread the truth of Christ.

In these days, people like to talk about “subjective truth,” that is, truth determined by and for the individual. You can’t tell anyone what the truth is because everyone’s got their own brand. In fact, if you try to intrude on someone’s personal truth party, you get called arrogant. The irony of course being that it is incredibly arrogant to think that one may determine what the truth is for oneself. If my personal truth is true, and your personal truth is true, and we disagree, then neither of us are right because we have a contradiction. The very word “truth” implies objectivity, or the existence of facts that are unaffected by what you think.

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Good morning, everyone! Are you ready to get into some really mind-bending stuff, or is it too early for that? Alright, wake up and get your thinking caps on because today we’re talking about one of the most profound doctrines of Christianity. The Trinity! How many of you struggle to understand the Trinity? Well, technically we all do. It’s a concept that goes beyond human understanding. Perhaps some of you even wonder where we get this idea from. Hopefully what I have to share with you today will help you understand it just a little bit better, or at least show you where exactly our understanding falls short, and reveal to you why we hold this doctrine.

I chose this topic because the Trinity truly matters. It has to do with God’s fundamental nature. It has to do with what God has revealed about Himself, and when God reveals something about Himself, that is a precious thing to be received, meditated on, and guarded. Received, because when God speaks we have to accept what He says whether we get it or not. Meditated on, because it’s important to better know the One we worship. And guarded, because as with all doctrines, opposition rises against it and we need to be equipped to counter that. Unfortunately, opponents of the Holy Trinity have gotten rather loud as of late, and I fear that we’ve taken this doctrine for granted. It may very well be that many of us just aren’t rooted enough in knowledge to handle these critics, and as a result, some may fall into error or be discouraged.

Of course, the Trinity is the doctrine that God exists as one being who is three coequal and coeternal persons. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now everyone agrees that the Father is God. If there’s a group out there that denies the deity of the Father, I’m not aware of their existence. And frankly, I’m not sure how it would be possible to come to that conclusion. We really only need to examine the scriptures that teach the deity of the Son and the Spirit to get our Trinitarian train rolling.

Let’s start with the Son and see in scripture where Jesus is revealed to be God.

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Howdy folks! I’m going to make a conscious effort to speak a little more slowly than usual today because I know I tend to talk way too fast when reading something. Hah!

Anyway, today I’d like to discuss everyone’s favorite topic. Sin. More specifically, I want to impart a deeper understanding of sin to assist in combating it. Of course, we can always appeal to the fact that God said such and such action is evil, and He knows better than we do, and that is a perfect reason to avoid something, but you see, the human heart tends to drift. Even though we know consciously that something is sin, and we really shouldn’t do it, our hearts can feel very distant from that reality. The eyes of our hearts become blind to just how bad sin is, and we get numb to the truth of the matter. We think things like: “What’s the harm? Surely, I could get away with a little something here and there. I’ve been good lately. Maybe this really isn’t that bad after all.” We are masters of self-deception when there’s something we really want that we shouldn’t have, and sometimes we don’t even notice that we’re deceiving ourselves. As Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

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SERMON

The Riches of God’s Love

Matthew Weber

Good morning! Fancy seeing you here. Today I thought we should discuss a topic that has a deep effect on our perception and understanding of God. God’s character. With specific regard to His love. All too often, people have this image of God in their heads where He’s an angry deity waiting to strike them down at any second for whatever transgressions they may have committed, or that He’s perpetually disappointed in them. Sometimes we feel like God is a harsh master, and even when we look at Him as a father, we see Him as an angry one. This is a spiritually crippling misconception that often leads to mental illness in people and ruins their walk with God. So today, I want to help you truly understand the riches of God’s love toward you, and just what kind of God He really is.

A great place to start is to understand the meaning of a word that describes an essential part of God’s character. It’s a Hebrew word with no direct English translation, and that word is Hesed. It’s actually pronounced with more of a phlegm type thing going on like chesed, or chased, but I’m just going to say hesed. Hesed is often rendered as loving-kindness or steadfast love in English Bibles. Hesed is the love of God that endures. The same love God showed Israel every time he restored them after they turned on him. It is a love that is faithful, and persistent. People often think God was harsh in the Old Testament, but I find myself constantly amazed at His patience and mercy, because no matter how many times Israel left God, He kept coming back to them. His hesed prevailed time after time.

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