All posts tagged church

In the Church – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re in our last week looking at the Nicene Creed! We’ve broken it down into the 3 persons of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this week we’ll be looking at the institution that represents that Trinity today: the church.

-And once again, I found another bad creed for us to look at, from an organization that claims to represent all “progressive Christians”

-“Inherently evolving and always progressing” how does that relate to Jude 3-4? A faith that was “once for all” delivered to the saints? Should Christianity always be evolving? No! That’s the amazing thing about it, it’s true forever. Now it can be applied differently depending on the context, but Christianity itself will never change!

-Is Jesus THE Way, truth, and life, or not? 

  1. One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

-These 4 words have often become referred to as the 4 characteristics of the church, and I think we need all of them together because each new generation needs different reminders. We also need to be careful not to project current issues onto what the early church meant here. When we read “one” today, we tend to kind of chuckle to ourselves because of the abundance of denominations we have today. I found 1 article online that said there are over 50,000 “Christian” denominations around the world, and we’ll look at that in a minute, but think of what these 4 words together mean: it distinguishes them all from the different heretical sects that were popping up all over (one of which was Arius). And each one of these are brought up throughout the Bible as something Christians should be pursuing together. So let’s take each one in turn!

-What does it mean that the church is one? This signifies the unity that’s supposed to be true of Christ’s church, and this is literally something that Jesus prayed for during His last night on earth. Look at what He prays in John 17:

-First of all, I’m going to point this out every time we read this text, but I think it’s just amazing that Jesus prays for us. He’s facing His death and He takes the time to pray for anyone who will believe in Him. Another way of saying that is He’s praying for the church throughout all history. But look at what He prays for: that they would be one. He says it 3 different times!

-And look at the outworking of this: so that the world would know that Jesus was sent and that we’re loved by Jesus. But how can we confess that the church is one when there’s so many different churches that look & act differently from each other? And I want to propose potentially a different way of thinking through the unity of the church. There are 2 things we need to think through in relation to this: first we need a way of defining what actually is a church because it’s more than just meeting together (JW and Mormons meet together, and as I shared in the 1 sermon in this series, they also claim to be Christians. We’ll look at that more when we get to baptism). But secondly, what if, instead of being inconsistent with the differences between church and denominations, those are actually markers of unity?

-One of the biggest questions philosophers wrestle with is the connection between groups and individuals. How can there be unity & diversity at the same time? And I think it’s getting us back to the Trinity! The creation is pointing to the Creator who is united as 1 God who exists as 3 persons. So what if the different true churches are representative of the eternal God who can’t be contained by any 1 church or denomination? A couple things that might help illustrate this for you: how many families do we have represented in this room? Quite a few! Does every family look and act exactly the same? Nope! Even though we spend time together, even though we worship the same God, there’s variety in these families, just like there’s variety in church families. If that doesn’t help, think of all the various sandwich shops we have, kids, I need your help to list some of them! Subway, Jimmy Johns, Jersey Mikes, Erberts & Gerbets, and because I’m from Northfield, Hogan Bros. Every one of those places is taking basically the same ingredients (some places have better ingredients than others), and putting them into a similar vehicle for calorie delivery to your mouth, right? So again, we have unity and diversity in the way these sandwiches are compiled. It’s similar in the church, where each local expression of the church will do some things better than others, but together we better represent the unity and diversity in the Godhead. With that in mind, I want to look at one more passage:

-Paul also talks about this in Eph. 4 where he has a running list of “ones.” He calls the church a body, and it’s hard for one body to be divided, isn’t it? So while I do believe that the various expressions of church help us represent God, there is still the call for us to pursue unity and work to break down some of the divides that we see between true churches around us (true is important there).

-What does it mean that the church is holy? This is a way of saying the church is set apart, sacred, unique, but this marker also signifies that we’re supposed to represent God. Peter talks about this in 1 Peter (quoting a few passages from Lev.)

-And notice how Peter begins this section: children. We’re operating under the assumption that we’re brought in as adopted children of God, which changes the focus of this holiness. It’s not pursuing holiness as a way to earn God’s recognition or to get Him to like you, it’s pursuing holiness because you know that He loves you and desires your flourishing. And because you know that God wants the best for you, it means obeying the things He’s told us to do.

-As I brought up earlier, we know that each family has “traits” that set them apart from other families, you all have told me how much my kids look alike, and there’s literally nothing they can do about it! But there’s also certain habits or patterns that my kids pick up that I can do something about. The foods we eat, the games we play, the inside jokes we have, and that’s also meant to be true in the church! When the world looks at the true church, they’re supposed to see God represented in us and through us, which means holiness should be a family trait they see!

-What does it mean that the church is catholic? This word “catholic” is taking from word that means “universal,” NOT referring to the Roman Catholic Church (notice that the word is lower case when I didn’t capitalize it, meaning it’s not a proper noun). And we see this in Jesus’s last words in Matt. The church is supposed to have disciples in all nations!

-Each church I’ve been at I’ve introduced reciting various historical creeds, confessions, or catechisms (like we do here) and each time I’ve had someone get upset with me when they’re first introduced because we’re Protestants and not Catholics! Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to conflate church history with Roman Catholic, and that’s not a helpful way to view church history. Gavin Ortlund has done some fantastic YT videos from a particularly Baptist perspective on church history, if you want to learn more about church history from a Protestant and baptistic perspective, watch him!

-All that to say, when we confess that we’re a part of the catholic church, we’re saying that we trace our heritage all the way back to Jesus! It’s confessing that we’re a part of the global church today, connected to the historic church of the past, and will remain a part of the church into eternity!

-What does it mean that the church is apostolic? Just as I said, we’re tracing our beliefs back to Jesus, and His first apostles. Look at what Jesus said to Peter in Matt. 16

-We’ve looked at this other times, the rock that the church is being built on is Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, it’s not being built on Peter being the first Pope (which is why Jesus 3 verses later changes Peter’s nickname to Satan!)

-But do you see the authority that Jesus is giving to the church? The binding and loosing is in terms of recognizing and affirming the salvation of the future disciples. That’s an unbelievably weighty task! Now I want to be careful about this because I know your ears may have just pricked up: isn’t salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone? Yes, but the moment you’re saved you’re brought into a family that recognizes and affirms that you’re a part of this family.

-One of the early church fathers, writing in the 3rd century (so before the Nicene Creed) wrote an entire book titled “On the Unity of the Catholic Church” (again, catholic meaning universal). In that book, he stated the importance of the church this way: but then he went even further and also said: Once again, we need to caveat this a bit because Roman Catholics have taken this the wrong way to say that outside the church they’ve created there’s no salvation, what Cyprian is pointing to is the reality that God’s representatives on earth right now are found in the church. Think back to the great commission that we read earlier in Matt. 28, who is that charge given to? It’s not given to individuals, the command is given in the plural, saying YOU ALL TOGETHER go and make disciples.

-Jesus founded the church as His earthly representation in this time between His comings and for us to follow after Jesus, we must be a part of the church, and since I talk about it so much, this is another one of the reasons I emphasize membership so much. Membership is a modern day response attempting to live out what Jesus has commanded because every human relationship requires a commitment on the part of both parties involved.

  • Markers of the Church

-This only talks about baptism, not the Lord’s Supper, but we believe those are the 2 markers that help us get at what a true church is (our denomination SOF says it this way). Before we look at those, though, one of the common critiques from Protestants to this creed is the forgiveness of sins (which I just mentioned comes only through faith in Jesus), so is this Creed saying that baptism is required for salvation? This is picking up on Peter’s words at Pentecost in Acts 2:

-Do you see the way repentance and baptism are intertwined? Baptism is meant to serve as a marker of the entry point of faith. Baptism is often the first step of obedience when the Lord has saved you, and the New Testament has no category for someone who is not baptized. Throughout the NT these 2 things are intimately connected together. You can also read Rom. 6 to see the picture Paul gives assuming that every Christian has been baptized.

-The other reality we confess about baptism is that there is “one” and we can see that in Eph. 4. This means that you shouldn’t be baptized more than once, that would be like asking to be born again (and I know that none of your mothers would sign up for that!) If you, any of you, have trusted in Jesus as your Savior, we would LOVE to baptize you here! We will fill up this tank anytime someone talks to us and expresses a desire to be baptized, so if that is any of you, please talk to me or anyone else on staff here and we’ll set up a time to talk about the significance of baptism and what it looks like.

-One other important thing to note about this creed is that it’s a summary of the bare minimum doctrines, but it isn’t a complete list of things that you need to practice or affirm to be a Christian. For example, baptism is only 1 of the ordinances Jesus gave to the church, the other is the Lord’s Supper. As I shared at the beginning of this series, creeds are written in response to questions or issues being raised, so at the time these statements were enough to articulate what the church is. 1200 years later, another confession was written that was working to distinguish the true church vs. false churches, and look at their summary: 3 things: correct preaching of the gospel, practicing of the sacraments (or ordinances) of baptism & communion, and church discipline (which I believe is a subset of the Lord’s Supper, email me if you want to know why).

-And I want to take some time to walk through the connection between those 2 things, because they are connected to each other, but most of the time we don’t think about their relationship. In fact, I’ve gotten into some debates with some pastors over this connection before! And that debate is: who should celebrate communion? And to answer that we need to think about what each sacrament is connected to. Baptism, as I shared earlier, is connected to repentance and the moment you’re saved. The Bible doesn’t have a category for an unbaptized Christian, which means anyone who is following Jesus should be baptized as a step of obedience to the Bible. Communion is connected to the ongoing sanctification (being made holy) of the believer, which I believe means you shouldn’t celebrate communion before you have been baptized, hence why I’ve shared before in various settings that I would discourage children from celebrating the Lord’s Supper until they have been baptized, because I don’t think it’s right to celebrate the ongoing practices until you have celebrated the beginning practice. There’s a logical connection to these 2 things that we need to keep in mind. This is also the historic practice of the church. The Didache (late 1st or early 2nd century document describing the practice of the church) says this:

-That being said, because I can’t point to a chapter and verse that makes this practice explicit I don’t believe it’s a sin if you get these out of order, and in my debates with people I’ve had people ask me: if someone got saved today would I bar them from the table? No! But the normal practice should be: saved, baptism, Lord’s Supper. And parents, you have a role to play in this: talk to your kids about what each of those ordinances mean! And if you don’t know how, talk to Erin because she’s a master at collecting books and resources to equip you to help your kids take 1 step closer to Jesus! Kids: talk to your parents about these things! And if you have put your trust in Jesus, talk to your parents about being baptized!

  • The Future Church

-This first phrase would have been viewed as ridiculous to most of the world at the time! What do you mean there’s a resurrection of the dead?! We need to squeeze as much pleasure out of this world as we possibly can, because once we’re gone that’s it! And I hate to break it to you, but that’s not Christianity. Christianity tells us that this world is broken, but redeemed, and that one day all the brokenness will be fixed, and the reason we can trust that is because someone told us that, and then He proved His words by rising from the dead.

-One of the most helpful passages for us to meditate on in relation to this is 1 Cor. 15. Paul tells us the necessity of the resurrection of the body because if there is no resurrection, then even Jesus is still dead, and if Jesus is still dead, then we have no reason to put our faith in Him. And it gets worse! Paul says if our only hope is in this world then everyone else should pity for us. But Jesus has been raised from the dead, which means the only people who should be pitied are those who don’t put their faith in Him!

-And Paul connects that reality to us for the rest of this section. Do you see how he refers to Jesus as the firstfruits here? That’s a way of saying Jesus is the picture of what we someday will be like. Those who belong to Christ will be resurrected just like Him, someday in the future when death itself is defeated and undone.

