To the Praise of His Glorious Grace

Psalm 139 This is the sermon I preached on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. In Psalm 139, David gives us a beautiful glimpse of God's infinite, inescapable, intimate, and invited knowledge of us.

Psalm 139:13-18 reads, "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you." I have been told that there has been 56 million abortions since Roe V. Wade in 1973. That is nearly an entire generation of people eliminated mainly because they did not fit into the busy and complicated circumstances of our lives. It is incredible to me that our nation, claiming to be "One Nation, Under God" considers the extermi...

Philippians 4:10-23

Philippians 4:2-9

Philippians 3:12-4:1

Philippians 2:19-3:11 In this text, Paul lays out two more examples of Christ-like humility in Timothy and Epaphroditus. These men were not ashamed of Christ and risked their lives to make Him known. Paul calls us to honor and imitate their godly lives, especially the way they found their righteousness in Christ, not themselves.

Philippians 2:12-18 In this text, Paul calls the Philippian believers and us to shine like stars in the world around us. Shining takes hard work, just as trying to make shoes shine does as well. We must discipline ourselves to be godly so our lives stand out against the backdrop of our sin-cursed and darkened world.

Philippians 2:1-11 In this passage, Paul calls the Philippian believers and us to humility as Christ so perfectly modeled it for us in descending into our dark world to go to a cross for our salvation. If He so humbled Himself for our salvation, how much more should we have humility toward others.

In Paul's letter to the church at Philippi, he writes, "do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (4:6-7). We live in a  world full of anxious people. It only takes one click of the mouse or one turn of the newspaper or one push of the remote to see a litany of possible reasons to be paralyzed with anxiety. I recently went hunting with some other men, one of which was a gun salesman at a popular outdoorsman store and he told me that people have been so arrested by anxiety with the recent news of school shootings that they are flooding to him to purchase firearms to feel a little more safe. When people used to leave their doors unlocked at night, they now feel compelled to purchase state-of-the-art security systems. When school used to be seen as a safe place, parent...

The first sentence of the Bible reads, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". Can you think of a better way to begin your new year of 2013 than to look back into the pages of ancient Scripture at the One who began all things? We are not told much about the beginning, but we are told what is important to know about it...namely that God was there. People say, "Well, who made God?" The funny thing is that even such a statement implies that there was a creator before the created. The creator who brought into existence the created was none other than God Himself. "In the beginning, God". Not, "in the beginning, dust" or "in the beginning, matter", but "In the beginning, God". How liberating it is to know that all that we see came from the hands of One omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator. I recently went with my wife to Myrtle Beach, SC where we walked along the seaside and looked out at the vast ocean before ...