All posts in category Life

Zephaniah – Sermon Manuscript

-I think that stories based on events that happened during WW2 have led to some of the best movies: Fury, Unbroken, Saving Private Ryan, Darkest Hour, Life is Beautiful, Midway, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, The Pianist all incredible movies of the resiliency of humans, and the destruction of war. But all those movies are from the perspective of the Allies. Where we celebrate the victories, how do all those movies portray the Germans? As the bad guys. We look at those various battles in triumph, but how would the other side view those events? As humiliation, right? Think of D-Day, when the Allies cross the English Channel and began their attack of the Western Front of the Nazis. Do you think the Germans were celebrating that day? Absolutely not! See, every war has 2 sides to it. Similarly, Zephaniah is going to give us 2 sides to the Day of the Lord. We talked about this back in Joel, but this is the book that talks about it the most.

READ/PRAY (pg. 835)

  1. The Message of Zephaniah

-The intro to this book gives us the opposite of what we’ve seen for a while: 4 previous generations of people! Why is this significant? 

-3 names: Cushi, Hezekiah, and Josiah, intending to give us a starting place for Hezekiah

-Cushi: refers to the land of Cush, significant because of what God promises and it would make Zephaniah bi-racial

-Hezekiah is described as the best king of Judah in 2 Kings 18, he destroyed the competing “worship” sites in Judah. One of the most fascinating things about him is in preparation for the Assyrian invasion, he dug a tunnel under Jerusalem to reroute a river and provide water for the city during the siege, and you can go visit “Hezekiah’s tunnel” today!

-The last significant name is Josiah, who led a major reform movement in Judah and became king when he was a child (2 Kings 22). When he was king, he began repairing the temple, and in the repair the book of the law was uncovered (Deuteronomy) which gave the stipulations the people were supposed to follow and obey. And Josiah took this seriously! He re-enacted the covenant ceremony with the people, who recommitted themselves to obeying God’s laws.

-These names are pointing out that Zephaniah is going to be in the same line as his great-great grandpa Hezekiah, one who is faithfully following God and encouraging the people toward obedience of God’s law. There’s debate about how far into Josiah’s reign this takes place, with most people I read saying it’s most likely shortly after he found the book of the law and began enacting it, but it hadn’t yet taken root in the people.

  1. The Day of the Lord in Judgment (1:1–3:8)

-Zechariah mentions “The Day of the Lord” 22 times throughout it, which tells me it’s his primary point in writing! One scholar said, “There is a compelling simplicity about Zephaniah’s message: he has only one topic, and he never digresses from it.” (Alec Motyer)

-We’ve talked about it before, because it’s a theme that’s been running across all these prophets, so just as a refresher, “The Day of the Lord” is a future moment where God would come in judgment to pay back the enemies of His people. Throughout this time period, the Israelites were excited for the day of the Lord because it was viewed in a completely positive light, where the other nations who had attacked God’s people would be judged. But the warning from the prophets is that the judgment would be negative, not positive!

-And that’s where Zephaniah begins his rebuke of the people. Look at this first description from God: He says He’s going to completely sweep away everything! And there’s intentionality in the way this destruction is described. If you think back to Gen. 1 when God created the world, this is the opposite of creation, it’s meant to make us think that the day of the Lord is going to be a de-creation. But it doesn’t take long for Him to remind the people that this isn’t just for people “out there” because right after this promised destruction of the world, look at vs. 4

-God is also angry with Judah, the 1 remaining people of God, and even worse He’ll destroy the promised city of Jerusalem. But notice how God describes the problem: the people are worshipping Baal, a fertility god who was thought to bring rain to them which they needed in order to live. And apparently there’s no difference between the pagan priests and the supposed priests of Yahweh. And if that’s the priests, the one who are supposed to be leading people in the worship of the one true God, what about the rest of the people?

-They’re worshipping the stars instead of the one who made the stars. On the one hand they’re worship God, but at the same time they hedge their bets and also worship Milcom (the false god of the Ammonites). This is called syncretism that is combining the worship of the true God with the worship of all these false gods, and we do the same thing today! We say we trust God completely, but we also make sure we don’t get too sold out to following after Him. Both Baal and Milcom are gods that the surrounding nations worshipped, and as I have read about the Israelites, you can take them out of Egypt, but the rest of their history is working to take the Egypt out of them. And that’s the same journey for all of us in our Christian life: God has taken us out of the world, but the rest of our earthly lives is working to take the world out of us. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there! Also unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to find those areas that you’re still holding onto worldly ideas, we often don’t even realize them until either someone points them out or we react poorly to those areas being inconvenienced.

-I think I’ve shared this story before, but when one of the idols of my heart that I have to be conscientious of is when I feel dumb, and one of the precipitating reasons that has come to the surface in my life is because we drive older vehicles. Towards the end of me going to seminary, my car started having these weird issues where it would suddenly lose all power and acceleration, so the fastest I could go was like 15 mph. First time it happened, I pulled over, waited about 15 min, and suddenly it started and drove with no issues. But over the next week it KEPT happening and I just got ANGRY. And in one of my angry outbursts, I realized my reaction wasn’t the corresponding to the situation in front of me, and then it hit me: cars aren’t that complicated, I should be able to figure this out, and the fact that I couldn’t made me irate! Now I know you all already know this, but I needed to remind myself that I’m not God! I don’t, can’t, and won’t know everything, which means there’s going to be areas in my life that I am just ignorant about. This is an area where I know that I’m not God, but I don’t want to have to rely on Him, much to my shame and disgrace. And we all have areas like that in our lives, where we need to pray for the strength to fight those idols, those places where we struggle to trust God, where we still want to do our own things and live our own ways. The only consolation is we’re not alone in that! We see it in Zephaniah, which means it was true 3,000 years ago, so humans are still humans.

-Notice that in the very next verse, Zephaniah gives us the right response: be silent. Have you ever noticed that’s the response of people in the Bible who encounter God? Every time they realize that God is so much more holy than they are, so they fall on their faces and acknowledge their sin. Which is why it always make me chuckle to myself when so many songs that we sing in church are asking God to be present here, to reveal Himself to us, to show us His glory, because the Bible shows us that it’s a terrifying thing! With 1 caveat: if we’re covered by the blood of the sacrifice (Jesus) we don’t have to be afraid of approaching God. In fact, the book of Hebrews tells us we should have the opposite approach to God: we come before Him in confidence because of what Jesus has done, which is exactly what Zephaniah is talking about here.

-I think I mentioned him a few months ago, but I watched another interview with former Senator Ben Sasse yesterday where he was asked if he’s ready to die. He was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal pancreatic cancer in December, and you can tell if you watch this interview. But his response was fascinating, and it caused the interviewer to begin to cry, because he said, “I don’t feel ready, but to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus said to the disciples, he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell them about the water into wine miracle at the feast, but he says you can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the Divine and call him Daddy, Abba Father, that’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.” 

-That’s someone who understands this reality here: we approach God in reverence and silence because He is so far above us, but that same God welcomes us in as His children, with open arms, for those are following Him, but for those who aren’t, it’s a completely different story.

-On that day, there will be punishment from God on those who have been disobedient to Him, but the punishment from God ALWAYS fits the crime. He calls out those who take on the habits and practices of the nations (foreign clothing) instead of living as God has commanded them. He also promises to punish those who take on the superstitions of the nations (skip over the threshold, like “don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back”) No one will be left out of this persecution, and the rest of this chapter describes all the ways God will bring about this punishment. And do you remember what I said earlier about the day of the Lord? Look at the warning about this day in vs. 14-15:

-It doesn’t sound like the greatest day in the world, does it? It sounds horrible! But it gets even worse: distress, their blood poured out.

-And this day will also reveal where people are putting their confidence. Look at the beginning of vs. 18: even in Zephaniah’s time people were thinking their riches would save them. Once again, we see that the human heart hasn’t changed, has it?

-The beginning of chapt. 2 is a shift in focus, because in the middle of this promised punishment is a change of tone. Here the call is to repent before all this punishment comes. One of the reasons we have these warnings in the Bible is to prevent people from continuing on in their sin and facing this punishment. 

-And do you see what repentance looks like? It looks like seeking the Lord, AND it looks like seeking righteousness and humility. Another way of saying this is if you seek after the Lord, you will start to look like the Lord (although imperfectly). And this section ends saying PERHAPS you’ll be saved, but we know from the message of the NT that this sparing is guaranteed because we know how to be on the right side of history (which doesn’t mean going along with whatever is trendy in our culture), it means we’re obedient to the Creator and Sustainer of everything. 

-The rest of chapter 2 is God continuing to talk about the punishment coming to the nations, but there’s a specific ordering to this following the 4 points of a compass around Judah: Philistines to the West, Ammonites and Moabites to the east, Cush in the south, and Assyria to the north. And who’s in the center of that compass? Judah, but remember, they’re assuming that the Day of the Lord is going to be the destruction of everyone else, so they would hear this expecting everything to be ok for them! But then God focuses His attention on 1 city, and contextually you would expect this to be something like Ninevah or another one of the Assyrian cities, and look at how terrible this city is: 

-Rebellious, not obeyed God, hasn’t responded to God’s discipline, hasn’t trusted the Lord, and hasn’t sought after God. Not only is the city running away from God, but her leaders are even worse! Princes and judges have become like wild beasts who are looking to exploit other people. The prophets and priests aren’t leading people to follow the Lord, they’re only looking to their own interests (which is a perennial problem in Israel, and as the leaders go, so goes the nation). So remember, I said contextually that it seems like it’s talking about the rest of the nations, but then look at the first line in vs. 5:

-This is talking about Jerusalem, the city where the Lord lives. God’s own people weren’t spared from the punishment, in fact theirs is even worse because they were supposed to be different from all the surrounding nations, but instead they’ve acted exactly like them. But in contradiction to the His own people, God is completely righteous and holy. Even when His people are running away from Him, God stays the same and continues being faithful to Himself and His promises. God never changes, that’s one of the greatest realities about God. 

-The last thing God says in this section is that in that day, there will be people from every tribe and tongue and nation who will stand condemned before Him because they refused to follow Him. This is the reality of life in the world God created, which is why He gives us all these warnings. Follow and obey Him now, because someday it will be too late.

  • The Day of the Lord in Salvation (3:9–20)

-The best news about this book is that while the ending is bad news for those who haven’t followed the one true God, for those who have listened and obeyed Him, the ending is joy and salvation.

-Do you see how great this day will be? The end goal is that everyone will be able to call on the name of the Lord and serve and obey Him perfectly. And it’s interesting that the Lord mentions Cush here, because that would include the family of Zephaniah, the people who were once spread out will come and worship the Lord together from all areas of the world. AND there’s a story in Acts that shows the fulfillment of this promise. 

–Acts 8 tells the story of Phillip who was told to go to a specific place and share the gospel message with an Ethiopian. Ethiopia is the same place that was called Cush during the time of Zechariah. God’s promises always come to pass, as we see here from Zechariah. 

-But that’s not all! Look what God goes on to say:

-The punishment has been changed. Those who trust in God are spared from this suffering because the king has come and lived with them, which changes everything for His people. Now that He is with them, they have nothing to fear. Then God doubles down on this promise, but look at the description He gives: 

-A warrior who saves. This helps us understand some of what the early disciples were expecting when Jesus came, a conquering warrior who would overthrow the shackles of oppression from the Romans. What they didn’t realize was the enemy they were thinking about was too small. The Romans were nothing compared to sin and death. God’s plans are so much bigger than anything we could come up with. And look at how God responds to His people: rejoicing,  quieting us, and delighting in us. Isn’t that amazing? God delights in spending time with His people.

-And the very last verse, God tells us what the last day will look like for those who have followed after Him: He will gather His people together to honor them, to encourage them, and to give them a place in His kingdom forever. And we know this is going to happen because of the last phrase in this verse: if God has spoken, it’s guaranteed to happen.

  • The Day of the Lord for You

-But now that we’ve looked at this book, we’re left with the question: which side are you on? For some, the Day of the Lord is something to get excited for because it means everything we’ve been hoping for will come true! But for others, it’s a day to fear. I heard a pastor onetime say that for those who are following Jesus, this world is the closest to hell we’ll ever live. And the reverse is also true: for those who aren’t following Jesus, this world is the closest to heaven they’ll ever live. 

-The Day of the Lord isn’t just a topic that’s seen in the prophets, we saw it when we looked at Revelation together last year. Look at how John describes that day in Rev. 6: 

-Notice that no ones left out, just like God promises in Zechariah that He’ll be looking EVERYWHERE for those who haven’t followed Him. These people are begging to be buried alive in an earthquake because God is that much more terrifying. When that day comes, if you aren’t walking with the Lord, it’s going to be the worst first day of the rest of your life. But you have a choice, right here and right now to not have that day be terrifying.

-For those of us who are walking with the Lord, we have a different reality, a completely different response to the Day of the Lord. For us, it’s going to be a day of celebrating, rejoicing, and giving thanks for because our faith is now sight. Everything we’ve hoped and prayed for has become real. But in this in between time, where we live between Jesus’ two comings, the book of Hebrews reminds us how we’re supposed to live with an eye on that day. 

-It begins with a reminder of how we’re supposed to follow God: through a confession that Jesus is that Warrior King who conquered Satan, sin, and death through his victorious resurrection, and now provides the way for us to come boldly before the Father. That confession is what saves us and makes us new people. And once we’re new people look what we’re supposed to do: consider one another. This is a way we imitate our God, by looking to other people above and beyond ourselves! But then it gets weird! Because we’re supposed to provoke each other. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a situation where it’s positive to “provoke” someone else (this may be a reminder that I have young kids at home because there’s a LOT of provoking that goes on!) but have you ever considered that provoking can be a good thing? According to this text, there’s a way of provoking each other that can lead to love and good works. Now I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could use more of that provoking in my life! Most of the provoking I have around me is to get angry about what’s taking place politically or socially. That doesn’t make me more holy, that doesn’t make me more like Jesus, and that doesn’t help me to represent the one true God to the watching world. And the author doesn’t stop there, do you see the way we provoke each other positively? By gathering together. Friends, this weekly meeting is more than just a social hour, this gathering around the throne of Jesus Christ is a spiritual battle where we provoke each other positively to grow in our love and our good works. This gathering is meant to be the place where we’re encouraged to continue following faithfully after Jesus. Out there, we’re going to be tempted to question, tempted to doubt, tempted to reflect the world instead of the Creator of the world. But in here, we get to encourage (provoke) each other to love and good works. 

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon, Worship
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/12/zephaniah-sermon-manuscript/

The God of the Garden (John 20) – Sermon Manuscript

-How many of you have seen the Marvel movies? I’m not a big comic book guy, but I still remember when Iron Man came out in theaters. I was in college, wanted to go see a movie, and figured I might as well see this one. It blew my mind! But what was even more amazing was that was just the beginning because they kept building on that movie. And at this point, I’ve given up on trying to see them all because some of them have been pretty bad. Marvel had a good streak, but after Avengers Endgame, I think they lost their way with the story a bit. AND I also feel bad for anyone that’s missed out on the last almost 20 years of Marvel movies, because in order to catch up you’ve got: 37 movies, 32 TV shows, with more coming out regularly!

-What’s most impressive about their run is that each movie tends to be a good story just by itself, but at this point, unless you’ve seen them all I can pretty much guarantee you’re going to miss some callbacks and allusions to previous things.

-That’s a picture of what we get in the Bible, but thankfully there’s no more books being added at this point, and unlike Marvel, the Bible never gets lost in its story. But in order to properly read and interpret the Bible, we need to know the story. The whole thing has allusions and references to previous parts of the story that if we’re unaware of will go right over our heads.

-I’ve titled this sermon ‘The God of the Garden’ because John’s account of the resurrection is FULL of allusions to Genesis, which means in order to understand the resurrection we need to understand creation. As we read through this text, see if you can catch all the allusions to the creation account:

READ/PRAY (pg. 963)

  1. The Garden Tomb (1-10)

-The story begins focusing on Mary, who came very early in the morning to the tomb.

-Where was this tomb located? This part of the story was read at our Good Friday service, it’s found at the end of the previous chapter:

–John 19:41-42. The place where Jesus was crucified was in a garden. John is the only Gospel that has this note. John’s intentionally trying to call our minds back to THE garden in creation. And this garden theme has been building:

-If you look at John 18. I hadn’t noticed before that the text says Jesus OFTEN met there with his disciples. Jesus would take His disciples to a garden, a place where on His last night He prayed to His father asking for this cup to be taken away from Him.

-What’s so important about the place where Jesus was killed, as well as the tomb being in a garden? For that we need to think back to creation, because a garden is where sin entered the world, and John is telling us a garden is where sin met its end. But the garden isn’t the only piece John refers back to. This is why we need to know the WHOLE Bible, don’t just get stuck in 1 part of it, because if we don’t know the whole thing we’re going to miss all these ideas. We need to know the Bible so well our language and daydreams are impacted by it! That’s what we see from all the Bible authors (as I’ve been trying to point out through our 12 angry men series, even the minor prophets were quoting or alluding to so many other passages)

-Honestly, this whole thing as I was reading and studying this week blew my mind! So let’s think about the first garden, which I believe should be viewed as a temple. See, a temple is the place where God comes to meet with humans, and Eden was created as the place where God would come to meet with humans, we know that from Gen. 3:8. Apparently even God has preferences about what time of day is best, He would come walk in the garden in the evening.

