Sermons from Tim Reed

Matthew - Jewish writer, relates the story of the magi who were gentiles. Matthew was also a tax collecter, so chances are he was in financially difficult circumstances, and being a tax collecter made him despised by his fellow Jewish comrades. The magi were rather well off and respected in their culture.

Luke - Gentile writer, a doctor. Now, given, I don’t know what all being a doctor consisted of in the 1st century, but I have to guess it provided a decent life, and involved not a whole lot of manual labor, and probably brought some esteem with it. Luke writes about a bunch of shepherds. They were uneducated, scraped out a living, extremely blue collar and Jewish.

Each of the writers of the nativity writes about a different group visiting Jesus. And each of the writers writes about a group that is the polar opposite of what they are.

Mini-outline.
I. Luke and the Shepherds.
II. Matthew and the Magi.
III. Jesus drawing people from all backgrounds.
- The church reaching out to all people.
* Cultural backgrounds.
* Sin backgrounds.
- Unity issues within the church.

This sermon takes on 1 John 5 and is titled Follow Through.

You can download the powerpoint.

And listen to the sermon:

 

 Follow Through [23:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

1. These non-Jewish sorcerers knew about Jesus before the vast majority of the Jewish people. They were probably top 20 out of millions.

2. They practiced non-Judaism religion and lived far far from the holy land, and yet God reached out to them.

3. Herod strong-armed everyone, why didn’t he strong-arm the magi?

This would be a sermon series based on seeming contradictions in scripture (ie lose your life to save it, first become last and last first, weak to be strong etc).

Maybe as a crowd partcipation hook having the crowd say “that makes no sense” or something along those lines after the intro of the title of each sermon would be a good way to go.

This sermon covers 1 John 4. The first section deals with identifying trustworthy teachers, preachers, and methodologies, and the second with loving our brothers.

Powerpoint

 

 Eureka and Love [22:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sunday nights we’ve been going through Matthew and we’re on the visit of the magi to Jesus this week. Someone asked this question: if Herod believed in God, and believed the scriptures (which being an Edomite, and consulting priests when the magi inquire about the King of the Jews indicates he leaned that direction) then why did he act the way he did? Here he is slaughtering people to stay in power, the scriptures themselves say, “When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.” Its a despotic ruler that causes his subjects to be disturbed when he is disturbed.

So why did he act that way? I have a couple of ideas.
1) He just didn’t care. He was more interested in consolidating power in the here and now than in the eternal.
2) Justification. Sure what he did was wrong but it kept the Romans from wiping out the Jews.

Of course this doesn’t take into account how he expected to keep the Messiah who was sent by God from coming. I suppose after wielding power so successfully in his own service for so long you think you can make war on God Himself and win, call it the boastful pride of life. Either that or Herod thought this was yet another false messiah and wanted to keep people from getting all stirred up.

From here:Lacking Knowledge Essentials

Synopsis: Guy gets sent on business trip to decieve a company for long enough for his company to create a product that didn’t exist. Due to the incompentence of the buyer no deception is necessary as long delays result in the production of the new product on schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

John gets into the nitty gritty of preventing sin. The nuts and bolts of this part of the Christian life are the topic of the day.

Powerpoint and the mp3 of it is below.

 

 Theory and Reality [26:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Focusing on the last words of individuals in scripture.

Jesus (duh).
“Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Obedience to God to the point of death could be a theme, maybe a look at martrys, starting in Acts. That same passage includes the bit with the temple curtain tearing in two, and another (or only) theme could be the reconciliation of God and humanity through the death of Christ.

Joshua.
Just before his death Joshua gathered together the people and had them swear to remain faithful to God. Themes include the necessity of faithful leaders for a faithful people (Joshua 24:31), staying faithful to God even when a majority of people surrounding you aren’t (Joshua 24:15), and the faithfulness of God to his people (Joshua 24:1-15).

Moses
Of course you’ve got all of Deuteronomy to choose from here so there’s 31 chapters of material to choose from. Deut. 6:4-7 is a good place to start, in there you’ve got monotheism, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength, as well as impressing the commands of God on your heart and passing it on to your children. That’s at least an entire sermon in and of itself. But you also have Moses prophesying that God will raise up another prophet like Moses, which of course, ends up being Jesus.

Stephen
You’ve got an entire chapter’s worth of Stephen’s last words here. Needless to say you’re not covering all of it. Sticking with the theme means going with Stephen’s really last words. Here you’ve got Saul (the future Paul) holding coats and looking on which opens the door for a discussion of Paul’s change of heart. What sets off Stephen’s murderers was his mention of Jesus at the right hand of God, which flows into a discussion of the centrality of Christ, and of course you have Stephen being faithful to the point of death.

Jezebel/King Saul
Cautionary tale time.

Solomon
You’ve got all of Ecclesiastes to choose from. The general theme is the meaningless of pursuing anything but God, and Solomon ends with this little gem:

Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

It practically writes itself.

I’m sure there will be more to come….

Central Michigan is a little different from most other places in that if you drive two hours in any direction you hit a vacation spot, either at a great lake or just a good one. As a result summers get lonely as everyone takes off as much as possible. That means I have about 12 weeks in which we have sporadic attendance from a larger group than usual. As a result of this I was thinking of taking one of two extreme tacts:

1. A 12 week sermon series. I rarely go more than 5 weeks on a single series, so this would be sort of new. With people being sporadic they could miss a few weeks and still get the gist of it. But would it be too much for the people who regularly attend even through the summer?

2. A whole bunch of one shots. This way irregular attendance isn’t punished.

Oh well I have a lot of months to decide.