After a few weeks of hearing about God’s judgement, we could call this “The Gospel According to Romans 3.”
After a few weeks we are almost ready to speak to a different subject. The tone is going to change after this week and we will focus on the grace that comes through Christ Jesus.
Keeping the Law would please God but no one can do so perfectly. Circumcision, like baptism, should be an outward symbol of an inward change but the symbol is not the thing.
As we get into Romans chapter 2 keep in mind that Paul is building a case. He is heading towards something, laying the groundwork now for a conclusion later. Only God can be a perfect, righteous judge.
We will exegete the second half of Romans 1, and also address the “cult of Paul” idea and say something about bully verses.
We are starting a series in the book of Romans. We begin with a little background on the Apostle Paul and why he writes churches letters.
In John 19, John cites four things that happened at the crucifixion which fulfill Old Testament prophecies. I recently heard someone question if one of those had actually been prophesied “or was John mistaken?” It should come as no surprise that I am going to land on the side of defending the accuracy and authority of scripture but hear me out as I build a case.
Jesus didn’t speak softly and smile warmly like Mister Rogers. Sometimes he raised his voice, flipped over tables and more than once the people he spoke to picked up stones to throw at him. Jesus is God, a message that offended some but sounded like good news to others.
On this Father’s Day we are looking at a text in Ephesians that addresses husbands, wives, children and offers instructions to fathers specifically. We are going to try to answer a larger question about why God gave us families.
Just a friendly reminder: We mentioned a few weeks ago that some older sermons would be deleted to make room for new stuff. In the very early days of the website the “sermon” was posted as text. Here is an example titled The Gospel Is Our Privileged and Responsibility. Those take up very little space as far as memory on the server is concerned. About a year later we experimented with adding images and scripture slides to an audio recording. Here is a link to Getting the Gospel Right. This experiment lasted a few weeks and produced less than a dozen videos. Those are hosted on YouTube and linked from the church website, so those are not taking up any of our space here.
The videos were labor intensive and extremely time consuming to create and render in a final format that YouTube would accept. In September of 2016 we started posting the sermon audio to our church website which is hosted by WordPress. Here is a series on the first 12 chapters of Genesis. The audio player looks weird and I don’t think you can download the m4a files. These are from eight years ago, long before churches started scrambling around trying to figure out what to do during the Covid pandemic. We were somewhat ahead of the curve for a small country church back then but looking at this post today the design and the technology is outdated. This is the kind of thing we will be clearing. If you want to hear these recordings again you have a week or two then the oldest audio posts will be deleted. In 2024 we will delete sermon posts from 2016. Next year we will delete 2017 posts to make way for 2025 sermons to be uploaded. That is the plan at this time, we’ll see how it goes. I can’t imagine anyone is going back that far and listening to sermons that I preached when Obama was still in office. If you are this is last call.
Unity Baptist Church 