-There are 3 components to the creation account that will align with the tabernacle and then the temple later: there’s the earth, the place where the humans dwell, there’s the visible heavens which is the sky above, and there’s the invisible heavens which is the place where God and the angels dwell, and the goal for God was to have no separation between all these things: He wanted His entire creation living and working and playing together. If you then think of the tabernacle, it is also built of 3 different components: the outer court (where humans can go), the Holy place (where some humans can go) and the Most Holy place (where God dwells). And woven into the fabric of the tabernacle and crafted out of gold in the temple are creation motifs, pictures of plants, animals, and angels in and on the walls. So Eden, the tabernacle (and later the temple) are meant to be representatives (stand-ins) for all of creation. God’s plan didn’t change, but the means by which His creation is able to access Him does.

-But there’s another sense piece to this that we can often miss as well. We often call it the Garden OF Eden, but a more precise word would be the Garden IN Eden, the garden was a subset of a bigger place called Eden, and the first humans were tasked with “working and watching” over the garden. Those 2 verbs are also used to describe the role of the priests in the tabernacle and temple, meaning that part of Adam’s role is to be the priest of this garden, who works and watches over it.

-And what’s most amazing to me about this whole process is the way God orchestrates is. In the days of creation 7 times it states, “and God said.” In the building of the tabernacle, it’s structured around 7 times where it states, “The Lord said.” And then when Solomon built the temple, it took 7 years, was dedicated in the 7th month, during a feast of 7 days, and Solomon’s speech is organized around 7 requests of God. All these things are meant to signify the resting place of God. Think of what God did on the 7th day of creation, so all these other acts are pointing to a similar goal: God being in relationship and proximity to His creation (although in the OT it has to be mediated, someone else has to be the go between).

-With all that background from the OT, look at how John begins the resurrection account. What day are we talking about? 

-The first day. As if this is meant to enact a NEW creation account.

-We also should be thinking of creation because of something Pilate (accidentally?) said about Jesus in the previous chapter. Pilate calls Jesus “the man,” which is the same thing God called Adam when he was cast out from the garden. The difference is in that place the judgment was just and right, this time, the judgment is laid on an innocent man. 

-For those of us who grew up in the church, we’ve heard this story so many times that we can miss what’s happening. How many of you would expect to find the body of a dead friend gone? People weren’t dumb in the 1st century, they knew what happened after someone died, they didn’t just get up and walk out of the grave!

-Which is why Mary’s response makes sense: someone took the body! What other option is there? 

-Peter and John (the one Jesus loved) take off immediately, most people think John got their first because he was younger (sorry to those of you who are older). John stopped, Peter went straight in, and what they found wouldn’t make sense if the body had been stolen: linen clothes, with one folded up and placed by itself.

-John is giving us 2 comparisons, 1 that’s immediate and 1 that’s much further back. First is a reference to a previous resurrection account in John’s Gospel where Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. But Lazarus comes out fully wrapped in linen cloth, Jesus actually tells people to go help unwrap the cloth, he can’t do it by himself.

 -The second comparison is to the priests. Listen to what God commands Aaron to do when he meets with God during the day of atonement, the day where the sins of the people are paid for:    Then when Aaron is done atoning for the sins of the people, look at what he’s supposed to do with the linen cloth:

-By leaving His linen garments, Jesus is signifying that He was acting like Aaron in paying the penalty for the sins of the people. He’s saying that He has entered the Holy place, paid the penalty for the sins of the people, and gone back out. Friends, this is the reason the temple in the curtain was torn in 2! The Holy Place doesn’t need to be curtained off anymore; Jesus has provided a way for everyone to have access to God! 

-This section ends with an interplay between seeing and believing: John’s primary point of writing this story is so that we would believe (as you’ll see at the end!). Here John’s saying that seeing the empty tomb has resulted in a belief.

-But his belief isn’t complete: they did not yet understand what? The Scripture. There’s a reason Paul refers to the gospel message as a mystery, it was hidden, it wasn’t easy to understand! Until everything happened, the disciples didn’t get everything the Bible was saying.

  • The Gardener (11-18)

-This next section has some interesting references to Jesus that are supposed to (once again) remind us that this is a NEW creation.

-After Peter and John had left, John doesn’t tell us how much later this is, so either Mary came running back after them or was with them this whole time. But the text tells us that now Mary looks into the tomb. And there’s even some interesting verbs used to denote the historical reliability of this: it would have been carved into a hillside, where she would have to stoop down to see into the tomb.

-When she peeks in, she sees 2 angels, but why does John denote where they’re sitting? Because it points back to something else in the OT.

-When God gives instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, on top of which was the mercy seat (where Aaron sprinkled blood while wearing his linen clothes). The mercy seat was called that because it’s the place where mercy was given to the people through the sacrifice of the animals. Where were the cherubim placed? The head and the feet. So God sending 2 angels to sit at both sides of where Jesus was buried is God’s way of saying there’s a new mercy seat, a new place where sins are atoned for! But that’s not all, does anyone know what was stationed at the garden in Eden when Adam and Eve were banished from it? Yep, the cherubim, the angels tasked with guarding the Holy of Holies. Once again, isn’t it amazing how God has woven these themes throughout this story? What once marked separation from God is used to mark that He is now near!

-And Mary’s story isn’t done: the angels ask her a question, this isn’t supposed to be a time for mourning, this is a time of rejoicing, to giving thanks, of dancing and praising God, because of what happens next:

-Jesus arrives, but she doesn’t know it’s Him. (there’s both similarities and differences between Jesus’s pre-resurrection and post-resurrection body, hold on to that thought because it will come up again in a minute). 

-Since she doesn’t recognize Him, who does she think Jesus is? A gardener. What were Adam and Eve tasked with being in the beginning? Gardeners. John is telling us that where Adam failed in his role, Jesus is faithful, and fulfills everything God wants for His creation. 

-Jesus says Mary’s name, and that’s all it takes for her to realize who it is, and she immediately comes running to Him! 

-Doesn’t Jesus’s response seem a bit harsh? Especially when just a few verses later He invites Thomas to come and touch Him. Most likely has a different connotation in both places, here she needs to be reminded to look forward further than the here and now, while Thomas needs the sight to believe. See Jesus is accommodating Himself to the needs of His disciples. No 2 people are the same, no 2 stories of salvation are the same. We’re given these different accounts so that we can understand the multiple ways Jesus draws us to Himself. And that thought continues through the rest of this chapter:

  • The Future Garden (19-31)

-What day does this begin with? John emphasizes what day it is AGAIN, he wants to make sure we understand a new creation motif is taking place!

-Why does Jesus say peace? This is the common Jewish greeting, one that’s still used today when they say “shalom aleichem.” But this is more significant than just peace be with you, this is meant to complement the last word He cried from the cross “It is finished.” Because Jesus said it is finished, there is now peace for His followers. And not just peace, both peace and reconciliation are now possible for humanity because of what Jesus has done. 

-Do you notice what Jesus shows them? His hands and his SIDE. Anyone who survived a crucifixion could show his hands and feet, but in order for them to know it was truly Him, He also showed the place where the spear pierced His side.

-Once again, He says peace to them, but then adds a component to this. Because they have peace with God, peace is now possible with other humans, so these first followers of Jesus are given a job: they are sent. Now, not in the same way as Jesus (because only Jesus can make atonement for sin) but they’re sent on the same mission as Jesus: to proclaim the good news that peace is now possible with God!

-This is the same mission we have today, and this is the reason we say at the end of our services: you are sent, because Jesus has sent us back into the world to represent Him and tell others about Him. It’s not meant to be a casual dismissal, it requires everything from us.

-But then John tells us Jesus does something weird, it says He breathed on them. Ever since COVID, this has made me chuckle, because people are so scared of being breathed on! I sometimes will blow in my kid’s faces, sometimes to have them check my breath! I don’t think that’s what Jesus is doing here. We need to keep thinking about the creation and new creation theme that John is focusing on. This same word that John uses to talk about what Jesus is doing is used in Gen. 2:7 when God breathes into Adam and gives him life. Do you see how Jesus is restoring all things here? I think Micky Klink summarizes what’s taking place here really well in his commentary: 

-Isn’t that an incredible summary of what Jesus enacted? While the OT is a story of humanity failing again and again, Jesus’s arrival means that God’s plan never got off track. He’s recommissioned this new people through this new creation to serve as kings and priests in the world. 

-Unfortunately, one of the disciples isn’t in this locked room with them, and it would stick with him for the rest of history, because people often refer to him as doubting Thomas! And there’s a sense where that’s right, but there’s another sense where I feel bad for him (especially considering I named one of my kids after him, because did you see what his name means in the text? Twin!) 

-Vs. 26 tells us the disciples did the same thing the next week, almost as if they expect Jesus to show up on this day, but this time Thomas wasn’t going to miss it. We’re already starting to see that there’s some new rhythms that are marking these people out, they’re meeting on the first day of the week, the day that Jesus rose from the grave. Friends, that means that EVERY Sunday is resurrection Sunday! This is literally the reason we’re here today! 

-Even though the doors were locked, Jesus comes to be with them. I said this earlier, but once again we see that there’s something different about Jesus’s body. He apparently can walk through walls or just appear at will. And he gives them the same greeting He did last time: peace.

-Then He singles out Thomas, but unlike Mary, Thomas is invited to come near and touch the Jesus’s wounds. And this confirmation leads to Jesus encouraging Thomas to believe. It’s a play on words in the original language: don’t unbelieve, believe!

-And Thomas responds with another component to the resurrection: while it has cosmic and eternal implications, it’s also personal. It’s for each one of us to believe that Jesus is not just the Lord, but He can be MY Lord. 

-And Jesus affirms Thomas’s belief, but He also affirms the belief of the rest of humanity throughout history: there’s going to be some people that don’t get to see His hands and side, but they can still believe, and there’s a special blessing Jesus gives towards people like that. Friends, this blessing that Jesus speaks here is for you and me.

-I was listening to some Rich Mullins this week (if you’ve never heard of him, you’re missing out! A Christian artist in the 80s-90s that died in a car accident in 1997). He had a line in his song ‘Step by Step’ that says “Sometimes I think of Abraham, how one star he saw had been lit for me.” God’s plans and promises are guaranteed to happen, nothing can stand against God, not Satan, not sin, and not death. And definitely not you and me. It’s incredible that God’s plans include a special blessing for us, we can be brought in to be a part of this new creation today! Which is what John says next:

-John concludes this chapter by giving his reason for writing this book: he could have included many more things that Jesus did, and in the next chapter 21:25 he actually says if everything Jesus did was written down, all the books in the world couldn’t contain it (which is why we’ll have eternity to think about it)! But this book was written so that even though we can’t see Jesus with our eyes, we can believe that He is who He said: the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God, and through that belief we can have life, NEW life. Just like John has been casting the story of Jesus as a new creation, He’s telling us that we too can be a part of this new life creation, just like these first disciples. One of the amazing things about being a Christian, is if you think about it, everyone who becomes a Christian is only 1 generation away from those who saw the risen Christ. We’re reading these eyewitness accounts of people who saw Jesus in His resurrected body, we’re brought back to that very moment where Jesus invites His followers to believe in everything that He said. And that same offer is on the table for all of us today: don’t disbelieve, believe! The resurrection proves that God has followed through on all His promises, that His plans are good and right and true, and that through belief in Jesus we are able to have life, NEW life in His name. 

-If you haven’t yet made that confession, do it today. Jesus invites you to join with Him in restoring His creation. And if you have made that confession, Jesus also invites you to not be unbelieving but believe. Walking with Jesus is a lifelong pursuit where each day we’re invited to take one step closer to Jesus. That’s the invitation to new life that is available to all of us because Jesus is alive!

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on April 5, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on April 5, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/05/the-god-of-the-garden-john-20-sermon-manuscript/

Habakkuk – Sermon Manuscript

-Many of you know my love for coffee, but my coffee drink of choice took a while to become solidified. It came during seminary where I needed the coffee because I was working in WY and commuting to school south of Denver which was 2 hours away. So I’d get up at 3:30 to get a cup of coffee with Cara (who I was dating) then drive to school and sleep in my car for an hour or 2, then go to class all day. And when I say all day I mean it, I’d schedule all my classes to be on 1 day so I didn’t have to drive down more than 1 a week. But that also meant that by the afternoon I was DRAGGING! And coffee shops don’t keep making fresh coffee all day, so when I’d go to Starbucks in the afternoon to try to stay awake for the later afternoon classes the coffee tasted metallic because it had been sitting in the urn for a while, but when you’re desperate, you’ll drink anything! But my life was changed forever when I went to Starbucks one afternoon with my best friend from seminary. He told me about an Americano, which is called that because Americans can’t handle straight espresso, so we water it down. At the time, it was the same price as buying a regular cup of coffee, AND you could order it with extra shots to get even more caffeine (yet another reason Caribou is superior to Starbucks, Starbucks doesn’t add any more shots of espresso to their bigger drinks). So since that afternoon, my drink of choice has become a grande quad americano with a splash of heavy cream.

-Let me explain what all those words mean: grande at the bucks is a medium, 4 shots is the number of espresso shots (normally they add 2), americano is espresso with hot water, splash means just a little bit, and heavy cream is basically milk with extra fat in it. Nothing super fancy or out of the ordinary, or so I thought. But I have had SO much trouble getting this thing ordered throughout my life that I’ve had to change the way I order it multiple times. 

-I was first introduced to is as a quad Americano, quad being 4 shots, until a fateful day when I had bought a new vehicle in San Diego and was preparing to drive that vehicle back to Colorado through the night. A friend and I made it to Las Vegas and stopped for food and coffee so we could make it through the whole night, stopped at a Starbucks that was PACKED, like so packed that it took 15 minutes to get up to the counter to order. So I went to order my drink at the counter after all this waiting and just wanting to get on the road, I ordered my 2 quad Americanos with a splash of heavy cream, looked at the price and thought “that’s not right” because Starbucks make you pay extra for those additional shots. So I asked “did you get the quad?” And very shortly back, the barista said, “YES, I got it!” clearly she didn’t want to talk! So I moved over to the end of the bar to wait for my drinks, and after waiting ANOTHER 15 min, I heard “I’ve got 2 Americanos for Quad!” Clearly that barista didn’t know what a quad americano was. So from that point forward, I decided to be more explicit: I always ordered a grande 4 shot Americano with a splash of heavy cream. Little did I know that even that had the potential to be misinterpreted!

-The next issue was when I was at a pastor’s conference in Indianapolis. Now if you’ve never been to a pastor’s conference, one of the realities is pastors LOVE coffee, so any break time is a mad rush to the coffee shops where the lines wrap around the block. That means you’re waiting a LONG time to get up to the counter to order your coffee! So once again, after waiting 15 minutes to get to order my drink I ordered my grande 4 shot americano with a splash of heavy cream. The barista didn’t ask any questions, the price of the drink looked right this time, so I moved down the bar to wait for the drink to come out. After waiting another 10 minutes, the grande 4 shot americano came out to the bar. I took my first sip (because sometimes they forget to add the cream) and it tasted like pure sugar, it was GROSS! I thought they messed something up, so I looked at the order sticker on it, and it said grande americano 4 shots, with Splenda. You tell me how splash can sound remotely like Splenda, but I wasn’t going to drink that nonsense, and I couldn’t get the attention of anyone working because the line was so long, so I gave it to my dad and struggled to stay awake during the next session. Which means, in order to ensure I’m getting what I actually want I either order through an app, or else I make sure I say I’m ordering a grande (medium) americano, with a little bit of heavy cream, and I also use my fingers to demonstrate a little just to ensure there’s no misunderstanding!

-Now, what does my coffee debacle have to do with Habakkuk? Habakkuk has to do with the issue of what do we do when it seems like God is misunderstanding us? Or worse, when it seems like the punishment God doles out isn’t fair. Or how can God be good when there’s so much evil in the world? Have you ever wrestled with those questions, or heard people asking those questions? Let’s read chapt. 1 as we hear Habakkuk asking God those exact questions:

READ/PRAY (pg. 832)

  1. The Message of Habakkuk

-As we’ve seen with a number of the prophets, we don’t have a lot of information about Habakkuk! There is an apocryphal account about Habakkuk in the expanded version of the book of Daniel that Roman Catholics use. I’ll read it to you, just so you can hear why historically the Apocrypha wasn’t considered to be on the same level as the other Scriptures: 

-In Judea at that time, there was the prophet Habakkuk. Having prepared a stew and mixed it in a bowl with some bread, he was on his way to take it to the reapers in the field. 34 The angel of the Lord instructed him, “Take the meal you have prepared to Daniel who is in Babylon in the lions’ den. 35 Habakkuk replied, “Sir, I have never been to Babylon, and I do not have any idea where the den is.”36 Thereupon the angel of the Lord grasped him by the crown of his head and, carrying him by his hair, with the speed of the wind, set him down in Babylon above the den.

