Sermon: Is the LORD Among Us or Not?
Jesus tells them that tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God ahead of them. His cousin, John the baptizer, came with the good news and the religious elite didn’t listen but the social outcasts did. Birthday parties for prostitutes, receptions for tax collectors, banquets for lepers and sinners and ragamuffins. The mercy of God has been on full display with all of the wrong sorts of people getting in like Flynn to the kingdom of God and it has not moved the religious crowd toward conversion, confession, or conviction.
Instead, their hearts have calcified.
He says: And even after you saw it, you didn’t change your mind and believe.
Again, I ask, Is the LORD among us or not?
Sermon Commentary: Are You Envious Because I am Generous?
You cannot preach against contempt by giving the congregation someone new to condemn or hold in contempt. The only way to preach against contempt is to throw yourself, your sermon, and your congregation on the rock that is Christ, on the ground that is holy, on the bush that burns yet is not consumed, on the lavish and radiant love of Almighty God which purges, purifies, convicts, converts, rescues, and redeems.
Sermon: Are You Envious Because I am Generous?
And of all the audacious acts that Nineveh could conceive, it never occurred to Jonah that they just might accept the invitation. Despite his eventual willingness to see the mission through to completion, Jonah had not wrapped his mind around the great grandiosity of God’s graciousness or the magnificent might of his mercy.