The Kingdom of Heaven, as prophesied in the Old Testament, was inaugurated after John the Baptist's death. This Kingdom is not a physical place, but God's rulership on Earth through Christ. Salvation comes not through good works, but solely through faith in Jesus' perfect life and sacrificial death. When we trust in Christ, we receive forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, uniting us with Jesus. This union with Christ is the essence of the New Covenant, offering a closeness to God at a new level than that available in the Old Covenant.
"We have been talking about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. And we've been talking about in the New Covenant begins for us, the moment we come to Christ and we're justified. And then followed by our sanctification, a process that the Holy Spirit pushes us along in and calls on our cooperation to help. And then finally there is that glorification when we get to heaven or some people refer to it as going to glory. And in that middle step of sanctification, a part of the agenda of the Lord is that he wants us to grow more and more to be like him."
"Have you ever wondered why the Gospel calls us to make a confession of Christ? And it's rather interesting in evangelism when you know that the message itself is asked for people to believe. But the way that Jesus talked to the crowds, he sometimes finished up with calling on them to make a response."
"What's interesting about these times when God breaks in with grace and calls upon faith is that it has a word that's used about it a way of writing and it's in our passage that we had in the Bible reading about Jesus talking to the Jerusalemites of how they did not know their time of visitation and the word visitation is used and I've been chasing up ever since that home group about the meaning of the visitation discovering it to be quite a technical word."
"Probably no bigger topic is there within Christendom than wherein lies the authority that we have to believe the things that we so do. What is the basis of our faith? Is it just presumption? Is it just our feelings? Is it just formed by sociological factors in our childhood and in our society? And of course, the scriptures speak about God being the ultimate authority, and so if we were to isolate something to be the course or the method, the way His authority gets to us, then that will answer the question, how does God tell His story?"
"I also want to say that it was a joy for me to come this morning here and I immediately saw a beautiful illustration of what I'm going to be getting into from our passage, which is from the Beatitudes. And we're up to the one where Jesus said, blessed are those, well it's there on the screen for you to see, verse 7, blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. And about the relationship of what exactly is mercy, how does it differ from grace, what is going on in the Beatitudes as Jesus is talking about how to come to God in the early ones."
"He's actively taking me through hard times that have forced me to acknowledge my own weakness and my lack of ability to do anything to save myself and to cling only to Him because He will hold me fast."
Bible Text: 1 John 4:7-8, Ephesians 1:6-10, Jude 1:21, Romans 5:6-10 | Speaker: Rev Dr Jim Gibson
Bible Text: John 17:6-19, 1 John 2:2, Romans 5:5 | Speaker: Rev Dr Jim Gibson