Sermon Video: The Shepherds go to Bethlehem - Luke 2:15-18

The first missionaries of the Gospel were the shepherds visited by the angels who first came to see the promised child for themselves and then went and shared that Good News with many.  The shepherds did not know how this child would save his people, but because they trusted God they were filled with joy and shared their wonder with others.

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Sermon Video: A baby whose origins are from of old - Micah 5:2

The prophet Micah predicted that the future king in the line of David would be "from of old"; yet how could this be?  How could a future king be from the past?  The mystery of this prophecy was solved at Bethlehem when Jesus Christ, the God-Man, became flesh and he who had created the world entered into time.

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Sermon Video: We preach Christ crucified - 1 Corinthians 1:21-25

The field of Christian apologetics is concerned with spreading the Gospel message and defending the faith from critique and attack.  This is an important field, oft used by God, but as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians, it operates under an important caveat: We preach Christ crucified.  The message of the Gospel was offensive to some and difficult to accept for others in the 1st Century, and it remains offensive and difficult for the Lost to accept today as well.  Paul was willing to try different approaches to his preaching in order to make it possible for the audience to hear the message, but he was completely unwilling to adjust the message to fit the audience.  Why?  Because "Christ crucified" is the wisdom and power of God.  Should anyone attempt to change the message to make it more palatable, they will only exchange the power of the Gospel for popularity, a poor choice indeed.

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Stepping into history: A conversation with Jo Beach

Jo holding newborn Clara in May of 2015

I had the privilege yesterday of visiting with a member of my church, something I do as often as I can for those who have difficulty in getting to church.  I went to the home of Jo Beach, who is in her 98th year and has been a member at First Baptist for over 80 years.  In our conversation, Jo talked about the past quite a bit, which is always fascinating to me as a lover of history.  Three things in particular stood out from that conversation: (1) That Jo's grandfather was a POW at the notorious Andersonville, Georgia prison in the Civil War.  Jo's grandfather never got over the horrors that he witnessed there, and was unable to work the rest of his life.  My grandfather was in the merchant marines in WWII which was 75 years ago, what an incredible step back into history that Jo's grandfather was a Civil War veteran, that war having ended 151 years ago. (2) Jo herself was born 16 days after Armistice Day, the end of WWI on 11/11/1918.  Her father was not yet conscripted, but would have soon joined the army to be shipped over to Europe, but the war ended. (3)  Jo was born near Cook Forest and her father worked at one of the lumber mills there.  The lumber mill only paid its employees with script redeemable at the company store.  One day, Jo's mother went to the store and demanded a portion of her husband's earnings in cash, to which the company employee replied, "What do you want cash for?"  Jo's mom made her husband quit his job, presumably after an interesting conversation, and the family moved before Jo started school here to Franklin where several of their extended family members already lived.

The next time you have a chance to talk to somebody who was born sixty years or more before you, take it, you won't regret the chance to get a glimpse at the window into the past that they can provide.

Sermon Video: The Foolishness of the Cross - 1 Corinthians 1:18-20

The Message of the Cross, that is the Gospel message about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has always been foolishness to those who don't believe it.  In the first century, it was the shame of dying upon a cross that Paul had to overcome, and while that connotation has been replaced by the much more positive symbolism of the cross following the triumph of Christianity within the Roman Empire, the message itself still remains hard to accept.  Why is that?  It isn't the message, per se, but what the message requires of us.  To accept the Gospel, we must first admit our own failure and allow God to save us from our sins.  The problem with this step is of course human pride.  It is an act of humility and submission to bow before Jesus Christ, and plenty of the Lost are unwilling to countenance that step.
The difficulty of the Gospel message raises an important question about the relationship between faith and reason.  Do we arrive at faith through reason or do we abandon reason in order to have faith?  While there have been famous Christian philosophers who embrace their God given reasoning ability in service to their faith, there have also been Christian theologians who reject the use of philosophy in connection with theology.  In modern American Christianity, those rejecting the role of reason in faith evidence an anti-intellectualism that in particular tends to despise science.  It is not, however, all wisdom that God thwarts, only that of the world that in opposition to God, his people ought to be using their God given reason to serve his kingdom.  It is true that we do not arrive at faith by reason alone, nor is it true that faith ought to be devoid of reason, when we understand our faith properly it has reason as a partner.

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