Today’s sermon comes from a series on the hard sayings of Jesus. These are the statements Jesus makes in his teaching that people wrestle with. They’re either hard to understand or they’re hard to do or they’re hard to accept.
This saying is particularly…
Today’s passage from Luke 13 gives us two incidents that we would call tragedies today. The first one in verse 1 took place when Pontius Pilate, the Roman colonial governor of Judea, evidently had fallen upon some political enemies and destroyed them. Wh…
Read More
Today we’re going to look at a hard saying of Jesus in Matthew 7:6. Verses 1–5 are music to modern people’s ears — there’s nothing hard or particularly difficult about the first five verses. But in the context of the entire passage, you will see why vers…
Read More
Today’s sermon comes from a series on the hard sayings of Jesus. We find many of these throughout the New Testament — sayings that are difficult to understand or accept or both. Jesus says in verse 18: “I tell you the truth … not the smallest letter, not…
Read More
Today’s sermon comes from a series on the hard sayings of Jesus. The hard sayings of Jesus, the wisdom of Jesus, are more like hard candy than chocolates. You can bite right through chocolate, but with hard candy you have to work on it, going layer throu…
Read More
Almost everybody says Jesus Christ was a great teacher, but when you actually begin studying Jesus’ teaching, he has a lot of sayings we can call “hard sayings.” They’re hard partly because they’re difficult to understand, but just as much, and maybe eve…
Read More
Today’s sermon comes from a series on the ministry and teaching of Jesus – more specifically, the hardest and most difficult sayings from Jesus. In Luke 6, to “love your enemies” is maybe the most famous of Jesus’ hard sayings. It’s a hard saying because…
Read More
Jesus thought it was important to talk about promises — truthfulness in general and promise-keeping in particular. In today’s passage in Matthew 5 he talks about swearing and oaths, which are really just promises.
The whole Bible is built on covenants, p…
Sometimes when you read Jesus’ teachings, you feel like you’ve gotten on a horse that’s much too big and much too fast for your little hands and feet, and yet off it goes, galloping away with you. This may be the case with today’s passage. There is not a…
Read More
Jesus Christ was a teacher who walked around and told people to love each other. He was kind to the poor. He laid his hands on the sick. He fed the hungry. He did all these things. But there have been lots of people who have done good things like this an…
Read More