-And friends, the Bible also tells us about the life in the world to come, and the guy who told us what it will be like is the same one who rose from the dead, and since He’s the only guy who can claim that, I’m going to stick with His suggestions. Look at the picture we get of this new life in the last chapter of the Bible, Rev. 22

-In the new Jerusalem, after Jesus comes back, the city is divided by the river of the water of life. No more death exists there! And do you see the sources of this life? The throne of God and the Lamb. God is the source of all our life (remember last week we saw the Lifegiver?). And the tree of life produces fruit each month, the nations are healed, and the curse of sin is the only things that’s dead. And this life will never end! It says we will reign forever and ever.

-And the whole creed appropriately ends with a Hebrew word that means “this is true.” Which also happens to be the last word in the Bible, which is connected to another promise from Jesus. Jesus says that He is coming soon (which is a relative term when you compare it to eternity!)

-So John’s response: Amen, yes, this is true! And we respond inviting Jesus to return, but until that time we ask for the Lord’s grace to be with all of us, and just to reiterate that this is true, the Bible ends with this note of praise: amen. Yes, let it be true!

-We’ve made it all the way through this creed; how do we take this and begin applying it to our lives?

-First, we read and reflect on this as our pledge of allegiance to this Trinitarian God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit, and we fall on our faces in worship of this mysterious reality that brings us into the loving relationship of this God.

-Second, we use this as a reminder of what is most important in our faith, this summary of God’s plan in salvation to rescue, reconcile, and redeem a people for Himself. This reminder of what the church throughout history and the world together believes and confesses as the mark of orthodoxy.

-Finally, because of the way this creed (and the Bible) ends, we use it as a reminder to hope! Jesus is coming soon, so we say: amen and amen, this is true, so come, Lord Jesus, come!

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by mikethestrand on May 31, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 31, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/31/in-the-church-sermon-manuscript/

In the Holy Spirit

-Looking at the Nicene Creed in celebration of it’s 1,701st birthday. But each week, we’re also looking at a different creed to see why we need to have creeds. I’m guessing you’ve seen this one before, there’s a house in my neighborhood that has it up:

Let’s think about what this is saying:

-Black lives matters. I agree! As the nursery rhyme that I still sing to my kids says: Jesus loves the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white. But, we have to differentiate between this statement the organization Black Lives Matter. BLM as an organization has some major disagreements with Christian faith, but we as Christians can affirm that black lives do indeed matter! 

-Science is real: science is merely observation, this is as helpful as saying “science says…” science doesn’t “say” anything, scienTISTS can say things as they interpret data and observations.

-Love is love: we talked about that one last week.

-Kindness is everything: have you looked at gas prices? I can’t use kindness to fill up my tank! It’s a ridiculous platitude that’s meant to give warm fuzzies but doesn’t mean anything!

-And Christians can be guilty of doing the same thing: I’m “pan” millennial, we’ll see how it all “pans” out, I’m as Calvinist as the Bible says and as Arminian as the Bible says. Study these issues! Those are an excuse to be lazy, and God doesn’t call people to laziness! Friends, this is why we need creeds in our lives to help protect us from laziness or theological drift. A friend sent me this yard sign that if anyone wants to buy for me I will gladly stick in my front yard:

-I’m going to ask you to stand for the reading of God’s Word, but we’re going to do something a little bit different, I’m just going to read them to you and ask you to listen and not follow along in your Bibles quite yet because I want to read the primary texts that get to what we’re studying today.

–Gen. 1:1-2; Luke 1:26-35, 4:1, 14-15, John 14:15-26, 16:12-15

  1. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

-Technically, the creed we’ve been studying is referred to this way instead of just the Nicene Creed, because there are 2 editions of this. I shared at the beginning of this series that we’re celebrating 1700 years since this was written, but that’s only partially true. The conversation continued over the next decades, so in 381 they landed on the finalized version of the Nicene Creed that continues to be used through today.

-Now before we look at the biggest difference, I want to remind us where we’re starting and the reason this Creed even exists. God is the creator of everything, but there’s a hard line between God and creation, you’ve seen this each week. Arius worked hard to emphasize the one-ness of God and thus argued that Jesus has to go below the line. He argued that since Jesus was “begotten” then there had to have been a time when He was not. But the council, tracing what the Bible said, disagreed with that argument and said that Jesus Himself claimed to be one with the Father, therefore Jesus is above the line.

-The next question they had to work through gets us back to the beginning of last week’s section, where it said that Jesus’s work was “for us and for our salvation.” How do we bridge this divide? History traces humanity’s attempts at building a ladder to try to get up there, most specifically seen at Babel where humans did their best to reach the realm of the gods (in the heavens above), but despite humanity’s attempts, there is nothing that can bridge this gap. God exists completely outside of His creation, we can’t do anything to get up to Him, which means He has to come down to us, which just so happens to be the story we see in the Bible! Out of the overflow of God’s inner love comes the physical created world that is created to love God and love each other. But how can we be brought into that Trinitarian love? That’s where we need the Holy Spirit living in us, which the 325 edition of this creed didn’t articulate very much, here’s the comparison:

-The first edition made a basic statement that didn’t give much clarity, which meant guess which debate came next? Yeah, people trying to argue that the Holy Spirit was less than God. There was a group that called themselves the Pneumatomachi (side note, but if you’re going to create a heretical cult, this is a great name to use) which is Greek for “Spirit-fighters.” Just as Arius denied that Jesus was fully God, this group denied that the Holy Spirit was fully God, proposed by a guy name Macedonius. So how did the church respond? They convened another council to re-articulate and defend what the Bible says by fleshing out what they meant when they said “and in the Holy Spirit” previously.

-This takes place all the time, like you know how policies and laws always get created in response to something happening? That’s exactly what’s taking place here. At a previous church I was at, there was a policy in the wedding manual (but nowhere else) that banned Dungeons and Dragons, which means it could be played anytime EXCEPT when a wedding is going on! I would have LOVED to have known what happened that led to the banning of a board game because you know it was in response to some funny story!

-1 other big difference between these 2 editions is what is included after the section on the Holy Spirit: 

-This was removed in the 381 version because they wanted to use it as devotional and liturgical statement to be used in the church and by Christians.

-hypostasis and ousia are used as synonyms here (untranslated to be able to see what exactly is being said) and ensuring that Arius couldn’t use his preferred word and get away with it. Hypostatis refers to personhood or being, and ousia is the same thing (at this time). Eventually, hypostatis is the preferred term in referring to the persons of the Trinity, so what we looked at last week is what theologians call “the hypostatic union,” Jesus having 2 natures but 1 Being or essence. And if you’re already confused, then use that confusion to marvel at our God whose ways and thoughts are above anything we can ever imagine!

-So now let’s all recite the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed together again (and I hope some of you are taking the time to memorize it throughout the week! There are papers at the tables on your way out if you haven’t gotten one yet!)

-This last phrase I’m breaking up into 2 weeks, this week we’ll just look at the Holy Spirit, next week we’ll look at where He’s at work: in the church. 

  • The Life-Giver

-I intentionally pulled this word out even though it’s not the first word used to describe him because I love this summary of the Spirit’s work, and the Greek is 1 compound word “life-giver.” Have you ever thought of the Sprit as the one who gives life? We read Gen. 1 earlier which explicitly mentions the Spirit being involved in creation. We know from other passages in the NT that the Son is also involved in creation, so we see from the beginning the Trinitarian nature of God.

-This is intentionally mean to contrast with the dead. Think of what Rom. 8:11 says: the Holy Spirit’s role in salvation is literally to bring us from death to life spiritually. 

-And we also see the role of the Spirit in the act of creation twice. First in the verses we read earlier where the Spirit is involved in bringing life to the primordial chaos, but then we see His work implied when the text focuses on the creation of humans in Gen. 2: notice that it’s not until the man is giving breath that he becomes a living being, so the Spirit’s role is to give life.

-We read these verses earlier, too, but that theme comes up again in the new creation of Jesus inside Mary’s womb. Look at how both Luke and Matthew describe what happened.

-Back to the creed: the Lord, the same as Jesus, pointing to unity between Son & Spirit

-The ordering is both biblical & logical. We started with the Father, then talked about the Son, and now we’re getting to the Holy Spirit, and that’s the reason we refer to them as the first, second, and third persons of the Godhead. It’s not significance, it’s the way God reveals Himself to us. 

-What is “proceeds”? Another word theologians will use in reference to the Spirit is the word “spiration” which just means breath.

-They’re trying to answer the question: how do we talk about the distinctions within the godhead? How do we determine the difference between the Son & the Spirit? Last week we looked at the word “begotten” in relation to Son seen from John 3:16, proceeds is the word chosen to refer to the Spirit’s relation because of John 15:26 (remember, they’re working to define how the Bible reveals God to us) so we see that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, while the Son is begotten from the Father.

-we’ll talk about the part in brackets as the third point, so hold onto that

-The theme in this next section is the Greek word syn being used repeatedly in this section, it means “with” or “together.”

-a literal way of trying to translate this idea would make zero sense in English in most cases, but it appears 3 times: “with”, “co-worshipped” and “co-glorified” attempting to signify that we worship God as Father, Son, and Spirit.

-Something I’ve been mulling over for a few years that comes out of this: do we pray to the Spirit? And I at times struggle to land on some of this discussion because there’s so many excesses of conversation that we need to avoid, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking, studying, or learning about the HS, but if the HS is God, then shouldn’t we also pray to Him? 

-I also think emphasis matters, because the primary focus throughout Scripture is on the Father (think of the Lord’s Prayer, how does it begin?), the second emphasis is on the Son, and the third emphasis is on the Spirit, which means if we’re following the Bible our addressing of God should follow a similar pattern where we direct our prayers to our Father, addressing him through the Son, and we do so in the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. And even the work of the HS is meant to focus our minds in a specific direction: towards Jesus.

-I love what Charles Spurgeon said about this idea in one of his devotionals: Friends, part of the reason we struggle with sin is because we’re too busy looking at our sin or at ourselves instead of looking to Christ! Ask the Holy Spirit to focus your eyes on Jesus instead of yourself! 
-As always, because we’re in the realm of God, there’s more that could be said, but we don’t have time to dig into it today! I have plenty of books for you if you want to borrow them!

-The last phrase on the Holy Spirit gets to the realm of speaking. Have you ever considered the reality that our God speaks? And not just that God speaks, but sometimes God speaks through people! Where it says the prophets here, just replace it with “the Bible.” Anytime we see the Spirit speaking it’s going to drive us back to the Bible, and we see examples of that throughout Scripture:

-Look at what David says in 2 Sam. 23:2. Who is that spoke through David? The Spirit!

-Look how the author of Hebrews refers to the OT in 3:7. He’s quoting Psalm 95 there, but who does it say was speaking in Psalm 95? The HS!

-But it’s not just the OT the whole Bible is inspired by the same Spirit! 2 Tim. 3:16-17 tells us that ALL Scripture is “inspired by God” is trying to translate another compound Greek word made up of God + breath/Spirit, some translations have “God-breathed”, again inspired by the Spirit, and notice the goal of this inspiration: for us to be complete and ready for every good work (which comes about through the Spirit working in us)

-The last example of the Spirit speaking through Scripture: 2 Peter 1:21. I love the picture Peter paints here! “carried along” God working in them, but not leaving them off the hook, all this comes because the third person of the Trinity lives within us in some mysterious way through faith.

-Not let’s get into the most debated phrase of this whole thing: 

  • Filioque

-If you don’t know Latin, this word is Latin for “and the Son.”

-Let’s go back to the verse for the wording of this creed “proceeds” in John 15:26

-It sure looks like the Son is somehow involved in this process, right? And there’s other passages like John 14:16, once again Jesus is involved in the sending of the Spirit, even if the Spirit doesn’t “proceed” from the Son.

-The biggest debate about this whole creed is whether or not to include “and the Son” of for the procession of the HS. This is pointed to as the reason for the split of the church between the east and the west. The phrase wasn’t added to the creed until 589 (200 years later), at a Western council in Toledo, Spain

-And this wasn’t a trivial matter! One of the eastern bishops named Photius wrote in 866 (pardon the French): do you see how strongly he’s condemning the phrase?

