Pastor's Corner: WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

  “He must increase, I must decrease” John 3:22-30 Introduction: One of the things that may surprise us when we pick up the New Testament for the first time, is the fact that we have four Gospels that tell us about the life and ministry of Jesus. Why didn’t God give us a single, complete biography of the Lord? Some scholars have tried to help us out by putting together a harmony of the Gospels. Those works can be useful to guide us to see the connected history of Christ, helping us to understand that the gospels do in fact complement one another, they don’t contradict. Even so, by God’s design, the inspired record, the Bible, gives four parallel and complementary Gospels. Each one has its own emphases in terms of theology and pastoral concerns. All four Gospels agree on the fundamentals: Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Son of God, and He came in fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament. He came to give His life so that fallen humans could be reconciled to Holy God. He...

  Come to the Light! John 3:11-21 Introduction: Thinking of the theme of “light and darkness,” I remembered a night about 20 years ago, when I was teaching an evening class at the Baptist Seminary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The class was proceeding normally, when suddenly, the lights went out, we were plunged into darkness. The power grid was not always reliable, and brief outages sometimes happened. For a couple of minutes, I tried to continue lecturing in the dark, but that was not going to work, it was difficult enough for the students to understand my “Americanized” Portuguese with the lights on and PowerPoint illustrating the lecture! I had some papers to return to the students, and several of them had cell phones, so with the light of their phones they came forward and got their papers. Then we dismissed the class. As I left the school and began the drive home, I was surprised as I drove, mile after mile, the city of over 15 million people was in darkness. Traffic lights were not ...

 You Must Be Born Again! John 3:1-12 Introduction: Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died about six weeks ago, at the age of 100, the longest life of any US president. He was not particularly effective during his four years as president, but he did devote himself to a life of service when he left office, and really had a big part in the growth of Habitat for Humanity, which has done a lot of good for many families. Some of you remember that President Carter did openly profess to be a born-again Christian. I had heard the term “born again” when Jimmy Carter was running for president, but I really had no idea what it meant. Most of you know that one of the things the Lord used to bring me to faith was serving on a jury that heard a murder trial, that was late in the Carter presidency. A couple of the questions asked perspective jurors were, “would you describe yourself as a Christian?” And, “Does the term born again mean anything to you?”  One perspective ju...

The Son, Signs, and Saving Faith John 2:23-25; 20:30,31 Introduction: John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account of the story of Jesus written to reveal the glory of the Passover-King, and to evoke faith, trust in who He is and what he did for us. John didn’t claim to write an exhaustive “biography” of Jesus, telling everything he said and did.  In fact, he wrote in the very last verse of the Gospel,  “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).  He was selective and purposeful. We’ve looked at his statement of purpose in 20:31,  “Many other signs did Jesus in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. These have been written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name.”   John wrote to lead his readers to authentic faith, the fai...