Preached on: Sunday 11th February 2024
The sermon text is available as subtitles in the Youtube video (the accuracy of which is not guaranteed). A transcript of the sermon can be made available on request. There is no PowerPoint PDF accompanying this message.
Bible references: Matthew 4:1-11
Location: Brightons Parish Church
Preached on: Sunday 11th June 2023
The sermon text is available as subtitles in the Youtube video (the accuracy of which is not guaranteed). A transcript of the sermon can be made available on request. There is no PowerPoint PDF accompanying this sermon.
Bible references: Hebrews 11:29-12:3
Location: Brightons Parish Church
Preached on: Sunday 30th October 2022
The sermon text is given below or can be download by clicking on the “PDF” button above. There is no PowerPoint PDF accompanying this sermon.
Bible references: Isaiah 53:10-54:10 & 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
Location: Brightons Parish Church
Father God, send your Holy Spirit upon us now so that we might hear You in the preaching of Your Word.
Make us open to Your wisdom. Make us receptive to Your will and courageous in response as You speak. Lord, help us to listen. Amen.
Nostalgia, nostalgia is such a lovely thing. Remember the old days, those glorious times when everything seemed to go so smoothly, when things worked and people cared about each other, when people cared about their friends and their neighbors and those they meet up with now and again. Perhaps they even cared about who came to church and who they should be inviting to come along. And, in those days, there seemed to be such unity in the workplace and in the neighborhood. Everyone looked out for each other. And did it not seem as God, as though God was much closer to us in those good old days?
The Bible tells us that the people of Israel suffered from nostalgia. They had gone through a succession of wicked rulers who had led them away from God. In fact, they were at a very low point in their history. At that particular time the kingdom of Israel had been divided and weakened. First, the northern and then the southern kingdom had fallen to their enemies. The land had been laid waste and the walls of the city had been torn down. Even the Temple of God, where they worshiped, had been ransacked and destroyed by their enemies. And, sadly, only a remnant of the people remained faithful to God and they were in exile. They were in exile in Babylon, a nation, a priest weeping in sorrow on the banks of the river Babylon. And they were nostalgic and they remembered Zion and they missed their Holy God; the Bible tells us. And then, through the prophet Isaiah, God speaks these wonderful words to them. He says ‘Listen to me my chosen. I am still here. You may be in Exile, you may be in change, you may be defeated and humiliated, you may be oppressed, you may be afraid, you may be forced into poverty and feeling lost and you may be weeping but you’ve never ceased to be my people. And, through the prophet, we see God opening His arms out wide to Israel, drawing them close to Him, telling them where their comfort lies and where their healing is to be found.
Folks, we must listen, we must listen because the God of Nations, the God of the universe, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is also the God of individuals, of you and of me, and He sees the pain in our hearts, He sees the pain of nations, He sees the pain of struggling people and He notices every tear that is shared and every fear nurtured in the heart of every individual. And, amazingly, His Word still speaks to all the faithful who are struggling to make sense of life and all the changes that it brings. Through God’s word He comes close to us and He not only says to His people who are starting struggling ‘Receive my comfort’ He also tells them that they have a role to play in receiving that comfort. And so, God says ‘Remember this; the Holy God of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of all the Earth, so do not be afraid however desperate things might look, however desperate the future may seem, because I am the Lord Almighty, I am in control, I am the Creator God and I know you.’
I think the most assuring thing in this; is that God speaks a word of comfort to Israel of old and He speaks to people of all time and He speaks to us today because He knows us, He knows that so often we see only up to the end of our circumstances, He knows that our words become so small that they very frequently exclude God. And so, in His word of comfort, the Lord says to His people, as He says to us today ’Make your vision of me wider. If you are concerned about tomorrow, include me in because I am a redeeming God, I am the God of tomorrow, I am the God of the future.’
And then God uses an allegory that the people can understand. He says ‘Make your tent, that you live in, larger. Lengthen its ropes and strengthen its pegs.’ An illustration that can be made our own because, not only as individuals, but as a church, as a group in the church, or as individual families, because I believe that prayer, prayer should be that the Lord would help, that the Lord would enlarge our tents, that in everything we face, every change we encounter, every difficult decision that we have to make, as individuals and as a church, that there is space for God. Because the message to us today is, open your eyes, open your eyes and your heart and allow the Lord God Almighty in. Allow Him to come close to you, to dwell with you in your tent. And we need to pray like Jabez in 1 Chronicles chapter four where he calls out to the Lord. He says ‘O Lord, that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me.’