-And he has a point! Notice the word ecumenical, we tend to view that word with at least skepticism today, if not outright dismissal as someone who pursues just the lowest common denominator in theology instead of taking a stance, in this case view it positively as something the whole church together affirms.

-We’re Western Christians, we’re products of affirming that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, but is that the best way to describe their relationship?

-Some terms theologians use to help us understand are in Latin: one refers to the mysterious inner workings of the Trinity that we can’t fully understand, the other refers to the external workings of the Trinity (and if you go digging into this further you’ll find that theologians will also refer to this distinction as the economic or the immanent Trinity, economic as the external workings, immanent as the internal)

-And if you just got more confused: we need a way of distinguishing between the work of God Himself versus the way we experience him in the history of salvation. For example, we can say that God lives in us from the moment we’re saved, but we can’t say the Son lives in us. Similarly we can say that Mary is the mother of God (another early church debate!), but we can’t say that Mary is the mother of the Father. Or one more example, we can say that God died, but we can’t say that the Father died.

-The phrase “and the Son” wasn’t in the original, so it shouldn’t be considered a marker of orthodoxy, but we do have to acknowledge some kind of relationship between the Son and the Spirit. Maximus the Confessor (another great name) said it should be proceeds from the Father through the Son.

-Words matter, definitions of words matter, and God’s revelation matters above all of them! And one of the joys of being a Protestant (that’s another church history issue for another time) is we can look at some of these debates as outside observers who continually go back to the Bible and try to defend what the Bible says. So a couple passages that I think help us get some more glimpses into the Trinity:

–John 16 shows the Spirit obeying Jesus, and says that everything the Father has is also Jesus’s, which you could argue that if the Spirit proceeds from the Father, then He must also proceed from the Son.

-In contrast to that, Mark 1 tells the account of Jesus’s baptism where all 3 persons of the Trinity are glimpsed together, Jesus in the water, the Spirit like a dove, and the Father affirming His Son. But then what happens to Jesus? He obeys the Spirit. And once again, we’re left with a mystery as to how the Godhead works “ad intra” or internally. We experience the Trinity “ad extra” and the Spirit (through the Son) brings us into this loving relationship within the Trinity, but we will never completely understand how this relationship works. And each time we bring up this mystery, we need to fall on our face in worship of this God. 

-I want to end our study on the HS today in John 20. Because of what God has done for us through His Son and in the Spirit living in us, we have peace with God. But the Spirit living in us is also the reason we’re still here in the world. The Spirit living in us is the reason Jesus sends us out into the world to both show the world the love God has for them, and to live holy lives in the world as a picture of what it means to follow Jesus.

-There’s also a note in here about sins, which leads us into the Lord’s Table. The church is the place where we gather each week to remember what’s truly true: that we have been adopted into this family of God that comes from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. This family allows you to have your sins forgiven and together works towards ensuring the purity of Christ’s bride. 

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by mikethestrand on May 24, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 24, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/24/in-the-holy-spirit/

In One God – Sermon Manuscript

-My parents offered to watch the kids last night, so Cara and I got to go out for a date night, and we tried a new to us place called Crisp & Green in AV. Decent salads and smoothies if you’re looking for a salad! But they had something on the wall that serves as a perfect illustration of why we need to study something like the Nicene Creed: 

-I’m not sure about you, but I’m not looking to a salad place to tell me what to believe! Also, what does it mean to be 100% authentic? There’s all sort of different creeds that people hold to today (one of which is always be 100% authentic to yourself). But what is a Christian creed? What do we claim to believe in?

-We’re going to kick this series off reading from Deut. 6:4-8 (pg. 157)

-Our bread and butter here is picking a book of the Bible and walking through it. But how do we know how to interpret what’s in the Bible? Another way of asking this question is: how do we know which interpretation is the correct one? I share this regularly when I preach, but there are debates about all sorts of things in the Bible! The correct translation of specific words, the authors meaning behind the words, why some authors use words differently (if you want to wade into the waters look at the different ways Paul and James use the word “works”). One way the church (when I say that, I’m referring to the universal church) has tried to answer that question is by creating creeds, or statements of belief. Generally, these occur in response to specific questions or issues that are brought up as people start digging into Scripture, and the earliest debates in the church were focused on the question of how Jesus could be God. How could a first-century Jewish man who ate, walked, breathed, and slept be the Creator and sustainer of the universe? Especially when at the core of the Jewish faith is the confession that the Lord our God the Lord is one. I’ll mention this now as a teaser, but the big debate centers on this picture: where does Jesus fit in the understanding that God is unique when there’s a hard line between God and creation, does Jesus go above or below the line?

-One of the first things we have to admit is that in order for us to know God, He has to come down to our level. John Calvin, in his institutes, said, “God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children.” He’s saying that any talk God does to us is like baby talk, which is good for us, but it also means there are things that are said that we can’t fully understand, if we could completely understand God then He wouldn’t be God, we would! So then as we dig into what God has revealed, it takes some work and effort for us to figure out exactly what is meant in this “baby talk.”

-We also need to do some (what I have previously called) “Theological tune-up” from time to time! It’s worth trying to take some of what the Bible says and putting it together into a coherent system of belief (which is called systematic theology). I’ve shared this picture before, but it bears repeating as a reminder of how we grow in our knowledge and understanding of God. Exegesis is working to answer the question what does the text say? Biblical theology answers the question how has God revealed His word organically and historically, tracing various themes and ideas throughout the whole Bible. Historical theology answers the question how has the church historically understood this text? Systematic theology answers the question what does the Bible say about certain topics? And finally, pastoral theology answers how should humans respond to God’s revelation? We need all of these disciplines, but they’re often segmented off from each other, and in preaching the tendency is to do exegesis and then jump to pastoral theology without doing any further work. This series is intentionally taking some time to drill down into systematic theology, how do we put together what the Bible says about God? And all of these areas of study shape and inform each other in a feedback loop to help us grow in our understanding of what God has spoken to us. We need all of them working together to help us.

-I also like being late to the party, last year was the 1700th anniversary of the writing of the Nicene Creed, so I thought we should look at it, but I’d rather look at it after everyone else has already done it! My hope by the end of this series is that some of you have this creed memorized! So instead of doing a key verse in the sermon notes for this series, I’ve printed off some half sheets that have the whole thing on them, and the elders are also working to memorize it to recite at our meeting next month (so feel free to ask them how they’re memorization is coming). We’ll ALSO be singing a song after the sermon each week that helps us learn the words to this creed and move to a proper response. The words are also going to be on the screen each week, so would you please recite this creed with me (modern translation that I linked to in the sermon preview)

  1. What is a Creed?

-At the most basic level, a creed is an articulation of right belief, it’s where we get the word orthodoxy from 2 Greek words: orthos meaning straight or correct, and doxa meaning praise or belief. And that’s just 1 of the orthos, because for Christians the end goal isn’t just orthodoxy, the end goal of correct belief is orthopraxy (praxis Greek doing or practice) which is guided by orthocardia (right emotions), this is loving God correctly with all our heart, mind, soul, strength. This is meant to be a means of aligning what it is we believe with each other.

-Sometimes creeds were called symbols (from the Latin symbolum) which served as a sign or a token of being on the same side. For example, imagine a soldier is approaching a building at night, it’s dark outside, so the soldier standing guard says, “Halt! Who goes there?” and this army has a response that means they’re on the same side (open sesame). Another meaning of the symbolum is a pledge of allegiance giving from a solider when they were inducted into the army, they were given a creed something to recite that served as their confession in. Similarly for Christians, when they were baptized, they were pledging their allegiance to this God. 

-There are a number of what we could call “creeds” throughout the Bible (different than other creeds because these are all inspired), but there are numerous phrases that were used to identify God’s people throughout Scripture. One of the common phrases I’ve heard from Evangelicals is “No creed but the Bible.” And I understand and empathize with that impulse, but as soon as we say that we’re actually enacting a creed! And even more difficult: what do we do when heretical groups claim the same thing, as we’ll see with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Really briefly, a few examples of what could be viewed as creeds throughout the Bible:

-We read this one earlier, Deut. 6, and do you see how this is God’s people pledging their allegiance to Him alone? God’s Words are to be at the forefront of everything they do.

-Another example is found in 1 Cor. 15, Paul quotes something that he says he received. That is he didn’t make it up or come up with it, it was passed down to him, and then he passes it down to the churches he plants and supports. 

-Another one is thought to be found in 1 Tim. 3, which again focuses on Jesus.

-Finally, there’s a few different places where we have a VERY short creedal statement, I’ll use Rom. 10:9, but it’s also found in 1 Cor. 12:3, Phil. 2:11, and that is the proclamation that Jesus is Lord. It’s a confession of truth, of aligning ourselves to this specific God who took on flesh as the God-man Jesus.

  • Why Study a Creed?

-The first and most important reason is because creeds provide guardrails that serve as protection from heresy. One brief caveat here before I continue, that word is used far too loosely today by so many online organizations that become “heresy hunters” who are trying to condemn as many people as they can! It’s not a Christian virtue to constantly be looking for problems in others. I have a pastor friend who likes to say that Christians are called to operate with the perspective of love, which means we assume the best about others, we don’t operate with the perspective of skepticism, that’s not a Christian virtue. That being said, heresy is still a real thing that we need to be aware of! So a few examples of groups today who deny the Nicene Creed, and why we need to understand what this creed is saying:

-We’ll start with Jehovah’s Witnesses (of which Michal Jackson was a part of, and so was Prince). On their website under what they believe they say: 

-Do you notice that they’re quoting the Bible to back up what they believe? Does that mean that they’re orthodox in those beliefs? Absolutely not! In fact, I often see JWs at the library when we take our kids there, with their displays to try to convince others to join this heretical cult! 

-What about the group formerly known as Mormons (LDS)? Here’s a quote from their website from an article titled “Becoming Like God.” Distinct beings, unity of the divine. What is divine, and what are beings? But Joseph Smith said some pretty crazy things too, like: Does any of that sound like what we read in the Bible, or like what we read about in the Nicene Creed?

-One more modern-day example: United Pentecostal Church International (oneness penecostalism) again deny the Trinity. There aren’t 3 persons of the Godhead, they are 3 “modes” or perceptions of God. They even explicitly state that they baptize only in the name of Jesus.

-Do you see how they’re taking the Bible and twisting and distorting it to fit their ideas? They even reference various verses but then ignore or gloss over any verses that don’t fit within their ideas. This is why we need creeds to correct the areas where we may be tempted to twist the Bible. As an example, my kids will often ask the question “Does ____ believe in God?” So YouTube stars, actors, basketball players, etc. And that’s fine for their age, but as you get older you know it’s not enough to ask that question, you need to go to the second question of WHICH God someone believes in. The Nicene Creed tells us which God is the God of the Bible that we should worship.

-Secondly, it allows us to avoid what CS Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” Friends, we are not the first Christians to live! God has been at work among His people for millennia, and it helps us to know and love God by learning from the examples of those who have wrestled through various issues in the past.

-A secondary question to the above is why study of THIS creed (besides it being the 1701st anniversary of it). Because it’s the most important creed in church history. It’s the only creed that has been affirmed by every branch of orthodox Christianity (not the eastern orthodox church), thus serves as a good foundation for “theological triage.” If you haven’t heard that before, you haven’t been coming here very long! We need a way of ranking specific doctrines, because denying some of them would land put you in heresy, but other doctrines have a wide margin of belief to them and you’re not in doubt of worshipping the wrong God. 

-If you noticed when we recited it, it’s broken down nicely into 3 sections that all begin with “We believe” and each section refers to 1 person of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The trinity is what separates Christianity from every other religion that has ever been created, and whatever language we use for it is going to fall short in some area. We’re entering into the realm of the divine when we talk about theology, which means there’s going to be things that our human minds can’t completely comprehend. There’s also no analogy that accurately describes the Trinity (egg and clover they’re all separate, water can’t be all 3 at the same time, human as father, son, and husband only gets to the relational aspect of the trinity but breaks down into modalism). 

