Echoes of Grace

  Themes of the Bible: Heaven (Revelation 21-22) Alright, so this is both the end of this sermons series that we’ve been in together for the last nine months, and it’s also the final pages of Scripture that we’ll be in today. For this study, we've been looking at key portions of Scripture that God has preserved for us in his Word. He's protected His word for us to study and learn from today, and in preparation for this final portion of Scripture, we’re going to start by talking about the afterlife. And we have a big problem right off the bat. We have a lot of problems as human beings, but this is a big one; the concept of heaven involves eternity and we do not have eternally equipped minds. If you remember the very beginning of this series, back in May or June, we started the very beginning in Genesis by establishing that when God creates the universe he establishes these natural laws that we're bound by and one of those natural laws is time. Everything ...

  Themes of the Bible: Faith (Hebrews 11) Today, we’re in Hebrews chapter 11. Now, to begin, this is going to come as a surprise to many of you who understand me to be quite the intellect. . . but until I was in college, I was really not into reading very much. In fact, I was pretty successful at writing book reports on the same book, year after year. I read A Canticle for Leibowitz in the 9th grade, and used it for book reports up to and including my senior year of high school. Couldn’t do that in college. . . Anyway, so you ask, ‘how in the world did you get through book reports for the other books you had to read?’ It's a good question. I had a habit of what's called “book-ending,’ where you read the first couple pages, maybe the first chapter and then you skip ahead and read the last little section of the text and you skim the section in between. Now that isn't usually enough to write a book report. So, I had a little friend called Cliff Notes, now ...

  Themes of the Bible: Warfare (Ephesians 6) For next week, we’ll be in the 11th chapter of Hebrews. It’s the great faith chapter of Hebrews. This week though, we’re in Ephesians chapter 6. That’s the powerful passage telling us to put on the full armor of God. Let me start off this way. I want you to stop and think about the last war movie or some of the great war movies that you've seen. Now for some of you, you watch war movies regularly. You're into them. Then there's others of you that maybe don’t watch war movies. You don't really like the blood and the guts and the gore. But the truth is that you've heard war stories. You've gone to events where somebody has told their story. Maybe you've heard a veteran’s story at a veteran's event or maybe even in a sermon. So, whichever it is for you, whether you personally experienced a war or heard the accounts of war, I want you to think about that for a second. And tell me if I'm wro...

  Themes of the Bible: Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) Okay, I don't know if you know this, but the chapter I had you read this week, 1 Corinthians 15 is the single greatest chapter in the Bible covering the topic of resurrection. Last week, we left Jesus in the tomb, we had the thief on the cross in Luke 23, and this week, we're seeing his resurrection, and we’re doing that with the most profound chapter in scripture on resurrection. Last week, I mentioned to you that all of us are theologians in the sense that all of us have a theology, we all have something that we believe about God. And if you remember, I stressed that one of the things that I’m desperate to do at this church is to make sure that our theology as believers is a biblically based theology. People base their theology on all kinds of things, and shifting sands and we want to make sure that what we believe about God is what He has revealed to us about Himself in His Word, and not some other ph...