‘Don’t exclude me’ says God. ‘Don’t exclude me because I want to come alongside you. Don’t exclude me because I want to walk through the waters with you. Make me part of the challenges that you face and allow me to minister to you. I know you’ says the Lord God Almighty ‘I know you. I am your Redeemer. I am the God of all the Earth so do not be afraid. I will hear your prayers and I will comfort you.’
You know, when we cry out to God with open hands and expectant hearts, when we make our bold requests to God, miracles still happen. I’m sure many of you can testify to that. And, as we come to Him in desperation perhaps, if we trust Him as we pray for whatever situation we are facing or whatever unhappiness we tend to be feeling at that time. new opportunities will emerge from our situation and the course of our lives will shift
I am the Lord God Almighty I am your Redeemer do not be afraid I will comfort you says the Lord, and then the Lord, in great compassion comes close to His people and He stands amongst them. He stands amongst the weeping exiles and He says to them through the prophet Isaiah ‘I will not only comfort you; I will save you.’
You see, Israel really needed to be saved at various levels before God brought them out of exile. He had to bring them out of the bondage, of disobedient and of spiritual laxness. They had wandered from God and then they felt deserted, not surprisingly. They felt abandoned and God had to tell them that their salvation and their liberation are to start with faith and trust in a God who saves. So again, he says through the prophet ‘I will call you back. Because of your disobedience I left you for a little while but, with deep love and compassion, I will take you back, with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you.’ If there’s one thing that sufferers through the ages have had in common it’s that sense of abandonment. ‘I’ve tried everything, nothing works! I’ve turned everywhere, I’ve had no help.’ But God’s answer to those people and to us today is found in the allegory of the extended tent. You see, a large tent needs longer ropes and stronger tent pegs in the same way that a wide spiritual vision needs a deep spiritual routing.
The Scriptures teach us that God’s love is everlasting. The Lord’s desire to redeem and to save us is for real. But here’s the thing, we have to turn to Him in fervent prayer and we must do that often and we must trust Him. Israel had to go back to these spiritual roots, they had to trust God, they had to renew their faith in Him, they had to be obedient yet again, they’re to knock in the pegs, make firm their spiritual rooting in their saving God.
And the Apostle Paul understood this deep spiritual truth very, very well. Hammering home the tent pigs of trust and faith he says to the foundling church in Corinth, he says ‘Praise be to our God and Father who comforts us all in our troubles. We are under great pressure far beyond our ability to endure but this happened so that we might not rely on ourselves but rely on God, on him we set our hope and he will continue to save us.’ What Paul’s actually saying is ‘extend that tent folks’ he’s saying ‘trust in the saving hand of God and be prepared for what God can do and will do’ not ‘be afraid’ says the Lord God ‘make firm your spiritual rooting. I know you and I will comfort you.’
But what happens when we are dissatisfied with our situation, when we feel we are at the end of our tether? Do we believe God’s Word? Do we go back there and believe that God is an all-encompassing, all-loving, all-saving God? Do we really believe that God will always be there for us? it’s a challenge folks. Because, sometimes things go wrong and we just don’t know where God is in it all.
At that particular time in the life of Israel, as a nation, they had become very inward looking and so, perhaps, they were wondering whether a promise from the Almighty Creator of the universe was enough for them to be assured, not only of their salvation but also of their future? And I wondered, as I was writing this, is it enough for you and for me, when we are up to the eyeballs in difficulties?
Well, the Word of God says that it is, of course it is, and that, for us folks, is a lifetime guarantee. ‘Remember this’ says the Lord, ‘I am the God who loves you and my love for you will never end.’
You see, the God of Israel is the God who loved the world so much that He sent His only Son, suffering servant, and He sent His Son to save that world so that whoever believes in Him will never perish but will have eternal life.
Jesus not only experienced suffering and death, as we know, He also came through that and He came through that for you and for me. And, just as new life came through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, so too, new life can be found in the deepest recesses of suffering and of difficult change that we have to experience, if we look through at it, through the eyes of faith. You see, the God who loves us is also the God who carries us, who hears our prayers, who heals us, who gives us endurance during difficult times and pours His peace into our lives. ‘Do not be afraid’ says God as He stretches out His arm to us. I don’t know why I work, I think in pictures folks, but when I read that, I can see God stretching out His arms saying ‘Do not be afraid. You are healed in the unbroken, unbreakable clasp of my everlasting love.’
