Paul reminds the Thessalonians of what they experienced as they came under the influence of the preaching of the Word of God. Taking our cue from Paul, I’d like to talk about a concise theology of preaching with a view to its practical import for non-preachers. It is important to…
If there was ever a time in which the teaching of our Lord in this passage needs to be heard, it’s now. It was back in 1948 that Pitirim Sorokin sounded the alarm. He had founded the department of sociology at Harvard University. Sorokin showed that in 1910, the divorce rate in America was ten…
A sermon from the book of Job about how when the reality of this trouble comes upon us, it can seem like an all-pervasive reality to us that eclipses the reality of God in our minds. Eliphaz was realistic when he said, “man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” When you sit…
Our text is located within the history of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. The event of the exodus is a paradigm of salvation. To be sure, not every Israelite who was physically redeemed from Egypt and led through the Red Sea experienced eternal salvation (1 Cor. 10:5). Many of them did not believe and perished as…
The baptism of Jesus by John was the initiation rite marking the formal commencement of Jesus’s public ministry. And right at the outset, our Lord begins His ministry by formally identifying with the sinners He came to redeem. Hence the significance of Jesus’s baptism can be summarized in this: His vicarious identification with sinners as the sin-bearer.
Mark’s point is to show John the Baptist’s prophetic background. Isaiah prophesied of John’s coming 700 years before he was born, and Malachi, 400 years prior. The Baptist is one of the few individuals who have ever lived whose life was so historically significant that it was expressly foretold by the Prophets in the Scriptures.
Mark was probably written in Rome during the final phase of Peter’s ministry. As Peter was preaching the gospel in Rome, Mark was inspired by the same Spirit that was upon Peter to record the preaching of the apostle and to organize the material into a permanent, written testimony for the ongoing use of the…