37 Habakkuk shouted, “Daniel, Daniel, take the food that God has sent to you.”38 Daniel said, “You have remembered me, O God. You have not abandoned those who love you.” 39 He then got up and began to eat. Meanwhile the angel of the Lord immediately carried Habakkuk back to his own country.

-Let’s look at what Habakkuk’s original message is: 

  1. Conversing with God (1-2)

-Most of the book is a look at Habakkuk’s conversation with God, where Habakkuk asks questions of God that at first glance might make us slightly uncomfortable, or at least they should make us slightly uncomfortable if we’ve been paying attention to the rest of these prophets. Remember that much of the work of the prophets is calling people to pursue justice, defined as God defines it: rightly ordered lives and affections that lead to the flourishing of humanity under God’s rule and reign. 

-So Habakkuk’s questions are shocking: he’s asking God why there isn’t justice taking place around him. Even God’s people are marked by violence, injustice, and wrongdoing, and it appears to Habakkuk that God isn’t doing anything about it! But then he risks going even further where he tells God: this is why the law is ineffective. Isn’t the law the thing God gave His people to bring about justice? Isn’t the law the way God’s plans and rule will be carried out among His people? Think of all the Psalms we have that talk about how much David LOVES God’s law, or how many of the prophets are calling people to go back to God’s law to recover their identity as God’s chosen people. But here we see Habakkuk telling God that His plan isn’t working! Quite the claim, isn’t it? A prophet who, instead of speaking on behalf of God to the people is complaining to God on behalf of the people! I actually like the way the ESV translates this verse:

-The law is described as paralyzed or lacking power. It can’t accomplish what it needs to so that the people and the nation are marked by the wrong things instead of being a reflection of God. And because the law is paralyzed, justice is stuck, and the justice that is going out is described as “perverted.” We’ve seen that in our country during the lifetimes of some of you in this room! Think back to some of the civil rights issues that were taking place in 60s. Our nation had police officers, judges, and courts, but was true justice taking place? No! The justice that was going forth was “perverted.” Habakkuk says that the same thing is happening in his day, and he’s asking God to intervene. 

-And God responds that He has a plan, but it’s not something anyone would expect, and definitely not something Habakkuk is going to like! God is going to use an even more unjust nation to punish His people. He warns that the Chaldeans (or the Babylonians, both names refer to the same group) are coming, and He knows they’re not kind, look at how they’re described by God: 

-And that’s just the start of their depravity, God goes on to describe all the ways they look down on others, and He ends by saying their so confident in themselves that they think their god is their strength. Habakkuk wanted justice, but not like this!

-So we get to hear his response, he starts acknowledging who God is: the eternal one, the one who is in charge of justice, who knows nothing of evil and who refuses to tolerate wrongdoing. But in this case, it sure seems like God is tolerating the Chaldeans, doesn’t it? He’s allowing their civilization to rise up and flourish, AND allowing them to “swallow up” God’s own people. And yes, God’s people might be bad, but they’re not THAT bad when you look at how the Chaldeans are treating other people. Surely Habakkuk must have misunderstood something in what God said, right?

-He goes on to compare the Chaldeans to fisherman who fish among the peoples to drag them into the boat, and then empty their nets by killing these people “without mercy.” But Habakkuk knows that God will answer him, so after asking all these questions of God, he decides to wait and watch to see what God determines to do. And God does respond! 

-God tells Habakkuk that he’s going to be like Moses, he’s going to take God’s words and put them on a tablet so that it can be passed down through the generations. And it needs to be written down because it’s going to take a while to come to fruition, so as they’re waiting, they have the promise from the Lord that even though Chaldeans have been chosen to discipline Judah, they will similarly be disciplined someday in the future.

-But one of the keys to this section is the end of vs. 4: the righteous one. Depending on which translation you have may say either faith or faithfulness which gets to the 2 components of what is being described here: first is the reality that we must put our faith in God, secondly it also means we must trust in the faithfulness of God. It is something we have to do and something God does. Part of the reason I think this is the key to this section is because it comes up 3 times in the NT: Paul quotes this verse in Rom. 1:17 and Gal. 3:11 and then the author of Hebrews quotes it in 10:38, and I think all 3 of these quotes are similarly referring to both the faith we need to have in God and the faithfulness that God has extended to His people, even when things are difficult (as they are with Habakkuk).

-And just as God tells Judah the consequences for their lack of justice, He goes on to tell exactly what will happen to the Chaldeans, and this section is referred to as 5 “Woes,” which one commentator said could be read as “Alas” or “How terrible” and each woe is something the Chaldeans do to others, which will eventually come back on them. I took this summary from the ESV Expositor’s Commentary, I think it’s a helpful summary (just as a reminder, I upload these slides after I preach every week, so feel free to go look at them afterwards!)

-And look where these “woes” end up: in contrast to these earthly issues, the Lord is in His holy temple, which means no earthly army can compete with Him, all creation can do is stand in silent awe of God.

  • Habakkuk’s Psalm (3)

-This book then takes what seems to be an abrupt shift and ends on a Psalm (labeled a prayer) by Habakkuk. In fact, some scholars argue that this shouldn’t even be included in this book because it’s SO different from the rest of the book. Remember that we’ve seen Habakkuk questioning God’s oversight of His creation, but this prayer seems more positive, doesn’t it? But I think that those who are saying it doesn’t fit the context of the book don’t understand the way Christians are supposed to respond to God. God invites us to bring our complaints to Him, to realize that this world is difficult, but even in the midst of that difficulty we can still trust in our God. That’s what Habakkuk is doing! He’s acknowledging that he’s shared all his concerns, and now he trusts that God will do what is good and right for him. I’m going to read the whole thing: 

-Did you hear Habakkuk’s response to God’s vision; it starts in vs 16. Just as we’ve read in previous weeks that God’s enemies were terrified, here we see that Habakkuk was terrified. And do you notice that he doesn’t ask to be spared from the persecution? The difficulty, the stress, the persecution is all guaranteed to happen, but the Christian hope isn’t to be removed from the hard things, the Christian hope is to ask God to allow you to persevere through the difficulty. He says that even though the day of distress is coming, he’s going to try to endure.

-This also becomes his hope throughout the difficulty that’s coming, and the end of the book gives us a hopeful note too. Starting in vs. 17 he goes through a list of things that are lacking, they’ll have no food, no jobs, no sheep or cows, everything will be taken away. But in the midst of that poverty he will celebrate in Yahweh and rejoice that God is his salvation because if we have God, then we can be content.

-God will gives strength to His people even in the midst of suffering and persecution. That’s why Paul says we can rejoice always, that’s what Habakkuk is getting at here. Friends, we can trust in God’s provision in our lives. Even when you’re facing a difficult medical diagnosis, or you’re looking for a job, or you’re facing family strife God will help you endure through it, you can trust in Him because He is good.

  • Is God Good?

-There’s a line that I’ve heard from the former director of InterVarsity who said: 

-This is part of the reason church is so important, because we all walk in through those doors each week in different places, and we need the encouragement of our church family to endure when the suffering comes, because I don’t know when or what you’ll face, but something will come up that will incredibly difficult for you that will cause you to ask if God is good.

-And you’re not along in that question, previous generations tended to ask if God is true, but that doesn’t seem to be the case today, today the primary question people ask is: is God good? And if He is good, then how do we deal with evil or bad things happening? I’ve said this for a while, but I just heard it again in a podcast this week: COVID19 was the first national tragedy that didn’t lead to any sort of revival in our country, I think because people were asking this question. 

-Friends, this is one of the biggest questions that we have to deal with in our faith. But don’t forget that this isn’t just a problem for Christians, this is problem for any and everyone to figure out! What do we do with the evil in the world? And I believe beyond reasonable doubt that the Christian answer provides the best answer to that question! Because the Christian answer is that the world doesn’t operate the way it was intended to, and anytime you go to a funeral you see that reality! Death is an enemy to be destroyed, and anytime someone dies, something within us screams out that it’s not right! And thankfully, God is in the business of redeeming and restoring His creation.

-One of the most beautiful things about the Christianity is it’s meant to be a redemption project, where when we’re saved, we get to be a part of God’s plan to renew and restore the broken world. We aren’t saved to just sit back and wait for Jesus to come back, we’re supposed to be at work letting God’s will be done here and now just like it’s taking place in heaven, and that also means we need to walk through difficult seasons in our lives as Christians, knowing that God will bring good out of our struggles. WE are often the means God uses to bring good into His creation.

-This is why it’s so important for us to know who God is and what He’s like! God is so good that He didn’t leave us to our own ways to try to come back to Him, He sent His son to bear the penalty for the sins of the world. Jesus faced eternal injustice so that we wouldn’t have to. That’s the Christian response to evil and injustice: our Creator willingly taking on Himself the consequences for our sin and the evil that we committed to allow us to be made new creations. Suffering is going to come for all of us, that’s why we need to use the times where we’re not suffering to draw near to God so that when we walk through the darkness, we can remember these truths, and have a church family who can help list us up when we’re tired, who can remind us that even when things look difficult, even when we’re facing persecution, God is good. 

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on March 29, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on March 29, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/03/29/habakkuk-sermon-manuscript/

Nahum – Sermon Manuscript

-How many of you have seen this picture? It shows a scene that was captured on Aug. 14, 1945 in the midst of the celebration that WW2 was coming to an end with the surrender of Japan. A long a bloody war that included the introduction of the atomic bomb, the attempted annihilation of the Jewish population, and tens of millions of people dead. The Allies celebrated mightily at the end of this war, which apparently included even the kissing of strangers.

-And there’s an element to this that we can understand, because when evil is defeated, celebration is the right response. When Hitler was finally defeated, it led to rejoicing! This week’s angry man tells us of a similar story from the 600s BC. When evil nations are defeated, people celebrate! Nahum tells us the story of the defeat of the Assyrians. They were a brutal civilization who boasted about defeating their enemies and impaling their bodies on spikes in front of the city. Their capital at the time was Nineveh (who we read about a couple weeks ago in Jonah). The repentance that we saw in Jonah was apparently short-lived, Martin Luther stated, “Such are the hearts of men that when the punishment ceased, so did the repentance.” Let’s read 

READ/PRAY (Nahum 1, pg. 829)

  1. The Message of Nahum

-Don’t know much about Nahum either! We know what his message focuses on (Nineveh), and we know he’s from Elkosh, but we don’t even know where that is! If you remember this map, you can see Nahum here on the right, but there’s a question mark next to the city.

-The one thing that can be known is the approximate time that he prophesied because of other historical events that he’s talking about. Here’s the way Eric Tully (professor at TEDS and author of Reading the Prophets as Christian Scripture that I recommended at the beginning) summarizes it: So this was written sometime between 663-612BC.

-I think one of the interesting things about the prophets is the way people summarize the message of these books. I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago about a conversation he was having with a family member who said it must be timely to be preaching through these books right now because it’s all about judgment on God’s people. While it’s true that that’s part of it, I don’t think that’s the best summary. There’s a professor that summarizes the whole message of the Bible with 1 sentence: God’s glory in salvation through judgment.

-I wasn’t convinced the first time I heard it, but as we’ve been going through the prophets the last couple months, I’ll admit that it’s grown on me! The first part is literally the whole purpose of creation: God is jealous for His own glory because if He weren’t He wouldn’t be God! We tend to view jealousy only in negative terms, but there is a right jealousy that can be true, for example I can be jealous for my wife’s affections, and she can be jealous for mine. God can be jealous for his glory because if His creation gave glory to anyone else it would be sin. And the means by which God’s glory is most demonstrated is through salvation. All these stories throughout the OT of God’s deliverance are meant to show a picture of the greater salvation that comes through Jesus. All these nations and civilizations are nothing compared to the ultimate enemy of sin! But it doesn’t stop there, it goes on to say it comes through judgment, which is the part that tends to grate against our Western sensibilities. We don’t like to think or talk about the judgment of God, especially when we all know 1 John 4:8, God is love. How does judgment fit into love? We’ll get there at the end today!

-But where this message is timely for us is if you look around us, I think this summarizes the divide we see in our country today. One side emphasizes salvation (redemption, liberation), the other side emphasizes judgement (personal responsibility, consequences), yet isn’t it amazing that the Bible message doesn’t allow those 2 extremes to exist on their own? It cuts through both of them and offers a radically different way where salvation is offered THROUGH judgment, the judgment is placed on someone else. We need to remember that reality as we work through this book:

  1.  Yahweh Is…

-The first thing Nahum tells us is who God is, and this is at the core of why we need the Bible, of why we need the church, and of why we need the gospel. If we reverse this order and start with humanity our perspective is going to be skewed. Just like in Amos where we saw the plumbline that God holds to judge the world, we don’t get to be the ones who determine the standards, God does. If we start with ourselves, by the time we get up to God we’ll just be looking at Him through a human lens, it’s going to be completely skewed. That’s why plumblines are used in building! If you’ve ever seen someone building something that looks off it’s because they were using the wrong plumbline, the wrong standard of measurement, which threw everything else off. We’re tempted to do the same thing when we talk about God, which is why it’s so important for us to spend time reading books like the minor prophets because they remind us that we need to get God right! That we need to rightly understand who He is so we can go from there to interpret the world rightly.

-Nahum begins saying the Lord is jealous and avenging. He’s beginning in a different place than we’ve seen from the other prophets! Contrast this with Jonah! Isn’t this the side of God that Jonah was hoping for? The avenging God who would destroy the Ninevites! But Jonah didn’t get to see that part of God. 

-Eventually, we get to what Jonah talked about: The Lord is slow to anger, other prophets add to that reality: Joel said He is also gracious and compassionate, abounding in faithful love, and He relents from sending disaster. BUT notice that God isn’t opposed to anger, it says He’s SLOW to anger, but when His anger is kindled there is a reason for it. 

-Our God, who is slow to anger, also takes vengeance against His enemies and remains furious with them. But this anger isn’t like our anger. Even Paul admits that there can be a righteous anger (Eph. 4:26), but God’s anger is ALWAYS righteous. So we shouldn’t read this as someone who’s vindictive and finally snaps, this is a righteous judgment coming down on someone who is completely guilty and deserves punishment.

-And as we also saw in Jonah, God is also in control of nature. The storms obey Him, the clouds obey Him. He can make the sea dry up (like He did during the Exodus), He can make rivers run dry (like He did during Joshua’s reign). He can even destroy mountains and shake the foundations of the earth. None of this is difficult for Him! And sometimes God uses nature as His means of bringing about his judgment on people. Think of the story of the Exodus where God uses all sorts of natural things to lead to the freedom of His people, and then the destruction of the Egyptian army by swallowing them up in the Red Sea. 

-And Nahum asks some rhetorical questions at the end of this section: Who can stand up against God’s wrath? Answer: no one! If God’s anger has been kindled, watch out! Not even rocks can stand up to Him!

-But look at how Nahum ends this whole section: God is good! Even in His wrath, God is good. If we miss that reality, we’ll miss the point of the whole Bible! Even in His wrath there’s the potential for salvation IF you take refuge in Him. No one is too far gone to receive God’s mercy! Friends, this is our God! But that’s not where this book ends:

  •  The Destruction of Ninevah 

-Once we get God right (as Nahum just did) then we can move on to His actions:

-Look at the very next verse! God is good, but sometimes God’s goodness results in destruction where His enemies will be completely destroyed. He tells the king that he will be literally wiped off the face of the earth, that his children will be destroyed and that their gods will also be defeated. God is talking smack talk here! He continues this interplay between Assyria’s defeat and Judah’s provision before going into chapt. 2.

-I’m going to read chpt. 2, listen to all the descriptions of what God’s going to do to them:

-Did you notice that it begins in the present tense, even though it hasn’t happened yet? It’s an amazing choice that increases the tension of this story! It immerses the reader in these events. The attack is devastating, the shields and men are covered in blood, the chariots can’t run in a straight line, the officers are falling down, a flood rips through the city. And look at vs. 9

-The things that the Ninevites had put their hope in had been taken away. All their hopes and dreams were wiped out by this invading army. Then Nahum gives this play on words using 3 Hebrew words that sound similar, our translation does a fantastic job with these words so we get the point: desolation, decimation, devastation, as if Nahum is desperate to communicate how complete this will be. And the people will terrified, both internally and externally.

-The next verses are another play on Assyria’s supposed strength. We have accounts of them referring to themselves as lions who destroy everyone in their wake. We can miss the impact of this because we just see lions in cages at the zoo, in this time lions would have been terrifying! They constantly prowled looking for food, and Assyria viewed themselves as just as terrifying as lion. If you ever get to the British Museum, you can see these stone statues that are kind of creepy but look at the feet of the one on the right, do you see how they’ve incorporated a lion into the theme? This would have been a common way of viewing themselves, as undefeatable as a lion or a bull. But as we all know, pride goes before the fall!