We don’t have all the answers. There are so many mysteries in life and so many things that happen that we think ‘Where are we going now?’ but the one thing that we can cling to is what we know is true and that as our Lord God Almighty and His wonderful Word that encourages us every day and when we sit and remember the good old days, when we become nostalgic about the way things were when we were younger, the days before economic struggles, before high petrol and heating and food prices, before Presbytery Mission Plans and all the change that that will bring, when we become nostalgic folks, we must remember that our God is the God of all the earth and He wants us to include Him in and He tells us to extend our tents, to broaden our spiritual vision, to broaden our vision and our knowledge of Him because He is the God who saves. He wants us to trust Him always. He is a God who shows his love to all of humankind. No one is excluded. And He tells us to knock in the tent pegs deeply and deepen our roots of faith.
And also, as always, the Lord has the last word and He says ‘The mountains and the hills may crumble, but my love for you will never end. I will keep forever my promise of peace’ so says the Lord who loves you and who loves me. Amen, and thanks be to God.
Preached on: Sunday 29th May 2022
The sermon text is given below or can be download by clicking on the “PDF” button above. There is no Powerpoint pdf accompanying this sermon.
Bible references: Luke 24:36-47 & Acts 1:3-12
Location: Joint Upper Braes Churches
They were trying their very best, just like you are, to look up and to see Jesus but the Bible says that a cloud came down and hid Him from their sight. And then two angels came and they said to them ‘Why are you looking up like that? Jesus will come again one day,’ the angel said ‘just as he left, he will come again.’
When Jesus went to heaven it was the end of His work that He had to do here on earth. He had done everything His Father, God, had told him to do and now it was time to do even more work for the people of the world.
God had sent Jesus to earth as a baby. Remember, we talked about that at Christmas time. Jesus was born in Bethlehem but now that He had finished all His work here on earth, He had to go back to heaven to be the connecting point to people all over the world, so that the love of God could be seen in every place on earth.
But, just think about it, the disciples, those closest friends of Jesus, they didn’t want Him to go, they wanted to hold on to Jesus. I don’t know for how long but they were, they really didn’t want Him to go. They were so scared that they would never see Him again they didn’t want to lose that wonderful connection that they had with Him. But the Bible teaches us that Jesus and His love is still connected to every single person in the world.
Look up, the balloon is pretty high, but we can still hold on to it because there’s a cord attached to it and in the same way we still have the connection to Jesus, the love of Jesus, so that we are never lost forever. He is with us always. Every one of us can remain connected to Jesus, to the heart of Jesus and to the love of God. The very last words that Jesus spoke before he ascended to heaven were ‘I will be with you, always, even to the end of time.’ Jesus is never far away from us. We will always have a connection with Him because of His love for us, because of the love of God for each one of us. We love Jesus that’s why we are here today. We have come to praise Him and to say pray to Him, to sing our lovely songs and to join with the children in rejoicing that Jesus is with us.
But we have a job also to do, and that job is to hold onto the connection, to hold onto Jesus. to hold onto Him through our faith and through our prayers. And we have another big job to do and that is to tell everybody that Jesus loves them just as He loves us, just as He loves you and just as He loves me. We must tell others that they too have a connection to Jesus and that His love is for each one of them. Amen, and thanks be to God.
Preached on: Sunday 13th March 2022
The sermon text is given below or can be download by clicking on the “PDF” button above. There is no Powerpoint pdf accompanying this sermon.
Bible references: Psalm 40:1-10 & John 3:1-17
Location: Brightons Parish Church
Let us pray:
Father God, we pray that as we come around Your word now, that You will fill us with Your Spirit that You would open our ears Lord, so that we can hear You speaking to us, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him.’
These are words that summarize the entire Gospel for us. The core of the Christian message for us is ‘God loves you’ and God wants us to know that, and that is why Jesus was sent into the world to live among us, to suffer for us, and to rise again for us
and, in some ways, this has a major implication for us because it changes the way in which we should see God, it changes how we experience God in our lives, Jesus’ influence in the world.
