Sermons

"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."

"The topic that I thought would be good for tonight is to talk about something that there are differing opinions about, and that has to do with the idea of the rapture of the Christians or the saints."

"But we're following Jesus because if you really want to learn about the Christian life, then he's the one to follow. And the more closely you follow him, the better you're off. And so we're looking at the temptations of Jesus and the usual wisdom that people draw out of them is sometimes a bit mixed as to whether they've actually hit the nail on the head as to what it's all about."

"Jesus only did what he saw the Father leading him or what the Father led him by the Spirit to do. And the words that he gave were the words of the Father. Jesus was the conduit of the kingdom of heaven, now down on earth, by virtue of him being that Messiah. He was expected by the Jewish nation, and that's who he was. And someone here has very nicely fixed that book and left it out on the table there by taking something and sticking it over that last page, it just says God, and allowing the final page to be the previous one, which very clearly says who he is, that he is the Son of God."

"That's what this morning I want to explain to you, that when Jesus passed the test in the temptation, he did the thing that he had to do in order to be on the track to be your saviour. You don't have to pass the test."

"It is one of the joys of my time here in Salisbury to go around to the different home groups, and they're on different nights of the week, though there is one night where there's three of them, so I don't get to those three as often as the others, but to go around and to hear what God's people of our church are learning from the Word of God."

"So while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said you heard from me. Then there is what amounts to a clue, is to understand this, he says, for John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days, the old version said hence, and the modern version says from now."

"We are in the part of Matthew's Gospel which leads us to learn about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. I don't know whether you're used to listening to church services which make us say the Lord's Prayer."