-God says even though they think they’re completely powerful, God is against them. They think they’re lions, that’s fine, but their children will be destroyed.

-This continues in chpt. 3, where God compares them to Thebes, a city in Egypt that the Assyrians had previously destroyed. Thebes was the capital of Egypt and was also viewed as impenetrable. It was surrounded by water, hundreds of miles away from the border, and they had allies nearby to help. But they were overtaken by the Assyrians. So if even Thebes can be taken, Ninevah isn’t quite as secure as they think. In fact, if God is opposed to someone there’s nothing that can stand in their way! God has a tendency of destroying nations that think too highly of themselves. 

-And this book ends with the rest of the nation’s celebrating the destruction of this city. All these people had been subjected to their cruelty and destruction, but now that they’re defeated the rest of the people are thrilled because evil has been destroyed.

-I think there are 2 key takeaways for us today, I’ll do the most important second, but the first one is that no nation is off the hook from facing the potential judgment of God. It’s easy to look back at Assyria as overly primitive and not having the same technological advances we have today and dismiss them, but we’re not immune from experiencing the same temptation as the Assyrians. How often do we look to our military or technology and think that we’re safe and have arrived? Friends, the reality of every human civilization is that they have their rise and fall. No kingdom of earth will last forever (apart from the church). I think we have a very modern example of this reality: when Russia attacked Ukraine, they expected they would be welcomed with open arms, and that those who were opposed to them would be overthrown within a couple days. Some of the generals went into battle with their dress uniforms because they assumed they’d need them within a week! And here we are over 4 YEARS later. Turns out Russia might have thought they were a little stronger than they are. Friends, don’t put your ultimate hope in any nation or civilization. 

-The second takeaway for us just happens to be the second point in the sermon outline:

  • Vengeance is Whose?

-The fact that Assyria was destined to fall because of their pride and sins against humanity shows us that there are always consequences for our sin, and the God who is able to cast our sins as far as the east is from the west is also the God who will punish those who refuse to repent from their sins.

-God has promised that ultimate vengeance belongs to Him, which means we should trust His timing and His plans. If nothing happens outside of His plans then we can trust ourselves to Him, even if it doesn’t feel like things are fair in the moment. And ultimately, don’t we want vengeance, at least when we’re wronged? Anytime we’re hurt, don’t we want there to be some way of bringing justice to the situation?

-Paul picks up this idea when he talks about Christian ethics in Rom. 12. Our job isn’t to pursue our own justice, instead our job is to overcome evil with love. That’s what Jesus did when he willingly went to the cross and took all of God’s vengeance and retribution on Himself. He drank the entire cup of God’s wrath, which means there’s the possibility for us to not face the same vengeance as the Ninevites, IF we have the Lord as our refuge. But before we get to that I want to talk about God’s wrath, because we don’t often hear or think about God’s wrath today, we often hear about God’s love, which isn’t wrong it’s just not complete.

-We have to begin with an understanding of God’s wrath. God’s wrath is retributive justice doled out in response to the creation acting in willful rebellion against the Creator. And how does that interact with the reality that God is love? There are 2 things we need to keep in mind in this discussion: first we need to make sure we know the terms we’re using in light of God’s revelation (which is why I just defined God’s wrath as retributive justice), and second we need to understand that some things that are true of God seem like contradictions to us. I like to think of it like a see-saw. Think of some things we know to be true about God: is God 3 or 1? Yes! Is Jesus God or is Jesus human? Yes! Is God love, or is God wrathful? Yes! 

-I think JI Packer is helpful here where he uses the word antimony: 

-What he’s saying is there are some things in the realm of God that we in our finite human minds can’t completely understand. I had a professor in seminary said we have a “mystery” card that we can pull out when we’re talking about God. At the end of the day, there are truths about God that we don’t completely “get,” any every time we come to one of those cases, it’s a reminder to us that we’re not God, so we should fall on our faces in worship of Him!

-So when we talk about God’s wrath, it’s not in contradiction to His love, it’s the correct response to His love. He loves His creation and He doesn’t want anyone to perish, but when His creation acts in rebellion against Him there are consequences for everyone!

-There’s a Christian apologist named Wes Huff that’s gotten incredibly popular over the past year for some of the ways he’s engaged unbelievers. A couple weeks ago he was on a podcast titled “The Diary of a CEO” which is one of the 10 biggest podcasts in the world. He was asked by the unbelieving host if the host was going to hell, and he responded “yes.” Friends, would you be willing to be that bold? Now, Wes went on to say that “heaven is a place for those who have submitted their lives to Jesus, who are living the identity of what they’re created to be and said, ‘Your will be done, God.’ Hell is a place where God says, ‘You rejected me, your will be done. I’m going to give you what you want.” Friends, eternity is a really, really, really long time! And every person who has ever lived is going to live forever either saying “Your will be done” to God, or having God say to them, “your will be done.”

-So don’t let this moment pass you by! If we’re saved, then we have a job to do to encourage others to live in the reality that Jesus has taken God’s wrath on Himself. Paul earlier in Romans actually quotes from Nahum, in Rom. 10. 

-Everything centers on Jesus! If Jesus is really God (and He is), then all of us who were once God’s enemies have the opportunity to become the adopted children of God. Do you notice the ordering: It begins with the message of Christ that sends us out (like we do every week), it requires someone to preach the truths of the gospel so that people can hear it, and it takes people responding to what they heard through repentance and faith.

-And when that happens, when we’re brought from death to life, the verse that Paul is quoting from in Nahum says that we have peace. The wicked won’t have the same power over us because it’s been defeated, so we respond by celebrating!

-Which is exactly what we do when we celebrate communion.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on March 22, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on March 22, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/03/22/nahum-sermon-manuscript/

Jonah – Sermon Manuscript

-If anyone knows any of the minor prophets, it’s probably this one! VeggieTales movie, topic of a host of debates about whether or not this could really happen.

READ/PRAY

  1. Jonah’s Journey

-Fact or fiction: one of the biggest questions about this book is whether or not this really happened. I had a friend in seminary who was convinced this was a myth, written just to teach a story and wasn’t historically true. I’ve read all sorts of commentaries arguing both sides of this, and even saw a video of a kayaker in Patagonia who got swallowed by a humpback whale and then immediately spit out! So apparently it is possible to be swallowed by a fish and spit back out. But the primary reason I believe it’s a true account of a real historical event is because Jesus seemed to think it was, and anytime there’s a debate going on, I want to side with the guy who’s the author of history!

–Matt. 12:39-41 Jesus is asked to perform a sign for the Pharisees, and here’s how He responds: the prophet Jonah is referred to as a real person, and it says not only did it happen in the past, but the people of Ninevah will in the future condemn those asking the question for their lack of repentance!

-Another component to this is we tend to view the world with an anti-supernatural bias, or question whether things we consider miraculous can actually happen. Is anything too hard for God? Think of just a few other things God does in the OT: He makes a donkey talk, He makes food both fall out of the sky and appear on the ground, and walls fall down in response to people shouting. Do you think it’s outside of God’s ability to have a fish swallow a man in the sea? I don’t!

-We also see Jonah appear in 2 Kings 14:25. So with all that evidence, I think we should take this as a real, historical account.

  1. Down to Tarshish (1-2)

-Jonah is an anomaly in these prophets. The other prophets willingly obeyed God, there wasn’t any questioning or doubting of God’s call on their lives, Jonah is literally the opposite of everything else we’ve seen.

-Jonah also has very different content than the rest of the prophets (which is part of the reason we tend to gravitate towards it!) Jonah tells a story, and it’s a story that feels bigger than life, doesn’t it? (theme of “great” throughout) A prophet (who is supposed to represent God to the people) who attempts to flee to the ends of the earth to escape God who gets swallowed by a big fish, then reluctantly preaches the bare minimum of God’s word to his assigned city and leads to a revival. The whole thing it crazy! And pay attention to the way the book intentionally contrasts Jonah with the rest of the characters.

-One of the ways Hebrew builds suspense (and so do we) is through repeated words. Another one of the comparisons in Jonah is down vs. up. The Lord calls to Jonah and calls him to go UP to Tarshish, and he responds by going DOWN to Joppa. And this isn’t just a casual “on the way I accidentally” this is an intentional running away from. He goes down even lower into the boat and stays down while the storm is raging. The captain tells him to come UP to pray, pick me UP throw me DOWN into the sea. But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself! God’s command is 1 thing, but Jonah’s response is another. He’s commanded to go to the northeast, and he goes southwest, and then finds a ship going to what would have been considered the ends of the earth! Jonah’s not only disobeying God, he’s running as far away from God as he possibly can.

-One thing I noted in my sermon scraps for Amos is that the tendency at this time was to view gods as tribal deities, not dissimilar to the way we have NFL teams today. Yahweh was the God of Israel, Baal was the god of the Canaanites, and when they went to war it was seen as a battle of the gods, and whoever won the battle was the superior god. And that also impacted the sea! There was a specific god of the sea people would appeal to for safe travel.

-So when the text goes on to tell us that there was a great wind and a great storm, they all started appealing to any god they could think of for mercy, but it didn’t help. So they continued going on to throw out all the cargo. Compare the sailors to Jonah here. They’re doing everything they can to save the ship, and what’s Jonah’s response? He doesn’t care at all! He’s treating this like a cruise and decided his best course of action was to take a nap.

-So the captain wakes him up. He’s the only one who’s not trying to contribute to the crisis! Even though Jonah’s the main character of this story, he’s taken a completely passive role in this account. The prophet, who’s supposed to be speaking on behalf of the one true God is silent. They decide to do some work to find out which god is upset with them by casting lots. Jonah, as a good prophet, should have seen his chances of escaping getting even smaller. Prov. 16:33 tells us that God is even in control of this seemingly random event.

-This gambling (which God was in charge of, but friends, don’t gamble today! We have the Holy Spirit indwelling us as our guide!), but this gambling leads to Jonah being found as the guilty party. They didn’t know much about him, and if you remember back to our first week, I shared that the role of the prophet is to speak on behalf of God, but Jonah remains completely silent until he’s forced to open up. They’d been calling out to all these random gods, but Jonah is supposed to be worshipping the 1 true God, who even rules over the heavens, the place where they thought all their gods were. Not only is He the God of the heavens, he’s also the one who made the sea and the land, so there’s no where you can escape from Him! But Jonah’s trying to do exactly that and run to the furthest reaches of the earth to try to escape!

-When the men hear it, they’re seized by a “great” fear and realize they’re toast! Remember what I said earlier about the various gods? They assumed that Jonah was just running away from a little land god, not THE God who you can’t escape! Since Jonah is the only one who knows this God, the sailors ask him how to deal with the problem. And Jonah says: it requires a human sacrifice. Do you see how Jonah’s trying to die? He would rather be thrown into the sea in the middle of a hurricane than go to Ninevah to tell them to repent. And not only is Jonah trying to die, he doesn’t even care if the sailors are taken with him! Do you see how even though the sailors know what’s going on, they still try to help him? They worked as hard as they could to save Jonah, who’s still passive.

-And now who cries out to Yahweh? The sailors! Jonah still doesn’t care! Where previously Yahweh was unknown to them, as soon as they learn which God it is, they’re all in. They throw Jonah in and the sea is calm. So what’s their response? They worship the one true God! Do you see how even in Jonah’s sin God is still working? Jonah, the guy who’s trying to escape God’s call on his life just mentions the name of this God, and their entire worship changes. Keep in mind what these sailors do: they offer a sacrifice and make vows (assuming to Yahweh)

-But Jonah can’t catch a break; God STILL won’t even let him die!

-This next chapter needs to be read with a strong level of irony. First, do you hear how much this sounds like the Psalms? Jonah knows the Bible! He knows the truth about God, but it hasn’t transformed his heart. Second, do you see how self-centered it is? Who’s the focus of this “prayer” God or Jonah?

-Look at what he says in vs. 2, he waited until he was in Sheol, the place of the dead to call out to God. Why didn’t he call out to God while he was in the boat with all those pagan sailors? And it gets worse! Look at 3 he says God threw him into the sea! He’s blaming God for his current situation. Just when it feels like it can’t get worse, he keeps going!

-Let’s look at the end of the prayer. He talks about those who cherish or love worthless idols and says they’re terrible and wrong. Who were the ones who cherished worthless idols in this story? Wasn’t it the sailors? But where did we leave them? Offering sacrifices to Yahweh and making vows to Him. Jonah’s saying the sailors are the problem, meanwhile He’s in the right standing before the God! He continues deluding himself! One scholar said, “these are the right words coming out of the wrong mouth!” We don’t see any accounts in this story of Jonah offering a sacrifice of any vows. The final irony is salvation does belong to Yahweh, which is good for Jonah because if it were up to him, no one except him would be saved.

-But God is faithful and shows His complete control once again by commanding this fish to vomit Jonah up. We see this as gross today, but I think it has deeper significance than just the disgust: throughout the OT, this word is used to describe God’s punishment on the Israelites for disobedience, the land vomits them out. This may be a way of saying this is a continuation of God’s punishment on Jonah.

  • Up to Nineveh (3-4)

-Déjà vu here, as God tells Jonah once again to go to Nineveh, but this time he’s learned his lesson and finally obeys.

-Just to catch us up again and understand this, Jonah has spent who knows how long trying to run away from God’s call on his life. He’s been swallowed by a great fish, been vomited out, then recommissioned with the same task, and the journey to Nineveh would have taken him about 30 days of walking to get to. So this story for us is condensed, but how happy do you think Jonah was on this journey? Do you think he spent the time skipping and jumping along to get to Nineveh as quickly as he could? Remember: God wouldn’t even let him die previously! I picture him grumbling the entire way!

-So Jonah finally arrives at Nineveh, and begins proclaiming the incoming destruction of the city. Other prophets had similar tasks warning that the day of the Lord was coming, a day of darkness and destruction. 2 things to note here: first the description of the size of the city: it’s huge! It would take 3 days to walk it! And how far does Jonah walk? 1 day, which means he doesn’t even get to the middle of it! And what is his message? 5 words in Hebrew, 7 in English. He doesn’t mention which god he’s preaching on behalf of; he doesn’t say why they’re going to be destroyed, all he says is destruction is coming. All he does is predict a certain destruction.

-And what’s the response of the city? Immediate repentance! Friends, this has to be the most unbelievable part of this story! This city of people devoted to destroying the nation of Yahweh responds the right way when they’re faced with the realities of their sin. They don’t make excuses, they don’t ignore it, they work to get right with God. And the repentance is universal! It says the greatest to the least: no one is left out! And the king led the way! Here’s the decree he made the everyone:

-Everyone (even the animals, keep that in mind) is to fast and put on sackcloth (a way of grieving), AND begin crying out “earnestly” to God. Do you notice that they’re not even sure which God they’re crying out to? Think back to the sailors, as soon as they heard his name they started crying out to Him, here they’re only told that a god is upset but it’s STILL enough for them repent. Notice the ending here: they’re concerned that it’s too late and they don’t know how God will respond. They don’t know which God, they don’t know how to please Him, but they’re willing to try doing whatever they can!

-And we know God, we’ve seen that He’s slow to anger and quick to forgiveness (we’ve seen that repeatedly through these prophets). So God responds as He always does: he relents. The certain destruction doesn’t happen. And if this were the ending of the book there may be a glimmer of hope still for Jonah. But we’re not done.

-Jonah is now great with displeasure, and contrast this with the question of the king. Who knows what this God will do? And what does Jonah say? I KNEW IT! This was the whole reason he tried running way! God always forgives, God will always relent from sending disaster for those who respond correctly. But that’s not what Jonah wanted. Jonah wanted grace and mercy for himself, but not for his enemies. Keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it in a minute. Jonah here is so upset that he finally just explicitly asks God to kill him. He tried running away, tried sleeping through a hurricane, tried drowning and none of those worked, so he goes straight to the source!

-And God asks him a question in response: but Jonah (as we’ve seen previously) just goes with the silent treatment. He goes to build a little shelter and watch the show. I picture him setting himself up like this:

-And God is once again kind and gracious. Jonah goes from being greatly displeased to greatly pleased because of the shade. Unfortunately the shade turns out to be a lesson for him, and God sends a worm (compare that to the whale!) to kill the plant. AND THEN God throws in some nature to make Jonah even more upset. So how does Jonah respond this time? Once again, he asks God to kill him. And God asks a similar question to His previous one: is it right for you to be angry about this plant?

-YES! I’m angry enough to die! That’s the last word from Jonah in this book. Jonah’s anger keeps bubbling up to the point where he’s so angry he wants to die because of a plant. Doesn’t that seem a little misplaced to you?

-But God gets the last word. Jonah CARED about nothing in the book except a plant. He didn’t plant it or water it; he was just the benefactor of it. If Jonah cares about this little plant, isn’t it even more important for God to care about Nineveh, a place with more than 120,000 people who are all created as the image of God? God’s people are commanded to care for humans above all the rest of the created order, but Jonah’s missed that reality and was only worried about himself.