But what he said and by what he did, established a foundation for all Christians and for the body of believers such as we are here today. The church and this foundation is all that Christians are to communicate to each other and to the world. God is love. In fact, the scriptures teach us that love is the very nature and being of God and it’s this message that Jesus was communicating to Nicodemus and so, we see that in His conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus wanted to do a couple of things and the first of these is that Jesus wanted to set Nicodemus free from a wrong perception of God.
Nicodemus had everything going for him. He was in the inner circle of the Jewish leaders. He was wealthy. He had status. He was a member of the elite Jewish council and he was considered to be very knowledgeable. However, Nicodemus had a particular perception of God and how to enter God’s kingdom, and that perception was not correct. As a Jewish leader, he had dedicated his life to this way of living. Nicodemus was traveling down a road of what he thought was important, of doing everything correctly, a road that suggests that unless you do everything 100% correctly, God will reject you forever. Nicodemus thought that God’s biggest priority was to select the elite for a place in heaven and to reject everyone else. In other words, he thought that God was like a grumpy old judge boss who would severely punish anyone who didn’t perform absolutely perfectly and there were no second chances.
I wonder how many of us have thought about God in that way? That God wants to condemn rather than to save? There are some folk who have a picture of judgment day, one where there is a huge television screen, let’s call it, showing a DVD of your life and that you will be fast forwarding your story pausing every now and then to point out all the sinful parts of your lives, parts where you made wrong choices. Of course, this is certainly not so. Such a picture tells only a really small and distorted part of the story. On judgement day there may well be a showing of a film of our lives but I feel certain that, from what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus, that what we are told throughout the scriptures, that God will be highlighting those occasions when He has been at work in our lives, like when we were created, like when we were accepted into God’s family in baptism, like when God gave us opportunities to develop as a person, as a Christian, when God molded us as a result of our experience of Him, experiences in worship, in prayer, Bible study, in fellowship with other Christians, and every time some of the perhaps not so good things of our lives are shown, Jesus will be standing right there saying ]I already paid for that. Don’t worry, I already paid for that.’
Nicodemus had a completely different way of thinking about God. No doubt, he sought to keep all the main man-made rules of his religion as well as the law, of course, which God had given to Moses. Nicodemus was a religious man, he was an upright man, he was a teacher, and he was respected in society and yet, Nicodemus knew within himself that something was missing in his life, and so convinced by the miracles of Jesus that he had seen and those that he had heard of, Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness and Jesus explains to him the nature of God’s love, the nature of God’s love for all of humankind, that God’s love is not static or self-centered, but that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’
Christ came to save. Christ did not come to condemn. Why? Because God considers mankind special, and that includes each one of us, and he calls us to come closer to Jesus and not just for today, but every day. God’s love reaches out and draws others in, draws us in as well. God sets the pattern of true love. When we love somebody dearly, we are willing to give freely of ourselves, even to the point of sacrifice. God paid dearly with the life of His Son. The highest price that anyone could pay. Jesus paid the price for your sins and for mine, and then He offered to all of us, if we believe in Him, a life, a new life that He bought for us. And the message Jesus wanted to convey to Nicodemus was that he needed to allow God to be his influence and not all those other things in his life. Not the religious ritual he was accustomed to. Jesus wanted to set Nicodemus free from the wrong perception that he had of God, and then Jesus wanted to make Nicodemus aware of the radical nature of God’s love and to emphasize to him that, in order to receive the gift of eternal life, one must be born again of the Spirit.
Jesus says to Nicodemus ‘You are a respected Jewish teacher but I assure you no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born again. Humans can reproduce human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to Spiritual life.’
Unfortunately, Nicodemus was struggling with a concept of being born. He finds it really difficult to grasp this way of thinking so we hear him saying to Jesus in verse 3 to 11 ‘How can a man be born again when he is old? Surely he can’t enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born.’ See Nicodemus was looking at Spiritual matters from an earthly perspective. When Jesus speaks about being ‘born again’ Nicodemus is scratching his head,. trying to work out how it might be possible to crawl back into his mother’s womb. The thing is that, Nicodemus was too focused on what he had to do to receive the gift of eternal life/ Of course, that’s part of our nature. We find and it was part of his nature too. We find that really difficult to understand and probably most people on their faith journey will struggle with that concept too, because, most often in our faith journey, we are overly concerned about what we do, and what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus and to us today, it’s not about what you do, it’s about what God is doing for you, and what God does for you, changes you, changes your status with God. For each of us it begins and ends with a baptism based on faith. The day we were baptized is the day that we can say God claimed us for His own, it is the day we began being influenced by God, it’s the day we can say we are committed to being in a relationship with our triune God, it is from then on that we make God the influence of our lives. This relationship is absolutely important because without it we are allowing things other than God, to influence us and the influence of God has, that in the influence God has on our lives is to constantly remind us and to demonstrate to us He loved the world so much that he gave His one and only Son that when we believe in Him, we will not perish but we will have the gift of eternal life.
