Hope is bittersweet. We can only experience it when things are not as we wish they were, and yet hope is the refusal to accept that as things are they must continue to be. Godly hope sees God's faithfulness in the past as a downpayment on his future faithfulness and it trusts that the difficulties…

Ezekiel's promise that God would make one people out of Judah and Israel 130 years after Israel ceased to exist is fulfilled in God joining his people with others called from the Gentiles, called out of the nations. The unified people of God serve as a sign of God's hospitality in taking on humanity...if we…

Josiah is perhaps Judah's most pious king, restoring Judah's worship of Yahweh after decades of neglect. But his desire to please God doesn't save him from making a fatal error. Josiah tries to keep the Egyptian Army from propping up the dying Assyrian Empire, but The Egyptian King is following God's direction. Both the message…

Hezekiah trusts God at a time when the stakes are huge. Facing the destruction of his people by the Assyrian Army, he hangs on to faith that God will deliver the people. We learn two lessons from this: First, that life is more than just our economic or material well-being. And secondly, God may want…

Jehoshaphat is a righteous king whose reign is upended by an ill-considered alliance with the wicked Israelite king Ahab. His story reminds us of the importance of partnering with people who have compatible core values, or we may find ourselves pressured to compromise at the most important places in our lives.

The interaction between Ahab and Naboth shows the misunderstanding that happens between people pursuing God's vision of a good life and people who pursue a vision of the good life that based in cultural assumptions. The church is called to devote itself to an alternative vision of the good life, so we will likewise be…

Jeroboam has an iron-clad promise from God that he will be blessed if he obeys, but because he can't imagine how God will keep his promise, he goes his own way with disastrous consequences for both his family and nation. Like Jeroboam, we also have promises from God. Do we choose to believe them, or…

Saul, the first king of Judah, is overwhelmed by his duties. But instead of his uncertainty leading him to trust God more, it leads him to a toxic form of insecurity that destroys his reign. He serves as a cautionary tale for believers about the importance of faith in God when things are difficult.

The final section of the Apostles' Creed looks, on first inspection, like a random grab bag of leftovers, but the common theme that runs through it is the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who believe. By the Spirit, we overcome our differences to become a single church, by the spirit's…

Jesus' humiliation leads to his eventual exaltation as he is raised and ascends to heaven. This week we look at The Apostles' creed where it says that after three days Jesus rose from the dead, he ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father Almighty and from there he will…

In this sermon we look at the first half of the second article of the Apostles' Creed: The passages about the suffering of Jesus. The Son is God's message about himself to the world, and it is a very different message about God than we might suppose.

In this first installment of our dive into the Apostles' Creed, we look at what it means to say, "I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Belief in God means acting in accordance with the belief that God is Father--he loves what he has created. It means believing that God…