-In an attempt to simplify some of this conversation, there are 7 statements that are true about God, which are all found in this picture. So if you can start to understand this picture, you’re starting to grasp the one true God who has revealed Himself to His creation. 1. The Father is God. 2. The Son is God. 3. The Holy Spirit is God. 4. The Father is not the Son. 5. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. 6. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. 7. There is only one God.

-I’ve shared this story a couple times before, but it bears repeating as we begin this series. In seminary, you’re required to take some theology classes, which means we got to read a few books about theology. In talking about the Trinity, my professor said because we’re in the realm of God, we have a “mystery” card to play, but that doesn’t mean as soon as we enter into that realm we jump to waving the “mystery” white flag, we need to put in the work before we jump to the mystery. Our focus over the next 4 weeks is going to be exploring the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity, what theologian Fred Sanders calls “the happy land of the Trinity.” Even the word “trinity” isn’t in the Bible, it’s a word that humans came up with to describe this picture: tri (3) unity.

-Why was this creed written? In response to an early church debate that was taking place. There was a bishop (elder/pastor) named Arius who was trying to uphold the unity (oneness) and uniqueness of God. If God is one, then that means that even the Son had to be created by God. He was picking up the terminology from one of the most well-known Bible verses: John 3:16 (in the old NKJV that I memorized it in), begotten means there was a beginning time, right? That’s how it works with humans, I begot my kids, there was a time before they existed. Unfortunately, we can’t project the way humans work unto God. So when Arius was reading this, he equated begotten with created, but that’s not what is meant by this statement. God’s begetting is connecting to the way they relate to each other, not the way ordering of the Godhead (we’ll get there, don’t worry!). But Arius began teaching this, and apparently even created catchy songs that were spread across the Mediterranean by sailors (Athanasius said the songs weren’t even very good).

-Recently converted emperor Constantine, in order to protect the unity of his kingdom convened this council that met in Nicea to determine who was right: Arius or Alexander (bishop of Alexandria). Over 300 bishops convened, and there wasn’t a clear winner at the beginning. But it’s important for us to know that they didn’t set to determine ALL orthodoxy (inerrancy and the books of the Bible wasn’t even a discussion topic, contrary to Dan Brown’s presentation) primarily focused on the deity of Jesus, and worked to clarify the relationship God had between Himself and how that impacts us today.

-I mentioned Fred Sanders earlier, but I love the way he summarizes the way we respond to God: 

-We’ll be discussing more about the council each week as we work our way through the creed, but with all that background, let’s look at the first section:

  • God is One

-We believe: instead of a mere intellectual ascent, this is a way of ascribing allegiance to the one true God, who has declared from the beginning that He is one. He has no parts, He cannot be divided, He is completely united in being. This begins in the same place that shema began as a way to acknowledge the past history of God’s work. One note on this creed, the authors worked their hardest to use only biblical language, and they were successful with all except 1 word. But you’ll need to come back next week to find out what that 1 word is! There’s also some debate over how to translate this opening phrase, some manuscripts have the plural (we), others have the individual (I). One purpose in having this creed is to give something for those who were getting baptized to agree to! So in that case, it’s I believe, but WE all affirm along with those getting baptized.

-Second, the first things He’s called is Father, and this gets to His relation to His Son, Jesus, and because of what Jesus has done it also describes His relation to us. He’s not just the father though, He’s also the almighty. The words used by this creed were used to refer to some other gods too, in this case it’s a way of saying that God is the ruler over everything.

-He’s also the maker (or creator) of heaven and earth. This is a way of saying everything (like when someone says I’ve been working day and night, you don’t take it to mean there was no breaks), it also echoes the language of Gen. 1

-Lastly, it alludes to Col. 1:16 when it says that God created the visible sphere and the invisible sphere. But this also is a way of denying the Gnostic heresy that said Jesus was just 1 of a plethora of gods in the supernatural realm.

-This is the shortest section of the creed because this wasn’t really up for debate. Even the heretics believed in the unity of God, but what do we do with it today? We believe. Belief is more than just a mental check box (like saying you read the terms and conditions of every app you download), this is confessing our allegiance in this God who is completely united and can’t be divided. This God created everyone, including you and me, and what’s the most amazing about this God is He doesn’t leave us alone. He comes down in flesh to bear the penalty for our sins and then comes down to indwell those who confess that they believe in His name.

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by mikethestrand on May 10, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Worship
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 10, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/10/in-one-god-sermon-manuscript/

Malachi – Sermon Manuscript

-This book is a perfect end to this series because Malachi is essentially giving an overview of what all the previous prophets had been talking about and shares what God is going to do when He comes (and keep in mind the 2 futures that we’ve been talking about a few times now throughout this series, 1 future of Jesus’s first coming, and another future of His second coming). We have the advantage of reading this after the first arrival of Jesus, we can read and understand this in some ways that the first readers would have lacked some clarity on. The way God chooses to reveal things isn’t always as clear as we might want them to be, but God does reveal His plans and purposes to us if we’re willing to put in the work to understand what He’s said!

READ/PRAY (pg. 849) 3:1-4

  1. The Message of Malachi:

-Remember last week that the latter half of Zechariah was pronouncements, oracles from the Lord. Now look at the beginning of this book:

-Our translation says pronouncement here, it’s coming from the Lord, some of your translations might say oracle, some might say message. We don’t know much about Malachi, and there’s debate about whether or not that’s even his name because in Hebrew that translates to “my messenger.” I’m going to go with it’s his name because of the 11 other books we’ve looked at in this series that all begin by naming the prophet.

-This book contains a series of 6 “disputations,” think of it like a courtroom where Malachi is taking an accusation from the Lord, then go goes on to present the counterarguments from the people, then he delivers God’s response and verdict. I served in youth ministry for 4 years, so this reads like a teenager rolling their eyes at their parents. And yes, each of the emojis corresponds to one of the books, so now that we’re at the end you can go back through and match them all up!

-Chiasm – symmetry to them with a focus on the middle, which is where the 3 points of this sermon came from! 1&6 go together, 2&5, 3&4, and right in the middle is the section we read together where the Lord is promising to send a messenger to prepare the way for the Lord’s arrival. Let’s take a look at the first and sixth “disputations” (or courtroom scenes) 

  1. The Righteous and the Wicked (1:2-5, 3:13-4:3)

-God begins with His love, which makes sense because we know from the NT that God is love. And the people’s response is HOW? Because they’re not feeling that love right now. Isn’t it amazing how so many modern questions and doubts people have come up in the Bible? It’s almost like God knows exactly how humans work.

-But it’s not just between God and humans that we see this reality. This is true in marriage, in parenting, in working (working is much less so because I’m guessing you’re not told from your boss that they love you, unless you work at a church!) But love has become so convoluted today that when most people today hear of love their mind goes to acceptance, and those are not synonyms! Love means you care for someone else and desire the best for them, regardless of how it makes them feel. That’s why discipline is a part of love. It would be unloving for me to let my kids get away with throwing a fit, or with running out in front of a car, or eating nothing but candy all the time. It’s similar with God, because God loves He will discipline. If there was never any discipline or correction in your life God wouldn’t love you. Hence the people asking God how He loved them.

-God says that He loved Jacob (who was eventually called Israel, who had 12 sons who became the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel), but Jacob was a twin, and not just a twin he was the younger twin. And in that culture, that meant Jacob wasn’t supposed to receive any inheritance or recognition, it was all supposed to go to Esau, but God inverted the normal ordering and gave His love to Jacob, but He hated Esau. 

-That’s another part that grates against our modern sensibilities, and maybe this comes across to you as harsh! What we miss is the judgment God is giving to Esau’s descendants (known as the Edomites) wouldn’t have been seen as overly harsh to them. We talked about this back when we looked at Obad. The prophet there talks about the destruction of the Edomites because of their lack of concern towards their brothers the Israelites. Actions have consequences, and a lack of concern for other humans leads to punishment from the Lord.

-This first disputation tells us that God’s standards aren’t the same as human standards. There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s recognition and favor, but when God blesses us with His favor, then He does expect us to represent Him and live righteous lives (unlike Esau) 

-The 6th scene jumps to 3:13. God begins by saying the people talk harshly against Him, and as we saw previously the people immediately ask “HOW!?” they ask the exact same thing here.

-This time, God says that the way they’re harsh is by assessing their obedience and service to the Lord through a human lens, instead of looking at their lives through the lens of eternity (as the righteous are supposed to do). The people are saying it’s useless to serve God, that they look around at other peoples who don’t even try to obey God and it looks like they’re all prospering and flourishing, that there’s no consequences to someone who ignores or tests God. But they’re not seeing the whole picture. I saw an article that Randy Alcorn wrote this past week (author of the book Heaven that I would encourage you to read!), that was titled “For the Christian, the future is always better.” 

-But maybe you feel the same way as the people here! I know there’s times and seasons where I do! Think back to the parenting issues I talked about earlier, in the short term it’s a LOT easier to just ignore my kids, to not correct them, to let them do whatever they want, but I have a longer goal in mind for them than right now. I want them to become responsible adults who can love God and love other people, which means you have to learn about delayed gratification!

-Just to make sure we get this point, God ends this section in vs. 18 by saying: do you see how you can tell who is righteous or wicked? One serves God, the other does not serve God. What do you do? Do you serve God, or do you refuse to serve Him and just work to serve yourself? That’s our way of looking at it, from God’s perspective the question is: are you righteous or are you wicked?

  • Unacceptable Worship (1:6-2:9, 3:6-12)

-Second and fifth scenes focus on worship, particularly worship that God will not accept. This focus throughout these books has been the biggest surprise to me. I know God cares about worship, I know He wants us to worship Him correctly, but I didn’t realize just how much it came up in even the minor prophets. And we’re not off the hook for this today! God brings up 2 specific issues of incorrect worship: 

-First, the animals. God says that there is honor given to someone in a position of authority, so sons honor their fathers, slaves honor their masters, but God isn’t honored by His people even though He is their father AND their master. What’s even worse is the people know better. In vs. 8 God tells them to try bringing that offering to the governor. They know He wouldn’t accept it, which means they’re treating God even worse than their political leaders. And on top of that (it gets worse!) look at what God says in the beginning of chapt. 2. This gets us to the second issue: not only are the people offering these lame animals, the priests are accepting them! The priests are supposed to be the ones who are telling the people how to live near this holy God and what it means to worship Him, and here they’re taking these unacceptable offerings and offering them to God. Look how God describes these priests in vs. 7-8: The priests are even more culpable because they’re leading people away and have violated God’s commands for them.

-And then God circles back around to worship in chapt. 3. Look at vs. 7: The tenth here is what was expected for the people to give to the Levites and was also used for the poor, that tenth (also referred to as a tithe) is viewed as God’s. He required the people to give it back to Him, so by not paying it they were robbing from God. But there is a level of irony to even marking out 10% as devoted to God because how much does God actually own? Hint: it’s much, much more than 10%, EVERYTHING belongs to God! He created it, it only continues existing because of Him, but by setting aside the 10% to God the people are demonstrating their trust in Him. God even goes on to invite the people to test Him out. If they prove faithful in their tithes, God will respond by opening the floodgates of heaven and pouring out His blessings.

-Because we live in the USA in 2026, this doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed to live in a mansion and be a multi-millionaire. I hope some of you do get that (or are already there) because the church needs people who are wealthy and people who are poor to work together to show a picture to the world of the different classes of people loving and caring for each other, even though our bank accounts look different. Instead, what God expects from us is that we view everything as His and respond with generosity to those around us (church and others). I preached a series on this last Fall, so I’m not going to go any further on this today, but living obediently to God does affect our wallets. God calls us to respond to Him in faith and obedience, which is what the final 2 scenes are about:

  • Holy Living (2:10-16, 2:17-3:5)

-The middle sections (3&4) are connected to the worship that we just saw, but then God goes on to connect it to the way the people are living. The third one begins with the people crying out to God because He won’t receive their offerings (see how it’s connected to worship?) There are 2 issues that God addresses here: the men are pursuing marriages with women who worship other gods, which means (secondly) some of them are divorcing their wives to chase after these other women.