The message of Jesus is clear. It’s a message that will transform us. It’s a message that will allow us to take a careful look at ourselves. It’s a message that, when we give our hearts to Jesus, we will take on a new road a road of recovery and discovery, where we will find so much joy in knowing that we are loved by God. It is this message that transformed Nicodemus and we see this in John chapter 7 and verse 50 where Nicodemus tries to defend Jesus. We also see it in John chapter 19 when, after the crucifixion of Jesus, Nicodemus goes with Joseph of Aramathia to wrap the body of Jesus with spices and sheets of linen cloth. In fact, we are told in the scriptures that Nicodemus brought 32 kilograms of perfumed ointment with which to provide for Jesus burial.
Jesus had made it clear to Nicodemus that only a radical change in following God can lead to eternal life and certainly the message of Jesus took Nicodemus away from the road where he was primarily focused on himself and what he was doing the things that he thought were important to gain that space that elite space in God’s kingdom. The message of Jesus took Nicodemus to a place where he allowed Christ to do the work for him, to save him and to grant him eternal life.
But the concept of being born again remains difficult to grasp and, while most of us may have had a really good understanding of God’s message through Jesus Christ, as a body of believers, as the church of Jesus Christ in Scotland, our task is also to do all that we can in order that people can hear and experience the message of John 3,16 and that of verse 17 that God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him.
When I hear how people came to join the church, to join a congregation, or came back to church after being away for a lot of years, it’s often as a result of something, something new that they have experienced. In most cases, it was how another Christian brother or sister had related to them or treated them. How people were patient with them in answering their questions. How people were displaying the fruits of the Spirit which we find in Galatians chapter five – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. These are not actions that we have or that we are born with. These are actions that arise out of having a strong relationship with God and in this relationship we are influenced by God as a result of our earnest prayer times, of regular Christian worship, of Bible reading, Bible study and a fellowship with other believers and when we serve the church, when we serve our families and the various communities in which God has placed us, giving of our time and our talents and our money for God’s work, we are also encouraging others to grasp hold of the message of Jesus Christ, to set aside the things of the world and be born again.
A question we can ask ourselves today – Is the message of John 3 16 to 17 being clearly communicated in every experience people have with a church in which we serve? Are the people experiencing the message of John 3 16 to 17 when they cross our path? Are they experiencing that God loves them, that God welcomes them, wants them to be safe and wants them to be in heaven with Him? Are they hearing that God came to save them, not to condemn them, or to forget about them, because He considers them special? Are we, as a church of Jesus Christ, vehicles of God’s love?
In John chapter 4 and verse 9 we read ‘God showed his love for us by sending his only son into the world so that we might have life through him.’ The love of God is expressed through His offer to us, of a chance to join His Spiritual family and to live forever.
The starting point though, the starting point is to receive the gift of Christ and thereby taking up the offer of eternal life. So, how does this transformation happen in a believer? It is nothing less than the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God who is love and for those who obey his word 1 John 2 verse 5 God’s love is truly made complete in them. And this is how we know we are in union with Him: whoever claims to live in Him, must walk as Jesus walked. God’s love is not just expressed in the fact that Jesus was willing to die for mankind, for you and for me, but that He lives for us, that He is in us and that is also, through us, God’s love is expressed on how much we live like Jesus, and that is the plan of God. You see, the plan of God in the world is that the kingdom of God should grow, that is why God’s Spirit works through us and we must be really attentive to that. God’s love originates and finds its birth in the stable of our hearts. God’s plan to put love in the world started with the birth of Jesus Christ but includes the rebirth of you and of me and our task is to keep ourselves in God’s love as we wait for the mercy of our Lord to bring Jesus Christ alongside of us and to take us to be with Him for all eternity. To Him who is able to keep us from falling and present us before His glorious presence, the only God, our Savior, be glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.