Episode Details

I'll begin by reading that question.

New City Catechism, question 50, that's there in your bulletin.

It says, what does Christ's resurrection mean for us?

And the answer is that Christ triumphed over sin and death by being physically resurrected so that all who trust in him are raised to new life in this world and to everlasting life in the world to come.

Just as we will one day be resurrected, so this world will one day be restored.

But those who do not trust in Christ will be raised to everlasting death.

Essentially, that's just a summary of Revelation 19 through 22.

I'm going to start a short, well, Lord willing, we'll see where it goes, short topical series on the image of God.

The first thing you can pray for is that I can find my notes somewhere in this Bible.

Oh, there they are.

Before I do that, I'm going to explain why I don't normally preach topical series.

I mean, if you've been here very long and pretty much everybody here has long enough to know that normally we're preaching, like I'm working through a particular section of scripture or a whole book of the Bible.

And the reason for that is, is because we want to hear from God.

Like the whole point of gathering to worship is to, to gather together, to go to God, to hear what he has to say to us.

And, and if you.

I don't mean to cast aspersions on people who do things differently but when it's up to the preacher every week to decide like what are we going to look at in the sense of whatever his whims are or I came up with this really creative sermon series idea and if you do that consistently there's just going to be holes in what we hear as a church because my knowledge is limited my interests are limited so even if it's not you get

There are people who are crafting series specifically just to tickle people's ears and draw them in so they can fill seats.

But even if it's not, even if there's no bad intentions, just if it's up to me to have the creativity to decide how, what should we address, there's going to be big holes in our knowledge.

And the Apostle Paul, when he was speaking to the Ephesian elders in the book of Acts, said he had declared to them the whole counsel of God.

And I think the most consistent and

Ready, reliable way to do that is to simply pick a text of scripture and as we encounter things in that text, teach them.

We're going to come across things that way that I wouldn't have thought to or that I would be uncomfortable with and would shy away from.

But if we're moving through the text consecutively, God is going to confront us with unexpected things that comfort us and unexpected things that challenge us over and over again.

And I think it's the

The Healthiest Way, the easiest way to grow deep in our knowledge of the Lord.

And as he blesses and does give growth in terms of the number of people coming, that it will be healthy growth, not just something that's a flash in the pan.

All that to say, that's not what we're doing right now.

There are things that come up in the life of the

The Church or The Life of the Community or Our Nation that sometimes trigger in my mind, like, we need a series on that.

So last year, I felt like it was really important to do a series on the topic of what does a healthy church look like?

And so we did eight or nine weeks on that.

And then this summer, I was just personally struggling with hope.

And so we spent four or five weeks, whatever it was, looking biblically at the subject of hope.

This particular series, as we were working through the book of Genesis, at the end of chapter one back in October, we had a sermon on verses 26 through 31 of chapter one, where God creates man in his own image, male and female, he created them.

And I had like one paragraph towards the end, just trying to connect that to s