Sermons

"Even though the Bible teaches us that God is not willing, that any should perish, it goes on to say, but that all should come to repentance, which is to change your verdict, change your mind, to be sorry for your sin. And so there is, introduced by the scriptures themselves, these two elements that need to be held in tension, for both are true. The answer is not to find a way of thinking that chooses one and sticks to it and ignores the other, because both are in the scriptures... An antinomy is right there in the question as to whether God has chosen a sovereign or whether we've been put on the spot that our choice will make a difference."

"This morning we're in the Beatitudes in the book of Matthew in chapter 5 verses 1 to 12. And I'm planning on going through the Beatitudes, but not so much racing through the whole of them, but just one at a time and see how we go. In this particular chapter, we have Jesus going up onto a mountain... His disciples came to him and he opened his mouth, which is the best way to teach, and he taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I want to talk about what Jesus meant."

"I have grown my own personal relationship with him, my Heavenly Father. As a child, I always knew there was this big and powerful God in heaven. But realising that this big God sent his only son to earth to save me, a small individual blew my mind and made me feel so loved and precious in his sight."

"One of the things that we're finding very visible in the Gospel Record is the healing ministry of Jesus. It's actually in the Gospel of Matthew that the very spot we've been up to recently where it tells about Jesus moving from Nazareth down to Galilee and part of the purpose is for him to start his ministry. And then the text goes on to say about in that region of Caesarea on the lake side Jesus does a number of miracles. And one of the little comments there in Matthew is that all of the people who had diseases came and he healed them all."

"When God uses the 'you', when God uses an 'I', it's very strategic. God wants a relationship with you, the individual, not just the crowd. He's seeing individual people as you are, as you're sitting here. He's saying, you are someone that I have redeemed by sending my son into the world to die on the cross for your sins. I've called you by my name."

"We're in Luke chapter 9, and these are the principles for being ambassadors for Christ that we can all get."

"I want to talk tonight about one place in the earth which is lower, I believe, or one of the lowest, of any place in the earth. And it is somewhere which has a number of biblical towns that are associated with it."

"As is our normal custom, we are continuing at a slow pace to work our way through the Gospel of Matthew, and where we were at previously in Chapter 4 is moving past the temptations of Christ to begin seeing his beginning of his public ministry."

"Tonight, we're going to be looking just a little at some of the organisation of the Church that we can see written in the New Testament. The reason why we do that, of course, is that we take God's guidance to us as to how the Church should be structured, is what we find in the New Testament, and we seek to follow suit to how they organised the early Church. It doesn't mean that everything will be exactly the same today because there are some significant things that have happened that means that the Church, we have now cannot be exactly the same as the Church in the first years of its existence. The reason for that was that there were apostles who were given a definition, a qualification, that they were chosen from amongst people who had been with Jesus before his death and after his resurrection."

"We're looking at Matthew 4 and verses 12 to 17. And we're looking here at the next piece of exposition in our Gospel of Matthew. And it's rather interesting, the first reading this for this coming message was the first time I'd ever noticed something that's been there all the time, and that is that Jesus shifted home. And I wanted to talk about what was on my mind for this morning was this idea that there are times when we have to change address, change home. And Jesus went through that as well."