-Not only is this city full of people, but it’s people who don’t KNOW the right thing to do. Jonah is the only one in this story who knows the right God, the right ways to live, and is the only one who responds with disobedience and sin. Every other character obeys; did you notice that? The sailors believe, the whale obeys God’s command, the Ninevites repent, the plant obeys, the worm obeys, the scorching east wind obeys, meanwhile, Jonah gets angry. The worst prophet in this series!

-And God’s final request is: if you can’t care about the people, would you at least care about the animals? And that question leaves the book unresolved, doesn’t it? We don’t know what happened to Jonah, and the ending of the book is meant to force us to ask that same question: who do you view as outside of the bounds of God’s mercy and grace?

  • Grace for Who?

-The question at the heart of this book is: how do you view your sin? Do you know that you need God to be gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding I faithful love TO YOU, or is that just needed for other people who are worse than you? Isn’t the temptation for all of us to grade ourselves on a sliding scale? We compare our strengths to someone else’s weaknesses and determine they MUST be worse than us.

-You can see this with the whole NIMBY phenomenon, have you heard of it? It stands for not in my backyard. I’ve read it referring to someone that’s pushing for low-income housing, as long as it’s not in my backyard. They want to appear virtuous, but don’t want it to affect them. I think we also saw this during COVID: good for thee not for me, we excuse ourselves but enforce strong rules for everyone else.

-There’s a fantastic quote from a Croatian theologian named Miroslav Volf (who’s a professor at Yale Seminary) who wrote a book on reconciliation where he talked about forgiveness in this way:

-What’s he’s saying is we all place people in 2 different camps: those who are opposed to us (or we view as opposed to us) are less than human, meanwhile we elevate ourselves to the place where we’re more than human. That’s normal! We all do it! But Jesus gives us a different way: He goes on to say that when we look to Jesus our perspective changes. We go from wanting condemnation for our enemy to wanting resolution and reconciliation with them, and we go from pride to realizing that we, too, are in need of God’s grace.

-After all, this is what Paul says in 1 Tim. 1:15-17.

-He’s not saying he’s done the math and he got the worst grade, he’s saying that when you use the right standard, we’re all the worst! When we’re all comparing ourselves to perfection none of us can stand. At the end of the day, we’re all like Jonah, the temptation of the human heart is to give grace to yourself and condemn everyone else. But there’s a second piece to this that I think we also need to look at:

  • When Religiosity is the Problem

-Did you notice how when Jonah finally “prayed” he essentially just quoted the Psalms? He knew the right things to say, but it hadn’t gone the 18” from his head to his heart. Often Jonah is used to preach about ethnocentrism (or racism, if you want to talk about why I prefer the former term let me know), or it’s preached about the need to go into the nations and do cross-cultural missions. But I think that’s missing the purpose of this book. I think the warning is to those of us who are like Jonah, who haven’t let the truths of the gospel trickle down into our hearts and begin to transform us from the inside out. Jesus had some strong words to people like Jonah, who judged other people based on external compliance but didn’t take the time to look at the deeper reality.

-2 examples back-to-back in Matt. 23:

-First is the picture of people who clean the outside of a cup but leave the inside. One of my cousins when we were growing up was a major germophobe. He didn’t want to shake hands, refused to ever share snacks or drinks. But when he was done eating, he would literally lick his plate clean and stick it back in the cupboard. Do you see the inconsistency!? I know he sometimes listens to these sermons, so sorry if you catch this one! The point is: it’s gross, right!?

-The second one is making the exact same point: Jesus is accusing them of whitewashing tombs. Think of a house that looks beautiful on the outside, fresh paint, brand new roof, immaculate lawn, but you walk in and it’s a hoarder’s house. Jesus isn’t asking us to clean up our mess to present to Him, He invites us to come to Him so He can clean up our mess.

-Friends, this is why we need Jesus and not Jonah.

-Jesus, who also slept in a boat during a storm, but then cared more about saving his friends than himself.

-Jesus, who asked NOT to be killed, but willingly went to His death anyway, not because He was angry, but because we were angry.

-Jesus, who knows everything, and asked for God to forgive those who “didn’t know what they were doing,” even as he bore the penalty for every sin on the cross.

-Jesus, who then spent 3 days and nights in the belly of the earth, and then was “vomited” out because the punishment was done. Forever. Aren’t you glad that in a world full of Jonahs, we get Jesus?

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on March 8, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Relationships, Sermon
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on March 8, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/03/08/jonah-sermon-manuscript/

Joel – Sermon Manuscript

-One of the interesting things about these prophets is that all their names have specific meanings that tend to correlate to their role. Hosea’s name means “salvation” or “deliverance” which shows the way God’s people were saved or delivered from their sins. Joel’s name means Yahweh is God. But did you know the Jesus wasn’t the name of God’s Son? Jesus’s name in Hebrew was actually Joshua, which means “Yahweh is salvation.” So when the angel appears to Mary, he tells her that she should name her son Joshua because He will save His people from their sins. So why do we call Him Jesus?

-When the OT was being translated from Hebrew into Greek, there were some words that were transliterated (moved from Hebrew into Greek without translating, each letter for the corresponding letter in Greek). We saw this last week when our Bible’s transliterated the names of Hosea’s children. So Jeshua in the Hebrew became Iesous in the Greek. Then English came on the scene, and the first English translation put the name as Ihesus, which in the KJV became Iesus. So Jesus comes from a transliteration of a transliteration, and because of the impact of the KJV, we refer to Him as Jesus in all our English Bibles today.

-We’re going to look at the significance of Jesus’s name today, and it may surprise you that it comes up in Joel!

READ/PRAY (pg. 807)

  1. The Day of the Lord

-One of the repeated phrases throughout this book is, “The Day of the Lord,” a future moment where God would come in judgment to pay back the enemies of His people. It’s used in a number of other prophets in the OT, but it also makes some appearances in the NT. Some people call it just “that day” or will refer to it as “the great day of the Lord”

-Talked about in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Obadiah, and most explicitly in Zephaniah. Now, this gets to one of the biggest questions surrounding Joel. Think back to last week when I talked about the dates of these books. Many of them begin with the name of the prophet, followed by the kings who reigned during their ministries, see here’s the first verse from Hosea. Compare that to the beginning of Joel. So there’s debate about where we should historically locate Joel, since there’s similar themes to some other books, is Joel using terminology from them or are they borrowing language from Joel? If you remember this chart from last week that placed the dates of the various prophets, you can see a question mark next to Joel. The big event in Joel is a famine due to a swarm of locusts, which could place it in any of these centuries.

-We’ll talk about this more thoroughly when we get to Zechariah, but I think we need to build a foundation of this “day” that the prophets are talking about here to help us understand the message of Joel! 

-At the time, the Israelites were anxious for the day of the Lord because it was viewed in a completely positive light, where the other nations who had defeated God’s people would be judged. But the message of the prophets is that the judgment would be negative, not positive! Look how Isaiahdescribes this day:

-And this isn’t just an OT focus, look how Revelation both describes the day and what that day is referred to as. So instead of being a positive thing, the prophets warn us that that the Day of the Lord is going to be terrifying! And where that Revelation passage ends is the question Joel will help us answer: Who can stand?

  • The Message of Joel

-The focus of this book is trying to prepare people for the day of the Lord by using the picture of the current disaster from locusts as a picture of what will someday be coming from an invading army.

-Now, because it’s the Bible and probably the most studied and dissected book in the world, there’s debate about what’s being talked about! The debate is what exactly is Joel talking about, and is it different between chapters 1 & 2, or is he just talking about the same event? Either Joel uses locusts to describe an invading army, or there’s no army he’s just talked about how destructive the locusts are, OR 1 chapter is locusts and 2 is an army of people. Again, it doesn’t help that we can’t specifically date this book, which slightly complicates figuring out what exactly Joel’s talking about. BUT I would take the position that Joel 1 is referring to a real ecological disaster that serves as a picture of what an invading army would do in Joel 2, followed how God will redeem and restore His people in Joel 3. Remember, Joel’s name means “Yahweh is God,” and it fits with his primary message of God’s upcoming judgment of the wicked and restoration of the righteous.

  1. Judgment in the Day of the Lord (1:1-2:17)

-The first reminder is that this event is supposed to be significant for the people, significant enough that it becomes a part of the family story. What’s amazing, to me, about this is that throughout the Bible, God commands His people to repeat stories down through the generations. 

-2 brief examples. My mind has been in Joshua a lot the past few weeks, and one of the amazing stories in that book is that the nation is able to cross the Jordan river on dry ground because God stops the river from flowing (similar to what He did when they left Egypt). Once the whole nation had crossed, God tells Joshua to take 12 stones from the middle of the river and bring them to their camp, and then set up another 12 stone memorial in the middle of the river as a reminder of what God had done for them. And notice how God describes it: 

The nation is supposed to talk about God’s provision for them.

-Second is in Deut. 6, as God tells His people how they’re supposed to live (just so you keep this in mind from last week, don’t miss that the one true God doesn’t leave us in the dark, He tells us how we should live!) And look what God says they’re supposed to do with these words: repeat them to your children. This is God’s way of saying: know your history, know your story, so that you can know how you got where you are today. AND as we see in Joel, don’t just repeat the good stories! Share the difficulties and struggles God has taken you through, don’t just give your kids or your friends the Instagram reel of your life, talk about the times and seasons where you weren’t sure if God was going to show up. 

-I’m not sure if you know this yet, but life is HARD! And one of the things I think we need to teach kids is that it’s possible to navigate and persevere through difficult things. Sometimes the difficulty is because of our own stupidity, and sometimes things just happen to us, but let your kids know that you survived!

-In the case of Joel, what has happened that the people had survived is a plague of locusts. Just a few years ago, locusts were actually in the news because in Kenya they were facing the destruction of their crops from locusts, the BBC called it “The biblical locusts plagues of 2020.” And look just how complete this plague is for Joel 1:4:

-Nothing is left, they’re facing starvation in ways that we can’t begin to comprehend today! And when their entire economy depends on agriculture this is like facing the great depression of 1930s (close enough that we have to specify which century now!) Joel goes on through this chapter to say the grapevines have been ruined, fruit trees are destroyed, even the animals are grieving and groaning. 

-And this was something that God had promised! Remember to last week where I said the primary role of the prophets was to remind the people what God had said and to call them back to uphold their end of the covenant? God always keeps His Word, both for His blessings and His curses. And in Deut. 28, God says:

-And what’s the proper response of the people? They’re supposed to wake up! (5), grieve (8), be ashamed (11), dress in sackcloth and lament (13), announce a sacred fast and a solemn assembly (14) Why? Look at vs. 15. This is the first time that phrase is mentioned. And unfortunately, even though this day is terrible, it’s not THAT day! It’s near, this plague is a picture of the judgment and devastation that will come from God on THAT day, so brace yourself! Look at the way the Lord is spelled out in your Bible, do you see the smaller font, but uppercase letters? In the OT that’s the way our modern Bibles note where the divine name “Yahweh” is being used, you can see it previously in vs. 14, 9, & 1. If the letters aren’t capitalized it’s using a different Hebrew word.

-And that warning continues in chpt. 2, he doubles down on the reality that the day of the Lord is coming, and look at how he describes it in vs. 2, and part of the reason I think this is referring to something in the future is because of his description of something that “never existed in ages past and never will again.” He’s using the plague as a picture of what THAT day is going to look like.

-And to see how complete this destruction is, look at vs. 11. Nothing can stand in the way of this army, nothing can stand against them, leading to God asking the rhetorical question: who can endure it? The answer is no one!

-And friends, apart from God’s miraculous intervention that’s where we’re stuck. Paul in Eph. 2 describes us as dead in our sins. If God hadn’t brought us from death to life no one would be able to stand in His presence. And we know that about God! The fact that we preach a “gospel” which means “good news” means there must be hope in the midst of this destruction, right? Let’s see the way God answers that question, who can endure?

-God’s people can, if they follow through on God’s commands to seek repentance. And do you notice that Joel calls out a false repentance? Friends, how easy is it to act remorseful but not actually be repenting? To grieve that you got caught, not that you were sinning. God invites us to repent and provides a way of dealing with that sin, not just looking the other way and ignoring or penalizing and holding it against you but casting it as far as the East is from the West. And how often do we see a fake response in our world? People apologizing “if you were offended,” or apologizing for hurting you, but not admitting that what they did was wrong. And that’s only if someone actually apologizes! Think of what we’re seeing with the release of all these Epstein files! I’ll be honest, it’s pretty hard for me to take most of the apologies seriously when these people have had years or decades to apologize, but they waited. Is there actual regret for what they participated in, or is it merely posturing – putting on a show so you look good to others. That’s the kind of “repenting” that God is calling out here. He wants true repentance from the heart, not a show of repentance without any inner transformation.

-And notice how it describes God: gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love. Church – this is why it’s so important for us to have good theology, a good grasp on who God is. Since we know that God is gracious and compassionate we can respond with repentance! If God was malicious or angry we should be afraid to admit we’re sinners, but that’s not our God. Our God is slow to anger and overflowingwith steadfast, faithful love (Hebrew words chesed which is very hard to translate). Sally Lloyd Jones calls it: “Never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.” Think about that comparison: slow to anger. God’s first reaction isn’t in anger, it takes Him a LONG time to get angry. But God’s first reaction to true repentance is forgiveness. He’s slow to anger but QUICK to forgiveness. And if you think about that, isn’t that exactly what you’d hope for from Him? You don’t want him to be quick to anger and slow to forgiveness because we’re ALWAYS going to sin! If He weren’t slow to anger we’d be toast!

-Then with that reminder of who God is, the priests can call people to a true repentance (vs. 15-17) where once their sins are dealt with, God can be with them again.

  • The Mercy of the Lord (2:18-3:21)

-Now that the people know what God is like and they move to respond in repentance, how does God respond? Just as He promised! He will restore everything they’ve lost. God spares His people because they have responded in repentance. 

-God says He will repay His people for the lean years. God’s blessings will pour out on His people, but even more importantly than the blessings: 

-God will be present with His people. They won’t be looking to idols as their source of comfort anymore. BUT that doesn’t happen on this side of Jesus’s return! Which is what God goes on to predict, and this gets us to those near and far future fulfillments that we talked about last week but hold onto that for just a minute.

-The next key to Joel is that when that day of the Lord comes it will be marked by a revival among the people. Look at what He says in 28-29:

-Previously, God’s Spirit only indwelt people for a short period of time, not permanently, and it was primarily those who were tasked with leading the nation (kings, priests, prophets). But now God says He’ll pour out His Spirit on ALL humanity, and when He says ALL he means it! Sons and daughters (suddenly there’s no gender divisions in salvation), old men and young men (suddenly there’s no age or generational divisions), and male and female slaves (suddenly there’s no class or economic distinctions). God’s Spirit can live in any and every one! I think this is what Paul’s talking about in Gal 3:28 when he says: 

-And back to Joel, that’s what God says too: EVERYONE. 

-The final chapter gives the other perspective of the day of the Lord. There’s a different response from God to those who don’t turn in repentance to God. If you look at the footnote of your Bible, you’ll see that Jehoshaphat means the Lord will judge. God is reminding His people that even if it looks like the nations around them are flourishing in their defeat of them, the end result will be completely different for them. God will respond to their lack of repentance with judgment. But even in the midst of that judgment, look at how God describes Himself for His people: 

-A refuge and stronghold, a place where they can be protected and preserved from the incoming judgment and destruction of the nations. And look how God promises to pour out His blessings on His people:

-In order to understand how we should respond to this book, I think we need to see how the NT writers interpret Joel’s words, so there’s 3 key passages that I think help us understand what God is teaching to His people through all time:

  • The Use of Joel in the New Testament (Acts 2; Romans 10:13; Revelation 9)

-2 key changes that Peter makes:

-Peter says it is IN the last days, where Joel says “After this.” Peter is saying this is the sign you’ve been waiting for! The last days have started NOW, but those last days aren’t fully realized, just like the 2 mountains.

-He also adds in 18 that “they will prophesy.” Peter is saying what is taking place is prophesying, we think it’s just the future, but Peter is showing us that it is speaking in the power of God in unique ways, sometimes speaking to what’s happening right now. 

-More importantly, after quoting from Joel, Peter does a bit of logic building in the Greek to point out exactly how this salvation comes through a name. In the Greek, the word for Lord is kurios (no special marker in our English Bibles), so he begins with a reference to Yahweh from the OT, then he goes on to talk about God raising this Jesus in 32. Then he goes on to equate Jesus with the Lord (this is a key verse Jesus uses to describe Himself in Matt. 22) and lands by saying in vs. 36: God has made this Jesus the kurios, the Lord God. 

-The people are convicted, and they ask what they should do, and what does Peter say? Repent and be baptized (those are connected to each other), in what name? The name of Jesus. The promise that those who call on the correct name will be saved was hidden to Joel, but with the arrival of Jesus has been revealed! We know that name! We know who we should call to if we want to be saved!

-This is exactly the same argument Paul uses in Rom. 10.