-The big key is that the horizontal relationships are a reflection of the vertical relationship. That means if we love God, truly love God, it necessarily means that we will love others and treat other humans with dignity, honor, and respect.

-The problem is that God doesn’t receive their offerings anymore, so they ask why, and it’s because they have acted treacherously against their wives. He goes on to say the point of marriage is to create godly offspring. Part of the reality is that just makes sense sociologically. Part of the reason Islams and Mormonism grows is because they have more babies than other religions!

-Vs. 16 has been mistranslated over the years and has led to some pretty big issues in the church. NKJV translates this verse as God saying that He hates divorce, but that’s not in the text, that’s adding a pronoun that’s not in the Hebrew and adjusts the verbal form from what is actually in the text. Our translation gets it right! Contextually, it’s better to think of the husband as the one who hates and divorces his wife as committing injustice against her. He has covenanted with her, and by divorcing her is unjust towards her. The reason this is important is because the church has previously said that God hates divorce, therefore all divorce is wrong, and I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Moses gives stipulations for divorce, Jesus gives stipulations for divorce, and Paul gives stipulations for divorce. That doesn’t mean it should be the first option (or the second, or third), but it’s also not an unforgiveable sin. There are times where it is (to use the Malachi word) just to pursue divorce. And that’s where we need other people around us to help us navigate the complexities of living in this broken and fallen world, and unfortunately one of the realities of that broken world is divorce. And I know some of you have been affected by divorce, it is messy! And even the no-fault divorce that we have today is such a misnomer, because there’s always fault (and usually from both parties!). Divorce isn’t God’s intent for marriage, but He permits divorce because of the effects of sin today.

-Vs. 17 gives us another aspect of holy living that I don’t think we ponder very often, we get frustrated when people are blessed who aren’t following God, and we can tend to erroneously think that God is blessing their evil pursuits. I’ve shared this example before, but look at Michael Jordan, who I revered when I was growing up (but let’s be honest, what kid growing up in the 90s didn’t) He got to play basketball and hang out with Bugs Bunny. But when he turned 50 (in 2013), ESPN wrote an article titled “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building,” and it is heartbreaking. He said he would give up everything to be able to go back and keep playing basketball, which tells you what his god is! It’s wrong for me to look at his life and say I want what he has when I look at the fact that I have Jesus! I don’t need anything else.

-And in response to this accusation, God says “Just wait,” He’s going to send His messenger to prepare the way for the Lord, He’s going to refine and purify them so that they can be acceptable to God once again. But it requires them to live different lives than they had been living.

-The ending of this book is a great summary of the Bible, and it references the previous sections of the Bible! The law that was given to Moses (first 5 books), and then Elijah as representative of the prophets, which the NT tells us is fulfilled in the arrival of John the Baptist. I think the last 2 sentences are talking about the way the family was broken down in the days of Malachi, but with the arrival of Jesus a new family is born that doesn’t depend on us to uphold, but is completely dependent on God. And that’s where we need to think about how we apply what we’ve seen in these books to our lives today:

  • What Does Holy Living Look Like?

-First, Get worship right. Worship is us responding to God with all that we are and all that we have. As Jesus commands us, we’re to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s a way of summarizing our everything. Jesus is quoting the shema there from Deut. 6. The Hebrew word “strength” is may-od which my Hebrew prof in seminary loved to tells us is “much-ness” or “exceedingly” I just love that idea love God with your exceedingly muchness! It doesn’t make a lot of sense in English, which is why our translations say strength, but it’s meant to convey ALL that you have and are. But when I say get worship right, we have to acknowledge that there are ways of getting worship wrong. We can focus on the wrong things, we can have the wrong motivations, we can even use our acts of worship to sin against God (as we’ve seen all over these prophets). We’re commanded to worship God not just on Sundays, but that worship is supposed to spill over into our jobs, our homes, our hobbies. All of those things are gifts and tools that God has given to us for our enjoyment, for our growth and maturation, and to be used to bring honor and glory to Him. 

-Second, Get family right. Malachi focuses on marriage and the overflow into raising godly children, but under the covenant that Jesus ushers in, we’re supposed to focus on a different family: the church family. The nuclear family had a HUGE priority in the 1st century (and rightly so!). You relied on your family to survive, to function, to work, it took everyone contributing. But Jesus begins a new focus in Matt. 12. We saw this reality in 1 Tim. Last Fall too. Paul says we’re supposed to treat older men in the church as fathers, older women as mothers, younger men as brothers, and youngers women as sisters. Friends, this church family has significance in our lives! Paul even goes a step further and refers to the church as the “household of faith” in Gal. 6:10. Do you view this church as your family?

-Third: get hope right. Set your sights in the right direction and on the right person. Friends, these prophets would have given everything they owned to experience what we view as normal and boring. If you have been saved, you have God living in you. That doesn’t mean life suddenly gets easy (in many cases it actually gets harder!), but it does mean that we have a different direction and goal to our lives. God repeatedly called these prophets to continue hoping in Him because He had made promises to His people, and God calls the same thing for us today. Even though we live in between Jesus’s 2 comings doesn’t mean our lives are easier, or that we need the reminders less. Church, God is in control! Nothing catches Him by surprise, nothing can catch Him unprepared or unaware. He has promised that He will return to fix all the brokenness and provide a place for you to live with Him forever. That’s what our hope is in.

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by mikethestrand on May 3, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon, Worship
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 3, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/03/malachi-sermon-manuscript/

Haggai – Sermon Manuscript

-There was a movie that came out in 2004 that no one expected to take off like it did! It was a classic “coming of age” story of a guy who was trying to figure out life in high school and family dynamics that go along with that. I saw it in theaters and I haven’t been the same since! It was a movie called Napoleon Dynamite, and I feel like it’s one of those movies that only worked in a certain time period, because I know people who have tried introducing it to their kids and the kids thought the parents were crazy. One of the funniest characters is a guy named Uncle Rico, who claimed to be able to (and I quote) “throw the pigskin a quarter mile.” Look at that form! I doubt he could throw that a quarter yard! But part of the reason he was so funny is because we all know someone like him, someone who is always pining for the “glory days” of the past. And what’s craziest is their interpretation of the past doesn’t always line up with reality!

-Haggai is a message of encouragement for God’s people who were discouraged about not living during the “glory days” of Israel. They look around them and are living as a remnant, a shadow of the former glory of the nation. They’re subservient to a different nation, they don’t have a temple to worship in, and they don’t even have enough food to eat! What are they hoping in? Let’s read the first chapter and find out:

READ/PRAY (pg. 839)

  1. The Message of Haggai: The Presence and Blessing of the Lord

-We have more information about what’s leading up to this event in Ezra and Nehemiah. We sometimes miss the connection between books in the OT because of the ordering of them. Ezra & Nehemiah are prophesying and writing at the same time, and some people believe they were the people who compiled the OT together for God’s people. But Ezra tells us that because the people faced opposition to the building of the temple, they stopped working on it, and that stopping remained for 16 years, while the people focused on building homes and raising crops, getting the rest of their lives in order.

-Then the Lord sends Haggai and Zechariah to light a fire under the people and call them to begin building the temple once again, and Ezra 6 tells us the celebration they had at the completion of this new temple. So Haggai tells us the message the Lord gave to get the people going. Just to give some perspective, Ezra 5 also includes these prophets as part of his description of what was going on, and he tells us that Haggai helped rebuild the temple! 

-Not a ton of information about this prophet (apart from the note that he is a prophet!). But we have VERY explicit information about when these words came to him, allowing us to date this book to a 4-month period in the year 520 BC. Here’s where all the dates are listed throughout the book, and what they correspond to in our Gregorian calendar! 

-Who was this word give to? Zerubbabel and Joshua: civil and religious leaders. We’ll learn more about Zerubbabel throughout this book, so for now just note that these are supposed to be the recipients of this prophesy. And right away, we see the problem God is addressing:

-This house is in ruins. The problem is they had stopped building the temple. They had faced some difficulty with it, but instead of persevering, they gave up and focused on building out their own homes.

-God draws attention to these issues by saying “think carefully about your ways” which he repeats 3 other times in the book (1:7, 2:15, 18) It’s a way of telling the people to learn from these things and draw near to God through them. Honestly, I think this is a picture for us of how we’re supposed to respond to difficult seasons in our lives. If God is sovereign (in complete control) than we can trust Him even when things don’t feel like they’re going to work out, or we don’t feel like we’re flourishing. God isn’t the author of evil, but He’ll allow evil in our lives to grow and stretch us, just like any parent has to sometimes let their kids fail in order to help them grow.

-God has prevented His people from flourishing in their work. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, their clothes are wearing out. And this isn’t an accident or incidental thing, God is still in control, including over the times and the seasons, and He has prevented their crops from flourishing. And why is that? Look at vs. 8-9. The reason the people were living in ruin was because it was meant to be a picture to them of the ruin God’s house was in.

-The answer is: build God’s house, if you do, He will be pleased and glorified. Sounds easy enough, right? Put this building up, be done, and watch the wealth come in! But it’s never that simple, especially (I would think) as the people are struggling.

-I don’t know about you, but if I heard that God was the one that was preventing my flourishing, I don’t think I’d be very happy about it. Think about how many stories you hear or read about people who get angry at God for things not working out how they wanted them to. It’s such a common story! But that’s not how the people responded here! Look at vs. 12.

-The entire remnant obeyed and feared the Lord. This is the description of a revival! A particular season of repentance and turning to the Lord, and many times it comes after particularly difficult seasons.

-Have you ever had a season in your life where it felt like God was intentionally leaving you in a desert place? Where you kept crying out to Him and asking for some level of relief, but it never got better. Where you were reading the Bible, but it felt like it didn’t make sense, where you pray but it feels like you’re praying to the wall, where you go to church but it feels like a waste of time. It doesn’t take long in your journey with Christ to reach some level of crisis. And sometimes it’s God stretching and challenging you to grow through it. It hurts, in the middle of it, it feels like it will never end, but God’s call to His people is to continue trusting Him and persevere.

-And look how God responds to them: “I am with you.” That’s basically a summary of the whole story of Scripture. What is God’s plan from the beginning? To be with His people! That’s why He doesn’t ever give up. Even when the entire world was in rebellion against him (except for the family of Noah), He still moved toward His creation and created a way for them to be redeemed through the floods. Friends, this is the best news in the world! God’s first move is always towards, not running away which is why God came down to Earth.

-So the people obey, and the work on the temple began again.

-God (through Haggai) asks the people who saw the old temple. This new one wasn’t going to be as nice or as beautiful or even as big. Here it even says, “Doesn’t it seem to you like nothing in comparison?” God doesn’t even try to be “MN nice” about it!

-There is a human temptation to live like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite and pine after your “glory days,” to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and the people of the Lord are no exception. Ezra 3:13 tells us exactly what the response of the people was to this event: half were thrilled and excited that this work had begun, and the other half were weeping because it was so bad in comparison. Even though those former days had idolatry and sin, and there was the impending destruction of the nation coming, they wanted to go back, instead of celebrating what God was doing here and now. We see this today, too! There is a church I drove by in Rochester that has a giant billboard that says, “We sing hymns.” Technically, EVERY church sings hymns, because I’m going to assume that every church is singing songs to God! And there’s nothing wrong with singing hymns, but there’s also FANTSTIC new songs that are being written all the time! If you want to talk about my thoughts on music, send me an email! And it goes beyond music that too, I’ve had people tell me that they wish they could go back to the morality in our country of the 50s. I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve read enough history to know that the 50s was the time of MASSIVE segregation in our country, a time when the color of your skin could have prevented you from voting. Do you really want to live in that time period? That doesn’t mean today is any better! While the color of your skin doesn’t prevent you from voting, our culture is debating what it means to be male or female. Friends, the reality is whatever time you live in: people are still people, sin is still sin, and God is still sovereignly ruling and reigning, so the call for His people hasn’t changed, look at what God goes on to say:

-What’s interesting is this is the same exhortation that Joshua got when they were about to cross into the Promised Land, encouragement to be remain strong and faithful because even though the temple wasn’t done, His Spirit was with them. It’s hard to persevere, it’s hard to remain faithful, so God exhorts His people to continue pushing through, to not give up.

