Sermons
What do you need?
God already knows what we need, but he longs for us to come to him with our needs as confidently as child comes to a loving Father. He also wants us to come with a thankful heart. A thankful heart is one that looks back to how God has met all our needs in the past, and so we can be confident that he will not let us down now or in the future.
God is here, God is near
We know that God is always with us. That truth is easy to embrace when all is going well in our lives. But when troubles come and when the earth gets shaky beneath our feet, God can feel far away. These are the times we need to cling to his promise that he is with us, closer than our breath, whether we can feel his presence or not.
God’s power … and love
For Jesus’ first public miracle, turning water into wine seems like an odd choice. But it was an instinctive response driven by his love for an ordinary family in deep trouble. The good news for us is that Jesus still wants to use his power, and that it is his great love for us that motivates him to use it to heal and help us.
Provisions for the journey
At 30, Jesus was starting his public ministry. At his baptism, we see his Father opening the heavens and giving Jesus the provisions he will need for the journey ahead. He gives him the Holy Spirit to empower him, and the assurance of his unending love – two critical gifts that we too are given to sustain us for our journeys.
The final word
God could have remained at a safe distance, loving us, longing for us, from afar. But he knew that loving someone from a distance isn’t the same as loving someone up close and personal. If he turned up on Earth, if we could see Jesus, then we could finally see what God is really like. We could get to know God – and all his glory, grace and truth.
Waiting and growing
The story of 12-year-old Jesus, at the transition between boy and man, is an important lesson for us about God’s timing. Even God’s own Son had to wait, and to grow, in order to become who God had chosen him to be. When it appears that we are merely marking time, God is indeed at work in us, preparing us for what we cannot yet see.
What it means to be human
God coming to earth as the baby Jesus is the greatest love story ever told. He comes to be with us in the dirt and grit of life. He comes to be with us in our pain and our despair. He comes to be with us so he can experience what it means to be human. Immanuel (God with us). What a gift!
Who am I … in all of this?
As we ponder the infinity of the stars, we can feel both awe … and uncertainty. When we consider how small we are, compared with the majesty and glory of the universe-without-end that God created, we can wonder if we are anything more than a speck of dust. Does God even know we are here? Does he care about us? Christmas is God’s resounding Yes!
Letting things go
Jesus is not the saviour we might be expecting. We don’t often think of him wielding a winnowing fork. But separating the important things from the unimportant things in our life is good for us. Jesus invites us to trust him to sift out the wheat from the chaff, to get rid of those unnecessary things we cling to, and to burn them up.
Preparing our hearts
The Jews understood baptism to be a rite of cleansing, conducted by full immersion. But John called not only for cleansing but firstly for repentance – a change of heart. This was new. Repentance had never been associated with baptism before. John was calling for change of behaviour that was connected not to a ritual but to a change of heart.