-Lastly, just so we can begin to understand the way the day of the Lord works, listen to one of the things John sees in Rev. 9. 

-And there’s more descriptions of these locusts in later verses. In Joel, the locusts are described as lions (1:6), complete destruction in the front and back (2:3) perhaps like a scorpion, like horses specifically war hoses (2:4), their sound is described like chariots (2:5). Do you think there might be some parallels between what God revealed to both Joel and John? I tried emphasizing this point when I preached through Rev. in 2024, but how much of Revelation do we misinterpret because we don’t catch these OT references and allusions? And what if the verses in Revelation are supposed to remind us of what we just talked about as an application from Joel? Unless you call on the name of the Lord, you will be destroyed.

-So friends, as we conclude this sermon, the question before you is: what’s going to happen to you on the Day of the Lord? Today we’ve seen the reminder that unless we repent and believe in the name of Jesus we will not be saved.

-Peter says that there is no other name we should look to for salvation, there’s no hope for salvation from anyone or anything else.

-And because God is slow to anger, Paul tells us in Rom. 2:4 that that trait is God’s kindness and is meant to lead us to repentance. If you repent and believe, then the Day of the Lord is something to get excited for! It’s the day where our faith will be made sight, where the spiritual realm will be visible to us, where we’ll see our Savior and King returning to bring us home!

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on February 15, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on February 15, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/02/15/joel-sermon-manuscript/

Praying with Paul – Sermon Manuscript

-Last week was an “off” week with my ordination, thank you for your support through that! I’m thankful it’s done, and for the encouragement that came from that whole process. One of the most fascinating things to me about it is how infrequently we look to actively encourage each other! I can guarantee that no one around you is feeling TOO encouraged right now! Which gets us to this week’s topic: the prayers of Paul.

-Final week of this brief series. The first week we looked at the prayerbook of Jesus (the Psalms) and were reminded to use the Bible as a guide to our prayers. The second week, Micah took us through the Lord’s prayer as a helpful template to guide our prayers, but not as the only prayer we’re allowed to pray because no other prayer is exactly like it. Then, we looked at the need to pray honestly, to bring our true requests to God because He already knows them! 

-But there’s more to prayer than what we’ve seen so far because we’ve basically stopped at the Gospels, which is only the first 4 books of the NT. Paul mentions prayer regularly throughout his letters. Another inspiration for this sermon series is this book “A Call to Spiritual Reformation” (now retitled “Praying with Paul”)

-But before we get to those, I want to remind us of another reality about prayer. Friends, God hears your prayers. If you are His child, He hears every single one of your prayers. And how do I know that? Because of Revelation. I was reminded this week of a couple passages from that book (which we studied in detail over 2024, so if you want to hear that series you can find it online). 2 things: Revelation is meant to give us a glimpse of reality from God’s perspective, and it’s meant to be a blessing and encouragement to the church. It’s one of the most comforting books in the Bible, because it tells us that God’s actually in control! But prayer is mentioned in 2 passages, 5, and 8. 5 tells us the same thing that 8 does: that the elders and creatures have golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And look at what chpt. 8 tells us these prayers do: go up into the very presence of God. Remember what I said about this book being a comfort to us? This is what I mean! Our prayers fill the presence of the throne room of God! Keep that image in mind as we continue:

READ/PRAY (1048)

  1. What Does Paul Pray For?

-I did a search of the word “pray” (so it includes prayer and praying) but doesn’t include things like ask or intercede to try to limit a little bit. Paul uses it in 52 verses throughout his 13 letters, the only ones that don’t have the word pray in them are Galatians and Titus. Here’s the breakdown of where Paul uses pray (see the focus in Ephesians?) I’m going to begin by simply reading every single one of these verses, and as I’m reading them (they’ll be on the screens) see if you notice any common themes or ideas popping up throughout them all, and then we’ll go on to talk about 2 things that stood out to me from these texts, and how we should incorporate those ideas into our prayers. I’ve already highlighted each use of pray so you can easily see them on the screen. Are you ready for this? We’re going to go pretty quickly through them!

-Did you notice any themes pop out through them all? What stands out to me is how different this is from so many of my prayers, and the prayers I hear from other people. How many of our prayers are focused either on our prosperity or our physical health? Don’t get me wrong, those aren’t bad things to pray for, James commands us to pray for the sick and Jesus tells us to ask God who will answer us, but what is the percentage of our prayers that are focused on those things instead of the things we see Paul mentioning that he’s praying about?

-Not only that, but Paul seems to assume that his prayers will be answered. There’s no waffling, no giving up, no complaining about a delay to His prayers. He expects that God is going to respond to his requests.

-This is why I began with a couple quotes from Revelation. Friends, do you realize that your prayers are brought before the throne of God like incense? Like imagine it’s summer or fall, the 2 months where it’s tolerable to live in MN. You decide to have a bonfire. You get the grahams, chocolate (only Hershey’s), and mallows ready, build the perfect tee-pee with kindling, and you’re off to the races. When the fire dies down, and you have to douse it with water at the end of the evening, what do you smell like? Smoke! Even after you shower and change your clothes, right? I feel like my beard smells like smoke for at least 2 days after I’m at a bonfire, which is why I’m digging the new smokeless firepits!

-But combine that bonfire reality with the description of our prayers in Revelation: our prayers linger around the throne room of God like smoke on our bodies after a bonfire. Friends, God isn’t distant or aloof! He hears every prayer, and every prayer lingers on Him because He cares for us.

-One of the passages that has been lingering in my mind this week is Rom. 12:15. Within 5 minutes this week, I got 2 different texts, 1 from someone who got a new job offer that we’ve been praying for for 4 years, and another one from someone who was told he would be cut to part-time effective Monday. How do you deal with those 2 bipolar realities? I think I’ve shared this from the pulpit before, but in 2022 Cara had 2 miscarriages before the twins came along. And as she was going through one of those miscarriages, I was walking into church when someone stopped me to share that they were expecting another child. And a part of me was angry and hurting, and at the same time I was grateful that this couple was expanding their family and rejoiced with them. How do we live in those 2 realities, and often at the same time?

-Friends, welcome to the church! God calls all of us together to be a body, to love each other through every circumstance, and to recognize that not everyone is in the same place as us. Some people are coming in excited and thankful, and others are coming in weary and exhausted. And Paul reminds us to pray for everyone! But back to my original question, what things is he praying for? The 2 things that stood out to me this week were thanksgiving and growth or maturity. We could use a number of verses to see these modeled, but for simplicity sake we’ll look at the end of 1 Thess. and the beginning of 2 Thess. (same spot in the pew Bible!)

  • Thanksgiving (1 Thess. 5:16-18)

-I remember reading this in college, when this verse really popped out at me because my friends and I were always trying to figure out God’s will. How do you know which major to pursue, is this girl the right one for me to date, where should I work in the summer? There was 1 person I knew who wouldn’t do anything until she felt like the Lord had prompted her to, so she would skip class if she thought the Lord hadn’t told her to go. It was weird! This verse tells us that God’s will isn’t some mystery that we’re supposed to try to figure out, like a maze where there’s only 1 right path, and if you get off, you’re done. God’s will for all of us is a different way of living, God wants a certain character to mark out His people, we’re not supposed to live in fear of falling out of God’s will for us, we’re supposed to be chasing after Him, taking steps closer to Him each day, and then live a normal human life.

-But in order to understand what we’re supposed to give thanks for; we have to take a look at the larger context of this letter. This exhortation comes at the end of this letter where Paul has written to remind the church to remain faithful in following Jesus. They were worried that those who died would miss Jesus’s return, so he writes them to remind them that they’d know when Jesus comes back, they literally wouldn’t be able to miss it! In addition, because Jesus is coming back, He expects His people to act and behave a certain way. 

-Paul begins with a reminder to respect or honor the leaders of the church. We looked at those last Fall in much more detail in our walk through 1 Timothy. Thessalonians doesn’t articulate what the leadership is, but it shows that Paul expects leaders in every church. If you weren’t here with us last Fall, what Paul lays out in 1 Timothy is 2 church offices: elders and deacons. Elders focus on teaching the Word and praying for the church, deacons focus on the physical and practical needs of the church. You can go back to those sermons to learn more if you’re interested!

-And then included in this section is a reminder to be at peace. Now, I’m not sure how you’re feeling right now, but right now this feels like nonsense to me! How can Paul command the church to be at peace when the world is full of conflict and tension? Is there any way this can match up to reality? The good news is that answer is YES, but the bad news is it’s only in this community of believers called the church, as soon as we walk out those doors and go back into the world we’re not going to see peace. And church – we can be at peace because of what Jesus Christ has done. 

-Paul also tells us how we’re supposed to engage each other as brothers and sisters: warn, comfort, help, and be patient. Anytime we’re interacting with someone, we’re only seeing a glimpse of what’s going on in their lives, and many times people are bringing hurts and insecurities with them wherever they go. So as we talk to fellow Christians, we should be thinking about where they’re at. Do they need a warning to ensure their life is reflecting what God has called? Are they discouraged and in need of comfort? Are they worn down and weak and need some help? And regardless of where they’re at, we’re commanded to be patient. Church – this is how we help each other take 1 step closer to Jesus each day! Growing more like Him takes a lifetime, which is why we need the reminder to be patient with each other. 

-If we’re able to come alongside each other, we’ll be able to ensure that we’re pursuing with is good for others. As Christians, we’re supposed to forgive others as God has forgiven as. In fact, did you notice in the Lord’s prayer that we ask God to forgive us AS we forgive others? So we’re commanded to ask God to only forgive us as much as we forgive others. I hope you’re quick to forgive!

-Then we get to the primary verses for us from this section! Rejoice, pray, and give thanks 24/7/365. This is God’s desire for us; it’s the way we’re able to live out all the previous commands. And Paul goes on to remind us where the battle is really fought: in the spiritual realm.

-Don’t stifle (quench, suppress) the work of the HS. Are there ways you’re doing that? Could be through dismissing promptings in your life, could be living in unrepentant sin, could be from not living in a church community that God has called you to engage in! A way we ensure we’re not stifling the spirit is by giving high regard to the prophecies (words from God) that are tested and true according to the rest of God’s Word! And friends, because we have the Holy Spirit living in us, and God’s Word to guide us, we should be marked by thankfulness on a daily basis.

-Lastly, if you go to the next page of the pew Bibles, we’ll see what else Paul asks for this church, and this will be quicker:

  • Growth (2 Thess. 1:11-12)

-Your theological term for the day is sanctification, that is becoming more holy. Once again, I think we need some broader context to understand why Paul says what he does in these last 2 verses. And if the theme of 1 Thess. is to not worry because they wouldn’t miss Jesus’s second coming because He IS coming, the theme of 2 Thess. is but not that soon! And ironically enough, this section begins with another thanksgiving, hence why I chose thanksgiving as one of the themes to emphasize in Paul’s prayers! But what is he thankful FOR?

-Faith is flourishing, mutual love is increasing, another way of saying that is Paul is giving thanks for their growth in the gospel. Once again, when’s the last time you gave thanks to God for someone’s growth in the gospel? Not only does Paul give thanks to God, he also boasts about them to other churches! 

-All these verses are 1 long run-on sentence in the Greek, so it’s an extended explanation of why from Paul. This church is persevering through persecution, and Paul reminds that that the suffering is worth it, because in the end God’s justice will be delivered to those who opposed God and His people. That’s the summary of vss. 5-10! Some people will bear the penalty, and others have had that penalty paid for by someone else.

-Because God’s justice is coming, Paul’s prayer for this church is that God will make them worthy, and that they will live out their transformed lives by doing good. It’s important for us to note that these good works don’t earn salvation and don’t even earn special recognition from God. We do good works because of our transformed hearts, not as a way to earn special favor from God. But we are supposed to be praying that our transformed hearts would be evident in the ways we live, by doing good works.

-And the last verse is the reason we pray for growth: so that Jesus would be glorified. Friends, prayer is useless if it’s only focused on us. The point of prayer is to align our hearts and minds with God, for Him to be glorified in our lives through our thoughts, words, and deeds. To look for ways for Him to increase as we continually look for ways for us decrease.

-So as we conclude this series what are the things I hope (pray!) you’ve taken away from it?

-First – learn how to pray by using the Bible! Jesus used it as his source of prayers, Christians throughout history have used it to know how to pray, and we should continue that tradition. The book of Psalms is especially helpful!

-Second – in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells us how to have the correct orientation to our prayers. We start with God, acknowledging that He is God and we’re not, and only when we grasp that reality can we move to asking for our daily bread.

-Third – we need to pray honestly. Don’t hide behind walls or pretend like everything is ok when it’s not. God invites you to continually beg Him!

-Finally, this week we saw that Paul models that we should always be thanking God for all the ways He’s continually at work in us, through us, and around us. AND we should ask for continued growth for ourselves and our church body. SO THAT the name of Jesus would be glorified in us. All to His glory alone!

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on February 1, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon, Worship
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on February 1, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/02/01/praying-with-paul-sermon-manuscript/

Praying Honestly – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re going to have some fun this morning! I know what you’re thinking, how could church be any more fun than it already is!? We’re going to play some trivia this morning, I’m going to put some quotes on the screen, and you need to figure out where it came from: Taylor Swift or the Bible. For any swifties in the room (first of all, I don’t need to know which era you’re currently in), but if you’re a switfie don’t shout out who it is right away, let people think about it! You all ready?

-What does Taylor Swift have to do with praying? That’s a great question! I would argue that Taylor Swift is meeting a perceived need that people have. Her most recent tour grossed over 2 billion dollars in revenue, and she has a cult-like following. No one was surprised when the football star proposed to the pop star! And I think Taylor’s music is unique because she actually is involved in writing it – it’s songs that come from her real life experiences (which is why her latest album wasn’t as good, she’s found her “true love” so the angst, tension, and turmoil from all her previous albums is gone, she no longer has needs to just “shake it off”)

-See I think Taylor demonstrates what many people think they want. She’s perceived as being true to herself, to speaking whatever’s on her heart and mind, and she matches that to catchy melodies! She writes from a place of honesty and vulnerability that should be a marker of our prayers to the Lord. The fact that her lyrics sound so much like passages of Scripture shows us that we need to come before God with a level of vulnerability that maybe we’re not used to.

-So far in this series, we’ve looked at the prayerbook of Jesus (which is the Bible), we’ve seen how we can use the Bible as the inspiration for our prayers. Last week we looked at the Lord’s Prayer and saw that prayer isn’t supposed to be a performance, it’s supposed to reorient our hearts to God. This week, we’re going to look at the need for us to pray honestly to God, and what that looks like. 

READ/PRAY – Luke 18:1-14 (pg. 930)

-Before we work through some passages of Scripture, I want to remind you of a quote I shared a couple weeks ago that has served as the primary inspiration for this sermon series, as well as been challenging to my own prayer life as I’ve worked to grow in how I approach God on a daily basis.

-How often do we view Christianity threw this skewed lens of a personal growth project, where Christianity is the cherry on top of the rest of my life. The gospel message is there’s nothing you can do to save yourself, nothing you can do to earn God’s favor and merit, and unfortunately, the temptation for us all is to spend all our time and energy working to “prove” ourselves, to clean ourselves up so that God will be happy with us. And the reality is our best “good works” are viewed by God as filthy rags. Like imagine cleaning your bathroom, and then using the rag you used to clean it as an offering to God, and that’s how he views our attempts to try to be good by ourselves.

-John Gerstner (church historian, professor at Pittsburgh and Knox Seminary and mentor to RC Sproul) said this: 

-Keep this thought in mind as we work through all these passages today. The gospel message is meant to free us from trying to earn God’s favor, the gospel message means we are accepted, but not by anything we can ever do. As work our way through these various texts today, you’ll see why we need to come before God honestly, transparently, with everything we truly are.

  1. God Already Knows (Matt. 6:8)

-The first reality I want to remind us of is something Micah brought up last week. See, the Lord’s Prayer takes place in a specific context, Jesus is intentionally contrasting incorrect ways to pray with the way God wants us to pray. The beginning of this section begins with Jesus telling the people 2 ways NOT to pray, which is where I want us to begin today. The first is a praying for a performance, praying to try to impress other people. You see this often in movies where someone is having a normal conversation, and then as soon as they start to pray they start using old King’s English! Thee, thine

-The second way we’re not supposed to pray is to not “babble like the Gentiles.” We’re not sure everything that entails, but because Jesus goes on to say “many words” we know it has some level of repetition. Now, repetition itself isn’t bad as we’ll see later, the problem is with pointless or useless repetition.

-Most scholars points out that 2 things are being cautioned against here: first is the superstition that the right words said the right way invokes a deity to pay attention to you. Part of the reason the Romans had so many “gods” they worshipped is because they thought that you had to the right words to get a deity to pay attention to you, and if you said it the wrong way they would ignore you. 