-I will shake: there’s allusions to Ex. 19:18 here that shows that when God comes, the earth can’t stay still. Someday in the future, God will judge the nations, and what will they do? They’ll bring their treasures into this house. And I think we see this in 2 places, first when the wise men “from the east” bring their gifts to Jesus, and second and more explicitly in the new heavens and earth. Rev. 21:24 says the kings of the earth will bring their glory into this new Jerusalem. The external glory of the temple is meant to reflect the inner glory of the Glorious One.

-The final glory will be greater than the first. You haven’t seen ANYTHING yet, because for a Christian, the best is ALWAYS yet to come. One thing I’ve been trying to do more since preaching through Revelation is spend time contemplating heaven, and just how wonderful that will be. I heard someone onetime say he ended his devotions each day thinking about heaven until it brought a smile to his face! One of the most amazing things about heaven is the joy and happiness is unending. Each day is a new opportunity to try something new, to get to know someone in a deeper way, to taste a new food, to go on a new adventure. And each day we’ll grow in our awareness and understanding of God, which will never leave us bored because God is infinite (which is why I think we get eternity to spend with Him). 

-Then Haggai is asked to go to the priests and ask him a couple questions about Levitical law (vs. 10-19), and the summary of these questions is: defiling is contagious, while holiness is not. And you can kind of make sense of that with sickness, you can “catch” a cold (or the flu, or COVID), but you can’t “catch” health, can you? And God says that because the people aren’t holy, even their offerings are defiled by their sin.

-Which is some of what makes Jesus’s arrival so amazing, because the opposite is true with Him. Jesus comes along and sickness flees from Him! So now under Jesus, suddenly holiness is contagious. Mark 1 tells this story of a leper. Under the law, lepers were completely segregated from everyone else, and if anyone got too close to the leper, they were unclean. But do you notice how Jesus heals this leper? Mark is explicit: he reaches out his hand and touches the man, a man who likely hadn’t been touched by another human in YEARS because they didn’t want to catch his leprosy. And what happens when Jesus touches the man? Instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the unclean man is made clean (which Mark explicitly says). God says in Haggai that this is coming, blessing instead of cursing, and it’s dependent on God, not anything the people can do.

-The final word to Haggai comes on the same day with a promise to once again “shake the heavens and the earth.” The purpose of this shaking is to overthrow the Gentile kingdoms, with allusions to the Exodus when they overthrew the Egyptian army (Ex. 14), and the conquest of the promised land, when the Midianites killed each other in their confusion (Judges 7:22).

-Who’s going to be sitting on the throne? It says Zerubbabel, but one of the issues at this time was that Darius was the king, even though Zerubbabel was the descendant of David.

-First, a signet ring is the marker of royal authority, think of it like an official stamp. But the reason that’s significant is because of something God revealed to the prophet Jeremiah about Zerubbabel’s grandfather. In Jer. 22:24 God says that even though Coniah was (past tense) God’s signet ring (that is, bearing God’s authority), God was going to rip him off, cast him away, and the prophesy ends by the Lord saying his offspring will be cast off, which leaves in doubt whether or not David’s line would continue.

-But then we see here at the end of this book that God will renew His covenant with the Davidic line and make Zerubbabel His signet ring, promising that the David’s line would continue. And Zerubbabel comes up again in Matthew 1, do you know why? Because he is the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandpa to Jesus (yes, I counted). This is just a reminder to us that Jesus is the main point of the whole Bible. It all centers on Him, it all points to Him, and He is the answer to every promise that God makes. Which also means we need to talk about what this future temple is that God tells Haggai about.

  • The Temple of the Lord

-What was God talking about here that could be better than the temple Solomon built? What’s amazing is He’s talking about what we’re doing today. Now, I’m not saying that this building is the new temple, but God is talking about this new temple that exists worldwide, that is too big to fit in one building, and it’s called “the church.” Let me show why I think that.

-First, Jesus literally changes everything! So we need to think about the reason God has his people construct a tabernacle, then the temple to begin with. It was so He could live with His people. In fact, the ordering of the nation while they were traveling through the wilderness put the tabernacle in the middle of them, signifying that God had the primary place among them. But what’s fascinating (at least to me) is that God was living with His people before then too, but He was living with them as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. My reason for bringing this up is because of the way John describes Jesus in John 1. I don’t usually leave the footnotes in my slides, but it says it right on there: Jesus is the better tabernacle, the place where God’s full glory dwells (Col. 1:19). The reason God had His people build the tabernacle and then temple was because people would die if they were given unmediated access to God’s glory, but that changed with Jesus.

-Next, and a subset of this, is that Jesus says He is building something new with His disciples. So we begin with the reality that Jesus is the new and better tabernacle, but then He goes on to build something brand new which He talks about with Peter (Rocky! If you’ve read or watched Project Hail Mary yet). He affirms Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and that confession is the foundation for the church. So Jesus’s new idea for the place where God’s glory will dwell is in the church. But hold on, it gets even better than that!

-Paul continues this idea about what’s being built together in Eph. 2. Building up to this part, he’s been talking about the death we all lived in because of sin, and the separation we had between each other (Jew and Gentile) but how that division has been broken down by Jesus. Then he goes on to say that because of what Jesus has done, we are no longer foreigners and strangers, instead we’re citizens and members of what? God’s household. Turns out this has been God’s plan from the beginning! God living among His people, not in a temple built by human hands (Acts 7:48)

-But it gets even better. Look at what this house is built on: the apostles and the prophets. So we’re supposed to think back to prophets like Haggai as the foundation God was building 600 years before Jesus. And who’s the cornerstone, who’s the one who began the construction? Jesus. Paul is saying there is continuity from the beginning to the end. The tabernacle, then the multiple temples were in place to point to this reality that’s taking place today, because if you are in Christ, you are now a part of His holy temple. 

-And Peter talks about this reality as well. Not only are we the temple, we’re also being built to be the priests, the ones who can approach God to offer spiritual sacrifices through Jesus Christ. Friends, this means ALL of us are priests, this isn’t referring to some special “class” of Christians who act as a mediator between humans and God, there’s only 1 mediator: the God-man Jesus Christ. But Peter continues just a few verses later with a long list of descriptions of the church, all of which are direct quotes from God to Israel in the OT. God’s plan has always been to live among His people, not be constrained by a temple. God’s plan has also been to be the God of every tribe, and tongue, and nation, not just 1 ethnicity. 

-As I was studying this week, a verse from Psalm 27 came to mind. Think of what David asks the Lord here. The one thing he wants is to dwell in the house of the Lord and seek Him in His temple. Friends, we don’t just dwell in the house of the Lord, we ARE the house of the Lord, and where do we go to seek Him in His temple? We go here, because together we make up the temple of God. But just as the people during the time of Haggai had left the temple in ruins, there are ways that we today can leave the church in ruins. 

-An early church father, writing in the 3rd century, Cyprian of Carthage, wrote a treatise titled ‘On the Unity of the Church’ where he said: 

-There are 2 key issues I see today where we can leave the church in ruins. First is by treating it like a consumer, where we sit in judgment on what takes place, or we pick and choose the areas we want to be involved. I’ve seen people who would go to 1 church because they liked the music, then hop in a car when the music was done and drive down to another church because they liked the preaching there. That’s like a husband going over to the neighbor’s house because he doesn’t like his wife’s cooking (or the wife going over, I don’t know all your cooking arrangements). Pick a church and plug yourself in and don’t give up when you get offended or hurt. People are sinners, and when you throw a bunch of people together in close proximity, the sin is going to come out, we can’t help it. I wish I could say the church is immune from that, but until Jesus returns the church will continue being made up of a bunch of sinners. Which gets me to the second key issue:

-Don’t marginalize or belittle the church. The church is the 1 earthly institution that Jesus paid for by shedding His blood, and when you either speak poorly of the church, or complain about the church, or even worse if you just ignore the church completely, you’re dismissing the thing that Jesus loves the most. Picture this: my kids are starting to get a little older, which means they’re getting harder to correct. They’re using logic and reasoning to point out our inconsistencies. But the other thing they’re doing is starting to talk poorly about us, and I’m fine if they’re upset with me, but I don’t have much toleration for talking bad about Cara. When we are upset about the church or complain about it, it’s complaining about Jesus’s bride, and I don’t think He appreciates that. See, the call for all of us who claim to be Christians is in the name, it just means “little Christ.” We’re supposed to work to be like Him in every area of our lives, including the things that we love, and Jesus loves His church with every ounce of His being, so we should love the church with every ounce of our being.

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by mikethestrand on April 19, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon
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Posted by mikethestrand on April 19, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/19/haggai-sermon-manuscript/

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. 

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

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/12/zephaniah-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?

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by mikethestrand on March 8, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Relationships, Sermon
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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!

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by mikethestrand on February 15, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on February 15, 2026

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

1 Timothy 4:6-16 – Sermon Manuscript

-There was an incredibly influential Scottish Pastor that served as a pastor from 1835-1843 named Robert Murray McCheyne. He died before 30 of typhus, was a beloved pastor for all of 5.5 years, came up with a daily Bible reading plan that’s still used by thousands across the world today! Another one of my favorite quotes from his is “Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely.” But another quote of his was written to pastors, and I want you to be thinking about how you think he’ll finish this as we work our way through this text. What does the church most need from a pastor?

READ/PRAY (pg. 1052)

  1. Labor in the Word (6-10)

-If you read Paul’s letters, there’s a general overview that starts to take shape. He begins with this rich and robust theology truths about God that warrant all sorts of study that lead to all sorts of debate, and then about halfway through he turns to the practical outworkings of that rich doctrine. We’re now at that place in this letter. We’ve seen all these debated things like: the proper use of the law, praying for everyone, including ungodly rulers, the ordering of men and women in the church, the leadership offices of the church, and a reminder to follow the true Spirit instead of the spirit of the devil. 

-This section, I read as Paul pointing a finger at Timothy. We’ve talked about some ways people distort the truth, but as for YOU! You have a job to do! What does it require?

-Point these things out: all the truths Paul’s been talking about previously, and then continues to talk about! Continue bringing these things up to the church. I had the privilege of conducting 2 weddings this month. One of the couples asked me to make sure I talked about Jesus during my message, and I told them you pick the passage and I’m going to connect it to Jesus! The whole thing is about Him. I love the way Spurgeon summarized this: preach the text, then make a beeline for the cross! Friends, every week you’re going to hear about Jesus! 

-The goal of Paul’s instruction: so that Timothy would be a good servant of Christ Jesus. 

-Servant, not the leader, not the king. Same word as deacon, but in this reference talking about the general practice, not the particular office.

-How do you know if you’re a good servant?

-Have followed: there’s a path that you’re supposed to follow, there’s others who have faithfully served throughout the centuries who have ministered and dealt with the same issues we face today! It’s imperative to remain on this well-worn path, not being distracted by the enticing things around you.

-But notice the way Timothy is nourished: words of faith, and good teaching. Those 2 things go together to remind Timothy that he can only endure by keeping the Bible his primary focus.

