Our passage comes from Acts chapter 5 where things begin to look dim for the followers of Christ. Beginning around this time and spanning to around AD 300, the history of the early church is filled with persecution and suffering. Christians were systemat…
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Acts is about the origins of Christianity. Whenever you go to the origins, you learn something about what genuine Christianity is — authentic, original, real Christianity. That is important because many people base, to some degree, their non-belief on wh…
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Our passage today is on the first miracle the apostles perform after the resurrection of Jesus, which is at the very beginning of the Christian church. If you want to learn about the topic of suffering, you go to the book of Job or a lot of other places …
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Our passage from Acts 2 is about the birth of the Christian church. We’re going to look at how the birth of the church is intimately related to the birth of Christ: Christmas. In many ways, what happened at Christmas explains what happens in the early ch…
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Our passage is the first Christian sermon given by Peter on the day of Pentecost. It’s important that we consider the entire sermon for the context, but we’re going to focus our time on the last four verses (36–39) and what it means to be a Christian.
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We’re going to look at a very famous episode in the book of Acts today, the day of Pentecost. What makes this unique is the descent of the Holy Spirit. There’s a sense in which the Old Testament people of God became the New Testament people of God becaus…
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The book of Acts is about how the earliest church was essentially launched into a cosmopolitan and urban setting just like ours today. Our church has never been here just for convinced, believing Christians, but it’s also here for New Yorkers who aren’t …
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Today’s passage comes from the Passion narrative found in the book of Matthew. Matthew is not just a reporter; he’s a teacher. He doesn’t just tell us that Jesus died, but he always builds the narratives around certain statements and sayings that interpr…
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We’ve been going through the book of Matthew looking at the big blocks of teaching Jesus gives his disciples for how he wants his followers to live. While the Sermon on the Mount was mainly about how Christian disciples would relate to each other, starti…
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We’ve come to the end of the Sermon on the Mount. It would be very profitable if we went through and took each of these metaphors Jesus ends the sermon with. You notice there are always two. There are two gates. There are two roads. There are two trees. …
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