-The second thing being cautioned against is one of my favorite stories in the OT, the story of Elijah in the showdown against the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18. Israel is being led by a terrible king named Ahab, who has led the nation to worship false gods, particularly the god Baal. Baal had 450 prophets that served him, meanwhile Elijah was the only prophet left of the one true God. So he challenges the prophets of Baal to showdown on Mt Carmel. The challenge is each group of prophets must prepare a sacrifice to their god, but the one true God is the one who lights the sacrifice on fire without any help. And he lets the prophets of Baal start, since there’s so many of them. He gives them hours to cry out to their god (to babble), and what’s the response? Nothing! Finally, Elijah starts making fun of them, and he’s ruthless! But on and on they continue, but no one answered because as Jesus tells us in Matthew, this doesn’t work. And maybe that’s been your experience in prayer: it feels like there’s no sound, it feels like no on answers, it feels like no one pays attention. It’s ok, the theme of this sermon is honestly. It’s ok to admit that it doesn’t feel like it’s working. This is why we need other Christians around us to encourage us! And that’s why a series like this is important: we need regular encouragement to continue praying!

-I like what Jonathan Pennington (NT Prof at Southern) says about babbling: 

-A call for simplicity over rhetoric, clarity over piled-up repetition. What this tells us is that the focus is like Nike: just do it! Even if it’s a really brief prayer, just pray it! What God wants is communication with him, it doesn’t have to be a long drawn-out event. And why is that? This is the greatest news in the world for us: He already knows! We don’t need to worry about trying to get His attention, we don’t need to try proving ourselves to Him by finding some magical formula of words, He already knows everything we need, AND remember from 2 weeks ago that not only does He know what we need, but the other 2 persons of the Godhead are also always actively praying for us!

-Someone recently told me a story about a conversation they had with an unbeliever who was trying to argue that there is no evidence for God. The believer drew a circle and said, “imagine this is all the knowledge in the universe. How much of this do you think you know?” The unbelievers drew that black circle, and the believer said “Wow! That’s a lot more than I know! But look at how little you still know compared to the sum total of all knowledge. Don’t you think that it might be a problem to act as if you have all the answers to everything in the cosmos?” See, God does actually know EVERYTHING, including you. He even knows you better than you know yourself!

-That’s why sometimes God’s answers to your prayers are “no!” He knows far better than you do what you actually need. I love the way Tim Keller summarizes this point: If what we’re praying for is the right thing for our growth in the gospel, for our becoming what God wants for us, then he’ll give it to us. But we have to admit that we don’t know as much as He does.

-I have 2 2-year-olds in my house right now. One of the most used words from them is “PLEASE!” especially when there’s any candy in sight! Do you think me being a good parent means I should give them whatever they want? No! If it were up to them, they’d eat goldfish and candy for every meal! And anytime the stove is on, they run and grab a chair, push it right up next to the stove and try to “help” us with the cooking. They have no clue about the source of heat they’re trying to play with! Once again, Keller summarizes this idea well:

-So we need to acknowledge that God knows things we don’t, God is aware of things that we aren’t, which is why what Micah preached last week is so important. Half of prayer is recognizing who God is, and we have to start with Him before we can begin to ask Him to help us. But now let’s turn to Luke 18 to see a couple other concepts we need to learn about prayer:

  • Persist in Prayer (Luke 18:1-8)

-This is in the middle of a section of Jesus’s teachings as He journeys to Jerusalem. Right away, Luke tells us the point of this parable, which means we don’t need to try to guess the point! Here, the point of this story is to: pray always and not give up.

-Previously we looked at the caution to not babble in prayer like the gentiles, that is don’t assume that God will listen to you if you pray for a very long time, but here we see a reminder to persist in prayer, to continue asking for God to answer. 

-This story begins with a judge who doesn’t care about others, including God! In this town there was a widow, someone with no rights or privileges in society, someone who was easy for others to take advantage of. Unfortunately for this woman, the judge doesn’t care. But eventually he gets so tired of her that he gives in to her request and notice that he even knows that what she’s asking for is right: he’ll give her justice. If an ungodly and uncaring judge is that way, how would God, who is infinitely caring, respond to His children? 

-And it ends with Jesus asking the question: when He comes back, will he find anyone with faith? Because it requires faith to persist in prayer, to continue asking God and not giving up.

-So persistence is different than babbling! It’s a continual pleading with God to answer your requests, and it forces you to trust in His plans for you, plans that are for your good and growth in the gospel message. Persistence if you are being honest with the Lord, that what you’re asking is something you desperately need Him to respond to. Persistence is working to bring your feelings in line with God’s will for you, it’s a reminder that you’re not in control and He is, which is where He turns next:

  • Get God Right (Luke 18:9-14)

-What is your attitude when you pray? What does your heart tell you when come before the Creator of the universe? Because this story gives us 2 heart attitudes to approach God with: either self-justifying or understanding that your justification can only come from God.

-We view the Pharisees today as the opposite of how they were seen in the 1st century, they were the “good guys” that everyone looked up to! Jesus knew they were trying to pursue righteousness, He says so in Matt. 5:20. The problem was they thought righteousness came through external obedience, compliance to a list of specific rules, but Jesus tells us the externals were only there to work to transform their hearts. And for us who are living on this side of the cross, our righteousness does surpass the Pharisees, because when God looks at us, He sees Jesus’s work, not ours! That’s why what matters for honesty in prayer is looking in the right direction, which the Pharisee doesn’t do. The Pharisee is only comparing himself to other people, and we tend to only compare ourselves to people we think are worse than us, and then we excuse anyone we think is better than us! See, if we come to God in prayer comparing ourselves to others, our view is always going to be skewed.

-We’ll be looking at this at the end of February, or you can go listen to a whole series through it that I preached in 2021, but the book Amos has a story that tells us how we’re supposed to compare ourselves. In Amos 7, God appears to Amos and pulls out a plumbline. If you’ve never done any building, a plumbline is a straight line that ensures the building is built straight. God says His plumbline or standard for people is completely different than the one the people are using. But if everyone is walking around with a skewed view, we’ll look at God’s standard and say He’s wrong! 

-The Pharisee thinks he’s superior to everyone else because he’s using the wrong plumbline, the wrong standard. He needs to look at his own heart in comparison to God (who’s perfect).

-In prayer, we need to understand that our thoughts and feelings aren’t always true, just like this Pharisee! He feels superior to the tax collector, but his feelings aren’t matching up to reality. 

-Kyle Strobel summarizes this concept well: One of the most frustrating things I see when talking to people is assigning motives to others without knowing the full story. You assume the worst about someone who you view as hurting you but assume the best about your intentions. I see it in marriages, in friendships, with coworkers, so when we come before God in prayer, we’re forced to deal with our own issues instead of continually blaming others for our responses. Chuck Swindoll (long time pastor) said it this way: Prayer is what helps us realize our 90% contribution to what’s going on in our life! 

-One last thing I want to point out about the Pharisee is that true prayer will result in life change. Notice that the Pharisee is using the life change to try to attain righteousness, he’s turned things upside down! Fasting and giving a tithe (tenth) are good things for you to do, but they don’t make you more righteous. You do them in order to draw closer to God, not to try to force God to respond to you, this is another form of “babbling”

-In contrast, the tax collector wouldn’t even look around him, he knew who he was compared the perfection that is God! He admits that apart from God’s mercy and grace there’s no hope for him. He could fast 7 days a week and give 100% of what he makes, and it won’t help him climb any closer to God. This man is at the place where he can begin to pray honestly! 

-And here’s the best news about praying honestly, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you that have been coming here for any period of time. The gospel doesn’t leave us to wallow in self-pity when we realize we stand convicted. Once again, Kyle Strobel summarizes this well:

-Friends, everything within us works to self-justify, to clean ourselves up before we come near to God, but the reality of the gospel is that we can’t! That’s why the gospel is such good news: it’s not up to you; it’s in God’s hands. Jesus is telling us: the path for anyone who wants to follow him is through humility, which CS Lewis says isn’t thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking about yourself less. It’s stopping worrying about what others think of you and finding your identity only in Jesus, the only one who can actually meet you where you’re at and provide everything you need to fully live as a human in the world He created.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on January 18, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on January 18, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/01/18/praying-honestly-sermon-manuscript/

The Prayerbook of Jesus – Sermon Manuscrip

-Happy 2026! One of the things I’ve tried to do at the beginning of each year is to do what I’ve called “Theological Tune Up” where we talk about some things that have come up that are pressing issues in the world today, or things that have come up over the past year in conversations I’ve had with some of you, but I’ve always wanted to try including some emphasis on spiritual practices or disciplines we can grow in over the coming year. One of the things we need to be doing every year is continuing to get God’s Word into our lives, whether that be through reading it more, memorizing it more, meditating on it more, and there’s other practices that will help us take steps closer to Jesus, and this past year I’ve been focusing more time on prayer.

-And maybe like me, you’ve had that experience at about this time every year, where you’re determined to pray more and read more Bible, so you set out your clothes the night before, go to bed early, get your coffee ready (as everyone should be doing in the morning), get all comfy and ready bright and early, then you start to pray, get through your entire list you thought of and feel like you’ve been praying for about an hour, and check your clock and somehow only 3 minutes have passed.

-We’re going to be looking at 4 ways to pray this January (there’s lots more in the Bible, but we only have so many weeks!). We’ll start with the prayerbook of Jesus the guide Jesus used for His prayers, next week we’ll look at the most famous prayer: the Lord’s prayer, the third week we’ll look at the need to pray honestly, and finally we’ll look at the prayers of Paul.

READ/PRAY  – Psalm 110

  1. The Dilemma

-The Bible talks about prayer A LOT! And I don’t know about you, but for most of my life I felt discouraged about my prayer life. Think of what Paul commands us in 1 Thess. Not only are we to pray constantly (some trans. without ceasing), but this is God’s will for us! Talk about pressure! How does that stand up to the reality of everyday life, and how does that make you feel?

-This started changing for me when I was in seminary. One class I had, the professor began the class with the question: “how’s your prayer life?” And I answered “it could be better.” And we spent literally the rest of the class talking about why we feel guilty about our perceived lack of prayer. And friends, this was with a group of both present and future church leaders! If church leaders struggle to pray, what hope is there for everyone else, right!?

-And I’ll put all my cards on the table: I’m not a morning person, I REALLY don’t like getting up early! If it were up to me (and my kids didn’t have school) I would sleep in every day! And when I was growing up, I was always told that you were supposed to get up every morning to do a “quiet time.” I don’t like mornings and I don’t like quiet! (God’s working on me) so what else could I do? I’d also regularly forget to pray about things friends asked me to pray for (it’s a good thing God isn’t constrained by time like we are!), so I remember sometimes praying after someone had a surgery that went well! Thanks, God, for answering my future prayer in the past!

-And just to be completely honest, my heart and desires often weren’t even in it! Growing up I remember the church had a monthly prayer night that made ZERO sense to me, and what was worse was we couldn’t even do our normal playing because it would be distracting to the adults who were trying to pray!

-I remember when an adult that I looked up to was feeling called to seminary, the church commissioned him, prayed for him to go, and on his last Sunday I saved up all my money to buy him a CD (expensive in those days! Plus I was 12). I knew my mom got him something too, so I asked what it was, and he told me she had committed to pray for him and his studies every week. Astonished, I said “That’s IT!?” And he said “That’s much better than the CD you got me!”

-Now, I know some of you are much better at praying than I am, you have it scheduled, you never miss that time, it’s a sweet time of fellowship every day. Similarly, there’s other people that are able to run dozens of miles without stopping! We’re all wired differently, but we’re all commanded to be people who pray. Regardless of where you’re at with praying every single day, or whether your only prayer time is when during this worship service each week, this series is going to be some potentially new ways for you to pray that you may not have considered before, some ways that I’ve been stretched and challenged to grow in my own life, because the reality is we’re all on a journey. None of us will ever arrive, and we all have ways we could continue to grow.

-I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading on the idea of spiritual disciplines over the last couple of years. If you haven’t heard of him, a guy named John Mark Comer has just absolutely taken off. Former pastor and author who is a New York Times bestseller. College professors I talk to say everyone is reading him, every pastor I talk to has thoughts on him (including myself! But I’ll save those for another time, if you want to talk about him let me know and I’ll buy you some coffee)

-There seems to be a rise currently taking place in the church towards mysticism or experiential theology (seems to come in cycles, any of you former pastors remember Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline?). The trend (especially for younger Christians) is toward some more historical church practices, with a current obsession with eastern orthodoxy. 

-Just last week, I was talking to Micah about this trend with music leaders. I would argue that the music we do in the church today is mostly influenced by the Jesus People of the 60s, and that we’re on the 5th generation of those music leaders, which Micah believes is now emphasizing the experiential or mystical aspects. (again, if you want to talk about this, let’s get coffee!)

-The guy I’ve found that I think is writing more helpfully on this than anyone else right now is a guy named Kyle Strobel – a professor at Talbot seminary in LA. What he argues that we need is a recovery of Word-centered, Spirit-empowered, whole-life spirituality (come to the Walk This Way class for more!). He’s someone who stirs my heart and mind to love Jesus more completely. I’d encourage you to find his books and read them, listen to his podcast, or checkout his substack! 

-There are 3 theological realities that serve as the foundation for prayer that we need to be aware of.

1 Reality: We don’t come before God in fear. This is where my comment about “could be better” is off base, because I don’t truly understand God’s desire for me. Look at what we learn in 1 John 4. Friends, Jesus loves you! And not only does He love you, but he likes you. Not some future you, not the you with all your issues “fixed” (whatever that might mean), He loves and likes you! And out of that love comes a desire to be with you! Similarly in Heb. 4, we learn about Jesus who allows us to come boldly before the King and Creator of the universe! No fear, boldness. 

2 Reality: The Spirit is always praying for us Rom. 8. Do you ever feel like you don’t even know where to start praying? You don’t need to worry, because the Spirit is already praying for you! And not just the Spirit:

3 Reality: Jesus is always praying for us. Look at what Paul says in Rom. 8. Jesus is constantly interceding for us, which is also brought up in Heb. 7.

-Because of these 3 realities, prayer isn’t something we begin or end, it’s us entering into something that is taking place 24/7 regardless of what we do. We enter into what the Spirit and the Son are constantly doing on our behalf. Yet we still have the responsibility to come before God.

-I shared this quote as I came back from sabbatical, but it’s still been ringing around in my head since then (from Kyle Strobel) that comes because of the previous truths.

-In prayer we come as we are. God already knows it, why do we pretend that we can keep things hidden from Him?

-This gets to our “wandering minds” in prayer, too. What if, in prayer, as we draw near to God, the idols of our hearts begin to come to the surface? Like as metal is dropped in a forge, the impurities are literally burned out, as our hearts approach the completely holy one, our impurities start to bubble to the surface. Friends, instead of being a distraction from praying, those things may be the very things God is calling you to pray for! We’ll get there in a couple weeks.

  • A Proposal for this week, here’s my proposal for us.

-But we need somewhere to start. And I would argue that we have an entire book of the Bible that was used as the prayerbook for Jesus, that He taught His disciples to use and pray, and has benefited countless Christians throughout history.

-I am indebted to Donald Whitney for helping me understand this approach to both praying and reading the Bible. AND I’ve got a number of extra copies of this book, so first come first serve for whoever wants it!

-Martin Luther loved the Psalms so much he described it as a “little Bible.”

-The reason we know Jesus used the Psalms is because Jews have been using it as their prayerbook for centuries, and Jesus quoted from a Psalm while He was hanging on the cross, AND he used the Psalms to point to His divinity, AND His disciples quoted from the Psalms to share how Jesus fulfilled the OT, AND we have an entire book of the NT that one scholar has described as a sermon on Psalm 110.

-First, what is probably the most quoted verse in the NT: Psalm 110:1

-Jesus was interrogated by many of the religious leaders of His day on a regular basis. They had all the rules and all the history, and Jesus didn’t fit in their boxes! So Jesus goes on the offensive, and asks them whose son the Messiah is, so they reply (obviously…) David’s. But if that’s true, why does David call Him “Lord” in this Psalm? What comes out when Jesus is confronted is the Psalms.

-And His first disciples followed in His footsteps. During Pentecost in Acts 2, when the Spirit descends on the disciples and they begin telling the world in Jerusalem about what Jesus has done, Peter stands up and guess what he quotes from? This Psalm!

-And not just the early disciples, some scholars believe that the book of Hebrews is a sermon walking through this Psalm. Every time someone in the NT refers to Jesus sitting at the Father’s right hand (it’s all over!) it’s referencing this Psalm.

-The second reason we can see the Psalms being Jesus’s prayerbook is because of what He says on the cross. One of the last phrases he cries out (Hebrew, to Aramaic, to Greek, to English), is asking a question to God. But He’s quoting from a Psalm in the OT, specifically Psalm 22. We most likely don’t have every word that Jesus said from the cross (this was a multi-hour event), it’s feasible Matthew just references the first verse to signify that Jesus was praying this whole Psalm as His last prayer on the cross.