-He’s talked about these myths before in 1:4, there he said don’t pay attention to them, here he takes it even further: have nothing to do, here it’s translated pointless and silly myths, lit. he says “reject pointless myths and old wives tales”

-Blogs, influencers, mega-churches, “pastors” all these places that perpetuate ungodly nonsense. Have nothing to do with them!

-Unlike all these false teachers, Timothy is supposed to train in godliness. Notice all these actions that Paul uses in this section: train, (10) labor, strive.

-Have you ever gotten frustrated at how difficult Christianity can be? Do you ever feel like you were sold a false bill of goods that ended up being a lie? Turns out Christianity isn’t a cakewalk! 

-Christianity is simply, but it isn’t easy. There will be times and seasons of sweetness, where every time you open the Bible it’s like the Words jump out of the page and meet you right where you’re at. And there will be other times where it’s a grind. Paul knows that, he’s been a believer long enough, and he’s taking time here to remind his child in the faith, Timothy, that even when it’s hard, continue pressing on. 

-The training of the body had limited benefit. But it still has benefit! 

-I can’t tell you how many pastors that I respect seemed to have neglected this verse. Paul doesn’t say there’s no benefit, he says it’s limited, but the limitation is in reference to eternity. John Calvin died at 54 from overwork. Charles Spurgeon died at 57 (started getting gout regularly at 33), had to retired to the French Riviera every winter to recover from his schedule (plus the guy was huge! His chest measured 41”), I read a book that every pastor I respect has told me to read and I got so angry reading it because the guy said pastors must exert every ounce of energy on their ministry, and if they die from it, all the better because they died for Christ. Utter nonsense! Steward your body.

-But keep the physical training in check. Don’t let it consume you. Yes, take care of the body God gave you since it’s the only one He gave you, but don’t treat it as the ultimate thing.

-Instead, train yourself for godliness. But why? And friends, this is something that excites me more than anything else. Did you know that what you do today has eternal implications? 

-That’s what Paul is saying here: pursuing godliness will give you gains here and in eternity. That means every day, every decision you make has eternal consequences. I don’t know about you, but I feel like that just increases the potential of everything I do here!

-This gets to our whole purpose as a church, friends. We’re here to help people prepare for eternity, to help people take 1 step closer to Jesus today, because whether we realize it or not each day is 1 day closer to the day where we’ll see Jesus face to face. 

-That’s actually where Paul turns next in this section, too. And this should comfort you! We don’t have to come up with some creative campaign slogan, we don’t need a marketing department, or the best graphics. What we need is the Bible. Friends, the Bible tells us exactly what we’re supposed to be pursuing as a church!

-Here he says exactly why we work hard in our faith: it’s an overflow out of our relationship with the living God, who expects our everything. Our hope is in the one true and living God.

-Is Paul arguing for universalism here? Is he saying that everyone will go to heaven? Is he contradicting himself from Rom. 1:16-17? No! He’s saying that God’s common grace is extended to everyone, but there’s a different kind of grace given to those who put their faith in Him. 

-And there are literally cosmic implications to the realities of the gospel message Rom. 8 says that all creations groans waiting for Jesus’s return!

  • Live out the Word (11-16)

-Paul has just reminded Timothy to always keep eternity in view. Live as if we’re living for eternity! And then he has 2 verbs: command and teach. 

-Command connects to Timothy’s authoritative role. Remember: a faithful church will have a certain structure and ordering to it, with 2 leadership offices of elder and deacon. These 2 offices are God’s chosen means of helping the church to flourish, and we need to be careful who is chosen for those roles because they will determine the direction of our entire church body. Don’t affirm leaders that you don’t want to be like, but at the same time, when leaders have been elected, Scripture tells us to submit to them, to listen to them, which is why Paul tells Timothy to command things from the Word. 

-Some of where this gets difficult is the application of God’s Word is situational. Now, listen carefully: God’s Word never changes. Period. But the way we live that Word out does change. That’s one of the incredible things about the Bible! I’ve lost track of the times I’ve read through it, and still every week there’s something that I’d never noticed before. This is what Paul’s getting at when he says to teach these things. The application of this Word is going to change based on our people, our culture, our needs, and God’s Word is big enough for us to handle those different applications. Do you trust it?

-This verse has been the verse that has been preached at me for most of my life, and I figure I’m 3 years away from no longer qualifying for this verse. I’ve shared this story before, but before I was called here, I was told from another church that I was too young to be a pastor there. And it was an issue that came up when I was candidating here (believe it or not!) And just so everyone knows, when I was candidating I was 32, but as a professor at seminary says, don’t forget Jesus accomplished his entire ministry before the age of 33.

-And friends, there’s some truth to it! I get it! I haven’t had as many life experiences as some of you. But it’s also true that God’s Word doesn’t change, and I’ve devoted my life to the interpretation and application of this book. And as I said back then, I promise that I’ll do what I can to keep getting older! And I’ve kept my word!

-But the point to this verse is some commands, and they’re things that I’ve been praying for myself for the last few years. See, the way to ensure no one looks down on you in your youth is by setting an example. And the things that Timothy is called to are things that should be true of everyone who claims to follow Christ, but let’s look at them.

-Speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity. Now, I would argue that these are things that are particular temptations for those that are young. 

-Speech: it can be easy to be flippant or careless with words, not realizing the way that words can make or break a person and relationships. 

-Conduct: it feels like life is going to last forever, so why should there be any delayed gratification? 

-Love: you’ve probably heard that youth is wasted on young, and I think this is a particular area because there’s a level of pride of self-centeredness that comes with youth. I don’t think people know how selfish they are until they get married. 

-Faith: similar to love, there can be a thinking that you can wait until later to start taking Jesus seriously. Don’t wait! It’s worth it to chase after Jesus with all you’ve got now. 

-Purity: this feels like it could have been written today! With the rise of pornography use, the careless approach to sex. Church leaders must be marked by purity in all their relationships.

-And this is especially true of those who are young! And unfortunately, many who are young emphasize the first part without realizing they condemn themselves with the way they live. It’s on the young to not let anyone look down on you, but it requires you living a holy life that is faithfully following after Jesus. If any of you are young in here, don’t waste your youth on things you’ll regret as you get older. Choose today to set an example by pointing people to Jesus.

-Then Paul gives Timothy some more marching orders to focus on until he comes: Devote yourself, focus on, give everything you’ve got toward these things. In the Greek, these words have no conjunction, so one commentator said these 3 things are meant to be intertwined and inseparable, and notice that it’s again centered on the Bible.

-Public reading: we see examples of Scripture reading all throughout the Bible, and it’s supposed to take place every time we gather. One of the most discouraging things to me about our current church culture is how little the Bible is read! Friends, if you’re ever looking for a church count how many minutes it takes them to open the Bible. Same thing with the sermon, how quickly in the sermon is God’s Word read?

-Exhortation: God’s Word is supposed to be a mirror. We read something God says which has implications for us. Scripture is supposed to be used to exhort, to encourage to push us closer to Jesus. Similar to:

-Teaching: explaining what the text means. I’ve heard people say that what we do on Sundays is a modern invention, too influenced by education models. That’s just not true! This was adopted from the 1st century synagogue practice of publicly reading Scripture, then exhorting and teaching from the Bible. And in the 2nd century, Justin Martyr, an early Christian apologist and philosopher, said this:

-Friends, the church has been fixated on God’s Word since the very beginning, and the act of preaching has been the primary focus of the church since then.

-Don’t neglect the gift that was given.

-This will come up again later, but I’m going to approach it from a different perspective there. Church leaders are called to be people of the book, but the book is also supposed to lead to a different way of living. Pastors must be people of the book, both in their study and in how they live. John Calvin begins his institutes saying:

-We have placed a high emphasis on knowledge of God for pastors. Looking for a seminary degree, an ability to know the Word. But how many pastors don’t actually know themselves? You’ve probably heard of IQ, but have you ever heard of EQ? We know about God, but who are you?

-The public affirmation of Timothy’s call – you can’t be a pastor without a church. You can claim whatever you want, but a pastor by definition needs a church, a pastor doesn’t get to self-identify. There are 2 aspects to a call: internal and external. Both of these are critical, if it’s just external you’ll question and doubt all the time, if it’s just internal you’ll probably end up disqualified from ministry.

-Just had my ordination council this past week, every person I know struggles with imposter syndrome in some area. And let me tell you just how affirming it is to have a group of your peers tell you that God has called you to ministry and a church, having both an internal desire to teach the Bible and an external affirmation from other pastors and a church that confirms that internal call.

-Not only are these things supposed to be markers of Timothy, he’s also supposed to grow in them, to get better at them. He’s supposed to practice them, and be committed to them. To continue growing in his understanding of God, and the way he’s living his life. And why? So that everyone can see his growth.

-Friends, you should see your church leaders continually growing. If your church leaders aren’t continually acknowledging their sins, working to fight against them, and finding new things to learn about God, something is off. One of my favorite questions to start asking potential pastors is: tell me about the last time the gospel emotionally moved you.

-There’s a pastor I really like (from afar) named Ray Ortlund. I onetime heard him say that he prays every time he preaches that it’s the best sermon he’s ever preached. Not out a sense of pride, but because he wants to live out this verse.

-This next verse really captured my mind a few years ago, and in particular the way the NIV translates it. 

-Life and doctrine: the 2 things that every Christian needs to be growing in. The way I think about this is like a train. Trains need 2 tracks in order to remain moving forward, just like we’re called to grow in both life and doctrine. That’s why we renamed our small groups to life groups, that’s why we offer equipping classes. These 2 things are meant to be linked together, but you also need to be taking time to pray and ask the Lord what you should be focusing on in at the stage of life you’re in. Maybe you need to be stretched to learn some new things about God, attend one of our 9 AM classes, or read a theology book (if you need suggestions reach out to me!). Maybe you need to work on applying something you’ve learned about God to your life – get involved in a small group, or ask to meet with someone sitting nearby you, or maybe start meeting with a group of friends to talk about what God has been teaching you. Friends, this can be done in a variety of ways, both formally and informally, but it requires intentionality and effort, as well as commitment to a local church where you’re forced to rub shoulders with a bunch of people who may not think or act exactly like you! And you need that to grow closer to Jesus. Friends, Christianity is a team sport. When God saves you, He brings you into a new family comprised of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

-And the reason Timothy is supposed to watch his life and his teaching (doctrine) is for the salvation of himself and his church.

-Once again, we know that salvation is by faith alone through grace alone, in Jesus Christ alone, but Timothy can help in God’s mission of seeking and saving the lost, or he can hurt it. There’s a pastor I really like named Kevin DeYoung who has shared that one of his pieces of accountability is thinking about his congregation, and fearing what would happen if he gave up. When I first heard him say that it bothered me, but as I’ve thought about that more, it’s absolutely true! The number of friends I have who have left the church because of a pastoral failure continues to grow! And the pastors who fail will someday give an account for both their failings and the ways their failings affected the whole body.

-Back to Robert Murray McCheyne. 

-So friends, as we come to the end of this, I want to leave you with this phrase: watch your life and doctrine closely. Where is God calling you to focus on in this season of your life? What things about God do you have questions about? Or what areas in your life are you struggling to live out what you know God has called you to do? Take some time right now to ask God to reveal to you what you need to be focusing on in the days and weeks ahead, and then I’ll close in prayer.

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by mikethestrand on October 26, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on October 26, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/10/26/1-timothy-46-16-sermon-manuscript/

1 Timothy 3:8-13 – Sermon Manuscript

-One of the biggest struggles I have in my life, and ministry, is with delegation. It depends on the specific issue, but I generally just like to do things myself instead of asking others to do it, which has often not worked well for me. Yes, things get done in the way that I want them done, but I cheat others out of using their gifts, and I wear myself down. 

-And part of what has kept me going is that I’m in good company! In Ex. 18, there’s a story about Moses (who lead Israel out of Egypt and through their wilderness wanderings). Moses gets word that his father-in-law was coming to visit, and during the course of his visit he sees Moses’s work, where Moses would deal with any complaints people had. His father-in-law chews him out, and tells Moses that if he keeps trying to do it all he’ll wear himself out, that he needs to set up delegation who can deal with these little petty issues that people have.