 -And listen to some of these descriptions from this Psalm: 

-Friends, this was written 1000 years before Jesus came! Crucifixion hadn’t even been invented yet, and here David (under the inspiration of the HS), is talking about the kind of death Jesus experienced. I don’t know about you, but that comforts me! Jesus, in His humanity, experiencing the weight, the burden of all of our sins (and not just ours, the sins of the WHOLE world), was able to use God’s Word as a comfort, it gave Him the words to say as He experienced the heaviness and burden of the sins of the world.

-So if Jesus can use the Psalms as His guide for prayer, maybe we should too, right?

-Now I want to get at something right off the bat – using other people’s words to pray. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but when the elders pray, they’ve written out their prayers ahead of time and then they read them to us. When we first started having them pray, there were some elders that didn’t like that I asked them to write them out, and there were some people in the congregation that were hesitant about seeing the elders writing out their prayers. If you’ve ever heard someone get up to pray that hasn’t written anything down, isn’t it distracting to hear them say “just” over and over again? “God we just want to thank you, we’re just so blessed, we just want to confess our sins…” Many times, there’s a pointless repetition to those prayers! 

-Once again, we need to have an understanding of a theological truth to know what’s taking place here. Heb. 13:8 tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” So we can say that GOD never changes (that’s worth praising God over, and something we can barely understand because we ALWAYS change!). If God never changes, then why would we think that He’s more present if my preparation takes place in the moment on Sunday morning instead of being present if my preparation takes place days before? 

-I experienced this when I was a music pastor. I would schedule out the services a month ahead of where we were, so people could both know they were on the team that week and know which songs they had to know. And I was accused of squelching the Holy Spirit because I wasn’t spontaneous enough. So I walked people through the reality that God doesn’t change, the Holy Spirit is JUST as active in my preparation before as He is in the moment. BUT we plan everything in pencil, because God can do whatever He wants. And honestly, what I’ve found is those who push for less structure just don’t want to put the work in ahead of time!

-What we’re doing when we use someone else’s words (God’s and humans) is helping to guide our thoughts and prayers, and it turns our prayers into a conversation with the one true and living God because if we use God’s Word, it begins with what He’s said and revealed, and then moves to our response.

-I worked for a pastor who got really into what he called “listening prayer” where you ask God to speak to you and then sit silently while you wait for Him to give you an impression or a word for the moment you’re in. Now, I completely believe that God can and does work in the present moment, but it comes across as denying that God has spoken to us THROUGH HIS WORD! 

-This isn’t sitting silently and waiting, this is letting God set the agenda for your prayer time, and I think the Psalms is a great place to do it because the Psalms really cover the whole human experience. High highs, low lows, and everything in between.

-Let’s think of how this would work:

–Psalm 23 is one of the best-known Psalms, worth memorizing and meditating if you haven’t memorized it (even if you have it memorized in the KJV!).

-The first line: The Lord is my shepherd. Have you ever thanked God that He is a good shepherd who is leading and guiding us as His sheep? Honestly, this line could be the spark to spend hours thanking God! Maybe you think of the under shepherds God has appointed in our church (the elders and pastors) But pray whatever comes to mind when you hear that line, and then go onto the next one.

-I have what I need. Well, this makes me think of the fact that I’m getting kind of hungry, but I’ve never been truly hungry. I have enough food in my house to let me eat for a LONG time without truly starving (despite what my kids think!) And maybe you then think of some of the kids you sponsor across the world who do struggle with food.

-He lets me lie down. And you remember that you need to schedule that vacation you talked to your spouse about! But you have the opportunity to ask God to be in this time of rest and recovery.

-And on and on you can go! I think the Psalms are the easiest, but you can do this with any passage of Scripture! 

-150 Psalms, most days have at least 30 days, so 2 options. Day x5, start there and work back 5. Or take the day, jump ahead 30, another 30, another 30. 

-What happens when the Bible inspires and guides our prayers?

  • The Outcome

-God gets to speak to us on His terms, we don’t come up with an agenda that God has to answer.

-Many times, there’s a verse or 2 that really stand out that you’re able to use to meditate on throughout the day. So you get a 2 for 1 special here, where you’re praying the Bible, AND you’re memorizing the Bible!

-So your assignment this week is to pick a Psalm each day and use it as a template for your prayer for that day.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on January 4, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on January 4, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/01/04/the-prayerbook-of-jesus-sermon-manuscrip/

Prince of Peace – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re back with my Christmas beefs. If this is your first Sunday, go back and listen to my previous sermons, but what I’ve complained about so far is: real Christmas trees that drop needles everywhere, flimsy ornaments that are given to kids but weren’t created with any kids in mind, Christmas songs that are either nonsensical or weren’t mean to be Christmas songs. This week, my Christmas issue is Christmas movies (and just so we’re all on the same page, Die Hard is absolutely a Christmas movie!). But if you think about all the Christmas movies, they’re all centered on some bad guy who has to learn the “Christmas spirit” (whatever that is). You’ve got Scrooge who needed to learn to be generous and care about others, you’ve got Buddy the elf’s dad who only hired angry elves, you’ve got the bully in The Christmas Story, or the movie that is literally named after the bad guy: how the Grinch stole Christmas. All these movies need some level of tension in them, some lesson that needs to be learned, otherwise they don’t seem to sell! Even the Christmas story itself has a bad guy: Herod, with his plot to kill all the boys under 2 years old.

-Today we’re going to look at Jesus being the Prince of Peace, and I bring up all those other stories because I tend feel like peace and Christmas don’t belong in the same sentence. There tends to be family tension that we feel that brings a level of apprehension and uncertainty, there’s the pressure of getting just the right gift for everyone on your list, the pressure of decorating your house in just the right way. Or maybe it’s trying to keep up with your neighbor’s decorations. I love the commercial that’s played this year that shows one incredible house, then it shows the neighbor whose lights spell out “ditto.”

-Church, did you know that because of Jesus taking on flesh (called the incarnation) peace is possible? Now, we have to talk about what that peace means, and what it looks like! But it’s no coincidence that Jesus is called the prince of peace.

READ/PRAY (pg. 607)

  1. What is Peace?

-I realize this is a little before my time but think of some of the ways our cultural imaginations have been shaped around peace. There’s the peace sign that my parents grew up using, John Lennon wrote the song Happy Xmas does anyone remember the rest of the name? (War is Over) Where they sing “War is over if you want it.” Did these children of the era of peace summarize it?

-Or maybe I should (again, and I know I’m not the only one who does this) ask google what peace is. According to the google, it’s freedom from disturbance, or a time without war. But is that what Isaiah is getting at when he describes Jesus as the prince of peace?

-I thought I’d also go a step further, and instead of just looking at the AI summary, look at some of the links Google found (anyone remember when Google just compiled results for you instead of summarizing them for you? Anything to make our lives easier!) Link to United Nations. Calm, tranquility, absence of disturbance. Is that the goal of Jesus coming to earth? To prevent wars? On the one hand, yes! One of the biggest ironies of the book of Revelation is we view it as a bloody spectacle, of a big war. But there’s no war there. The battle lines draw up, and then they’re defeated without a fight, but with the Words that come from the mouth of Jesus. That’s what it’s talking about when it says there’s a sword coming out of His mouth (Rev. 19:15). 

-So I thought I’d look at some Bible resources. The Hebrew word Isaiah uses is shalom, which has a more complete sense than the way we use our word peace. One commentary defines it this way:

-Wholeness, completeness, not lacking in anything. Do you know how when you feel like you’re missing out on things, or all your friends are always on vacation and you’re stuck where the cold hurts your face in MN. The biblical idea of peace is the antithesis of that. And look how it goes on: harmony across a wide assortment of relationships: God, the world (creation), others, and even yourself!

-If you attended the “Strands of Unity” class last week, this should sound familiar to you! We talked about how to reach out to our community, and it has to begin with the understanding that there are multiple forms of poverty.

-This is the way the world worked when God created it (Gen. 1-2). Everything worked, there was no conflict or turmoil, every relationship operating as it’s supposed to operate. Plants and animals coexisting (think about that, no worries about poisonous animals, no season allergies)

-The hard part is, this is the world we live in today: EVERYTHING is broken, everything is in conflict and turmoil. And this one talks about the different ways people can be living in poverty. But this isn’t what Jesus wants from us.

-We’ve just been reading from Isaiah 9 this month, but there’s some other passages I want to point your attention to now that get at what it means for Jesus to be the Prince of Peace. 

-The first comes earlier in Isaiah, and look at how God describes what the outcome of His rule will be. He begins the chapter saying the nations of the world will stream in to seek the face of the Lord and ask how to better follow in His ways. Then He says: 

-So Jesus coming means people won’t have any use for weapons of war anymore. Instead of looking to fight each other, they’ll turn their attention to creating food, and even the training of fighting will be done! People will be so at ease they won’t even feel like they have to prepare for any “what if” scenarios. It’s fascinating to me, I asked some guys to read a book that was written around 330 AD (yes, almost 1700 years ago!) with me this year that is titled “On the Incarnation” written by Athanasius, one of the most influential early church fathers, whose work paved the way for the understanding of Jesus being fully God and fully man, and he does a masterful job of weaving Scripture and contemporary (to him!) philosophy. But he quotes from this passage in his book! Where he says: 

-Then he talks about “the barbarians” (those who don’t know Christ). He’s saying that this prophecy can take place even now! But we’ll get there. 

-The next one comes after our passage, it’s another Messianic prophecy that you’ve probably heard read at church before! I’m going to read starting in vs. 1, and then we’ll focus on just a couple verses that paint a picture of shalom, of the kind of peace that God intends for His people.

-Notice that the predator will lie down with the prey, the animals will allow themselves to be led by children. The lion will become a vegetarian.

-Even children won’t need the same kind of training we have to do for our kids. Cara has told me stories of her growing up in Kenya and needing to keep an eye out for the mambas that would make homes in the trees or bushes outside their house. When I asked her about it this week, she said the worst was when a mamba decided to turn her favorite fruit tree into its’ home! Cara wasn’t living in the realities of this verse!

-Lastly, see the way God brings about this peace: it’s connected to the knowledge of the Lord. Just like peace is more than just the absence of conflict, here the knowledge that God’s talking about is more than just mental, it’s living out the truths that you ascribe to.

-These pictures are what God’s peace is meant to bring, not just a lack of conflict, but true unity. Some people translate this idea as wholeness or completeness, and in every area of life!

-We all know that Jesus focuses on the arrival of Jesus, of His coming to earth, taking on flesh. So if that’s the goal, how does Jesus provide peace? 

  • How Does Jesus Provide Peace? 

-To answer that, I want to read from Col. 2 (pg. 1044), we’ll start in the middle before we get to the implications of how to live a peaceful life. Remember what I said previously about everyone living in some kind of poverty? Paul goes a step further here.

-When you were dead. What can a dead person do? Nothing! But here, Paul is saying that when we were dead in our sins, God made us alive with Jesus and forgave us for all our sins. Now, can we sit in that reality for a minute? When we were dead, God made us alive with Jesus. I sometimes worry that we approach our faith as if we were somehow worthy or special enough to get God’s attention, and the reality is none of us could ever come anywhere close to approaching God in our own power and strength. Dead people can’t even hold themselves up, much less be able to reach God by themselves! I love a line from the old hymn “Rock of Ages” “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.”

-But notice that there’s something more than just forgiveness that’s offered at the cross. It goes on to say that he erased the certificate of debt. There’s a whole host of discussion and debate about what this debt is, who the debt is to, and how it was paid, if you want to talk about that feel free to reach out to me and we can grab coffee.

-But there is some kind of debt owed because of sin, some payment needs to be made in order to even out the scales. Jesus, through his death and resurrection paid the penalty completely. Suddenly death itself had been defeated, sin no longer has power, Jesus has triumphed over Satan so we don’t need to continue trying to reach out to God, He has reached out to us. I love the way Augustine (4thcentury church father) talked about this. Before the Fall, humanity was able to sin or not sin. After the Fall, humans were only able to sin. Through Jesus, humans are back to being able to sin or not to sin. Finally, someday when Jesus returns, humans who are alive with Christ will only be able to not sin, all because Jesus erased this debt that we owed.

-But it wasn’t just for us, look at what else He did: disarmed the rulers and authorities. I haven’t been able to work LOTR into my sermons in a while, but this is the perfect time to bring in another one of my favorite fantasy series: Chronicles of Narnia. After Aslan (main character, the Jesus figure), is killed and resurrected, he breaks the stone in half. And when asked why here’s how he answers:

-Friends, Satan has been defeated! Paul says that he has been disgraced by what Jesus did. What looked like defeat, what appeared to be the end was just the beginning of a brand new order in the world brought about by God taking death on Himself. Satan didn’t understand the way the world works, since just like the witch in Narania, his knowledge only goes back to creation, not before. God’s good plans for the world involved sending Jesus to the world, and Satan thought it was his opportunity to get destroy God’s plan once and for all! But instead of ruining God’s plan, he fulfilled it and brought his own destruction.

-Because of that, we have the opportunity to be alive, to live “in real life,” but it involves a complete transformation of the way we live, which is what Paul goes on to talk about. You ready to look at that?

  • How Should We Live as Ministers of Peace?

-Paul gives us 3 responses we’re supposed to have as people who are marked by peace: living (or abiding) in Christ, overflowing with gratitude, and dying to yourself. All of them could fit under the “In Christ” idea. And all of this is supposed to be descriptive of the way we engage with each other in the church.

-The first reality comes in vs. 6-7. If you have been saved, there is a new trajectory for your life. If God has raised you from the dead, there’s some things you’re supposed to pursue. Notice the action words Paul uses: walk, rooted, built up, established. So we have a path we’re supposed to follow, a foundation we’re supposed to build on, and it’s established, or prepared for us. 

-But notice the means that God uses this to take place: in Him, twice, three times if you include the means by which we’re in him: in the faith. The miracle of the incarnation is that Jesus took on flesh (like us), to allow us to become like Him. In another one of his most popular books, Mere Christianity, Lewis says it this way:

-We talked about this last week, the fact that God is our Father means we have a family, a new source of identity. This new family of God gives us a new identity, a new purpose, a new direction to our lives, and provides us with others who are commanded to love and care for us, but notice that it starts with being in Christ.

-Finally, notice the outcome of being in Jesus: overflowing with gratitude. I know the joke: you have the spiritual gift of sarcasm. And even if you won’t admit it, I know some of you have the gift of complaining! But that’s not what the Bible calls us to. Here we see that we’re supposed to be overflowing with gratitude! If God has changed you, your natural instinct should be to give thanks. I know we already passed Thanksgiving, but friends every day is a new opportunity for us to give thanks to God for all his wonderful gifts!

-Paul goes on to start talking about the way we die to ourselves: don’t follow after the things of this world, the things that don’t come from Christ. You may have something in mind like I had when I was growing up: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t chew, and don’t go with girls who do! That’s not what’s being talked about here (although the advice itself isn’t bad, but we’ll get there later). 

-Paul’s asking us to look at the source of where ideas are coming from. And what’s difficult today is so many ideas that we take for granted are founded in Christianity. Things like equal rights for all people, fair treatment of workers, concern for the poor and the marginalized. None of that comes about apart from Jesus! And church, the world is starting to realize that! If you haven’t, look up the book Dominionby Tom Holland, he traces the impact of Christianity to the entire world.

-And Paul tells us how this comes about: circumcision of the flesh, that is the death of Christ, when He was cut off from the land of the living. And we follow along with that when we are baptized, it’s a way of us identifying with Jesus, reenacting what He did on our behalf. Because we have died and been raised WITH Christ:

-We don’t need to let anyone look down on us for what we eat or drink, for the things we celebrate, for our spiritual practices. Those things were given to God’s people in the Old Testament, but now that Jesus has come we have the Holy Spirit living in us. We take Jesus with us everywhere we go, there’s the potential for us to bring peace to the world!

-Similarly in the next section, even legalism isn’t what we’re called to pursue. It would be easier if it was, if we could just have a clear demarcation between what we’re allowed to do and what we’re not allowed to do. This is some of where our fights and tensions come from! We don’t extend grace to people who may struggle with different issues than we do. 

-Reputation for wisdom, false humility – these have NO value in crucifying our fleshly desires, because it’s not a matter of what we do externally (up to a point, you can sin externally), but the focus God wants for us is in here. If our hearts are right with God, He’ll allow us to be reconciled to each other, AND from there we can be reconciled the world. 

-But it takes effort that starts from being rooted in Christ, it comes from walking along the well-worn path that follows after Him, and it comes from loving and caring for others even more than we love and care for ourselves.

-If you feel a lack of peace in the world today, it may be because you haven’t truly put your faith in the Prince of Peace. Like the Grinch, your heart might need to grow even more than 3x its size, but it starts when you admit that you can’t do it yourself and put your faith and trust in Jesus.

-And if you have put your faith in Him, maybe there are areas where there’s a lack of peace in your life. Are there things you need to die to in order to have that peace in your life? Or maybe you need to work on being more grateful. At the very least, you can give thanks to God for breath in your lungs, for a church family, and for a Savior who loves you and welcomes you in as children.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on December 21, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on December 21, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/12/21/prince-of-peace-sermon-manuscript/

« Older Posts