-That picture is what we see in today’s text. Delegating various roles to people who are gifted so that all of us can use our gifts for the good of each other and the honor of God.

READ/PRAY (pg. 1052)

-Recommended books

  1. Deacons, Servants, Ministers

-Right out of the gate, we need to deal with what is the word for this role? Last week it looked like the NT writers were the confused ones, this week it looks like we English speakers who are the confused ones! Because the word is translated 3 different ways in English! And by the title of this point, you can see all 3 of them!

-It’s important to note that Paul is beginning a new train of thought here that is a subset of what he said last week. Last week was the qualifications for an elder/overseer. That thinking continues with this text as he says “likewise” to signify it’s a continuation of his previous thoughts. Remember what I said last week: a church that believes the 4 Gospels will organize itself like is described in the Epistles (letters), by calling elders and deacons as the leaders of the church.

-But just as there’s some confusion about what to call last week’s role, there’s some slight nuance to what we call this week’s role, and to demonstrate that, here’s a few verses that point that out. First, let’s go back to a passage I read last week to talk about leadership in the kingdom of God, Mark 10.

-Usually most translations have “serve” here, but it’s the same word that Paul uses to talk about this office in 1 Tim. And then, just so we get it, Jesus says it again in the upper room during His last night with His disciples. So right out of the gate we see that this isn’t something demeaning or belittling, this is something that Jesus Himself does!

-It’s also a word Paul uses to describe himself. In Col. 1 he’s talking about the church, and then describes himself as the church’s deacon (servant). And later in this letter to Timothy, Paul tells him that Timothy will also be a good deacon of Jesus. 

-So if we see all these examples of so many people being deacons, why do I think this is a separate office similar to Elder? Because of the logic of this passage, 2 other passages from Paul, and church history. Let’s work through each one of those.

-The logic of this passage. The purpose of this book is so Timothy can know how the church (household) is supposed to operate, with leaders called by God and affirmed by the rest of the congregation. The leaders begin with elders or overseers who “oversee” the church. But in order to receive help, they also need deacons (which we’ll see throughout this passage) to help manage the church. That’s why Paul connects this to the office of elders.

-The 2 other passages: the first (less convincing, but still necessary) is Rom. 16:1, where Paul (I believe) describes Phoebe who is a deacon of the church (hold on to that, it’ll become important later). The second passage is what clinches it for me, Paul writes a letter, but notice who it’s written TO: all the saints, including the overseers and deacons. 2 offices expected in the church.

-The final reason is church history. The early church quickly adopted and recognized these 2 offices in the church. In a document referred to as the Didache (teaching), they stated: And Pliny the Younger, a Roman lawyer toward the end of the 1st/beginning of the 2nd century said: 

-So what I believe we start to see through the Bible is 2 offices, 1 focused on the Word, the other focused on the works. Elders are to ensure the church remains committed to God’s Word, they teach and correct using the Word, while deacons focus on the physical needs to allow the church to be able to hear and receive the Word. So I would argue that many things people think the elders should do are better done by deacons! But we’ll get there at the end.

-While we’re all called to “deacon” each other, there’s a unique role reserved for qualified people that is recognized by the church. And just as Paul had a list of what should be true of elders last week, this week he has another list that sounds very similar to what we read last week. And this shouldn’t be a surprise to you if you’ve been coming the last few weeks, but there’s once again debate about the best way to interpret this passage!

  • A Faithful Deacon Is…

-Paul begins saying they should be “worthy of respect.” This word includes things like dignified, or worth following after. Similar to what we saw last week with elders, just as we need to be careful in our selection of elders, we also need to be careful in our selection of deacons, because we become like our leaders! And it only takes 1 bad leader to corrupt the rest of the group!

-Not hypocritical. While there’s many overlaps between this list and the elder list, this one is unique to deacons, and I think there’s a reason for that! Because of the focus on the “works” that need to be done, deacons are going to be aware of some sensitive information that’s going on in people’s lives. We don’t want someone who either doesn’t follow through on commitments or someone that’s going to be sharing that information with other people. 

-For example, one of the areas that I think should fall under the oversight of deacons is benevolence requests, money set aside to help church members in need. This means there’s going to be some people who know a bit about someone’s financial situation. You don’t want that person to be a blabbermouth, or to tell you they’re going to be helping you and not follow through! That’s why it’s so important for them to not by a hypocrite!

-Then we’re back to the same thing as elders: not drinking a lot of wine. As I said last week, this is someone who is self-controlled. 

-Not greedy for money. The word Paul uses is literally “shamefully greedy.” Someone who just wants more and more. I would connect this to the hypocritical piece: if this is someone who’s involved in the “works” of the church, some of them will have access to some level of finances, and if they’re greedy for that money they’ll look with suspicion on anyone else.

-This next one is where I believe we see the biggest difference between elders and deacons. Whereas elders are expected to teach, deacons are expected to hold onto the faith.

-Mystery isn’t like Sherlock Holmes, it’s a technical term that Paul uses to refer to the realities of the gospel message, something that had been hidden in the past that was revealed in Jesus.

-Clear conscience. Jonathan Edwards (American Pastor before the Revolutionary War) said the conscience is like a sundial, it only works when it’s viewed in light of the sun, other lights give false readings. Requires the community of faith living together to help you see yourself in light of the true Son of God! Our hearts will continually pull us away from that source of truth. That’s why we need Sundays and other people to pull us back and remind us who God really is! And deacons are supposed to be people who do that exceptionally well, who work to continually align their hearts with God.

-Last for this slide, they must be tested. This is similar to what we saw for elders that they must not be a new convert. This means they should have a life that models faithfulness. We’re not looking for someone who’s the best facilities person, the best finance person, the best business person, we’re looking for someone who is faithful in their walk with the Lord. Let’s not miss that Paul emphasizes this for both elders and deacons! Friends, churches aren’t just another nonprofit or institution! The requirements are different in the household of God.

-Are you ready for the biggest debate of this section? It’s the first word in vs. 11: wives or women? Dan Doriani (professor at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis) summarizes all the proposals under 4 options, with the most ink being focused on options 1 or 4.

-First option is that Paul is talking about male deacons, then focuses on women, back to men, then all deacons. There’s no distinction between men and women. 

-Second option is a different office that Paul is referring to, some people make a distinction between deacons and deaconesses as 2 unique roles the church is meant to fill.

-Third option would be women who help out the deacons, a lower role .That would mean they’re not the same as deacons, they come alongside to help the deacons.

-Fourth would be just translate this word as “wives” and call it a day! 

-I would argue that it’s option 1, for a number of reasons. First, what I mentioned earlier about Paul calling out Phoebe in Rom. 16 as a deacon, and church history also backs up the idea that deaconesses were a part of the early church. The second reason is I don’t think it makes sense for deacons to have stricter requirements than elders, if Paul was referring to their wives here then I believe he also would have had something about elder’s wives in previous text. 

-Additionally, I think Paul’s logic in the text is pretty easy to follow if you pay attention to a repeated word. This whole chapter is focused on leadership in the church, beginning with elders, which were supposed to be selected at every church. Then he continues his thoughts on church leadership with a word “likewise” when he starts talking about the second church office of deacons. And did you notice that he uses it again in this verse? So his flow of thought begins with elders, moves to deacons, then he has some specific expectations for women who are deacons before going back to male deacons, and finally ends with encouragement for everyone who serves as a deacon. Which gets me to the last reason I think it’s women and not wives, in vs. 12 Paul talks about their wives!

-All that to say, I believe Paul in this chapter is giving us principles for how to structure leadership in the church of Jesus Christ. Every church is expected to have elders, and then as the church grows a second office is introduced to help the church continue to pursue unity together: deacons. Deacons are comprised of men and women who meet these qualifications. And friends, some of where I think we’ve gotten off in the church is by not holding to these 2 offices as something God has called us to hold to. I think the whole women in ministry conversation becomes much more difficult when you don’t recognize that God has called women to leadership in the role of deacon. It is different than elder, but it is still an official leadership office.

-Now for the qualifications for these women deacons: I think it’s basically what we’ve seen of the expectations for the male deacons, it begins with literally the same word: respectful. Not slanderers connects to not being a hypocrite, self-controlled connects to not drinking too much, and faithful in everything connects to holding to the faith.

-Then Paul shifts back to the male deacons who (like the elders) are to be faithful at home as husbands and fathers because the church is just a slightly bigger family. 

-Finally, everyone who serves as a deacon acquires a good standing and are encouraged in their faith as they serve the church and point others to Jesus.

  • What’s the Difference?

-One commentary stated the difference as: elders serve by leading, deacons lead by serving. I think that’s a helpful summary! And part of the reason we need to talk about this is because there’s not a lot of clarity in the Bible about what each of these offices are supposed to be doing. AND there’s nothing in the Bible about what it means to be a nonprofit in the 21st century (nor is there a class in Seminary about that!)

-Language used: elders oversee, deacons assist. There’s recently been some linguistic work done on the Greek word translated as deacon, with the argument that it should be understood assistants to the elders. So the elders are tasked with leading the church (a Word based leading), and then they call and recognize deacons who help the elders focus on their ministry by partnering together for the good of the entire body. If you have questions about that, email me, I’ll send you some articles.

-Before we start to define what they should be doing, I want to briefly share some things that a Deacon is NOT. 

-Elders in training: these are meant to be 2 distinct offices that complement each other and minister in different but overlapping spheres of influence. This isn’t meant to be a steppingstone on the way to something bigger and better. Just like the youth pastor doesn’t just have to be a starting point for those in ministry (we had former Pastor Bruce there for 40 years, so we should know that!) Some people who are called to serve as deacons shouldn’t aspire to become elders!

-GCs: I believe facilities can be a part of the ministry of the deacons, but it’s not only that. So just because someone is good at fixing things doesn’t mean they should be a deacon, especially if they don’t fit the characteristics of a deacon that Paul gives us here.

-CPAs: once again, I think finances is an area that should be under the oversight of deacons, but that’s not all the deacons are supposed to do.

-CEOs: there are some business things that we need to do to function in the 21st century, like nonprofit laws, employee practices, etc. But just because someone is good at managing a secular business does not automatically mean they should be a deacon!

-And I added this last one because I’ve heard of too many people who say the elders are just “yes men!” Sometimes I wish that were the case! Deacons aren’t supposed to be a “check on power” of the elders, like the various branches of government. 

-So what is a deacon supposed to do? I think we see a glimpse of it in Acts 6. Now, this is contested because this passage doesn’t actually use the term “deacon,” but I believe it gives us the starting point of what eventually becomes deacons in the early church.

-It begins with a contested issue that’s threatening to divide the church. Things were not equal in the ways widows were being cared for. So the 12 (apostles) called a members meeting (see friends, even the early church had disagreements that required discussion at members meetings!). We see what the 12 are focusing their ministry on: prayer and the ministry of the Word. Don’t read the waiting on tables as a lesser than thing. That’s how we read these things, but that’s not how we’re supposed to. It’s not better or worse, it’s distinct. Plus, in God’s kingdom, the lowest is the person who’s going to get the most recognition in heaven!

-Now, keep in mind the complaint that led to this: Hellenistic Jews (Greek speaking) were upset about the Hebraic Jews neglecting them. So then we get to the next verse, and all 7 names are Hellenistic names, meaning the Hebraic Jews were working hard to preserve the unity in the church, laying down their preferences for the good of the rest of the body. So part of the role of deacons is to help preserve unity in the church.

-So the way I would summarize the distinction: elders are to focus on the ministry of the Word and prayer, the deacons are to serve in a wide assortment of ministries to help the church preserve unity.

-Most churches function this way, they just don’t use these terms, and we actually have people who have been operating like deacons, we just don’t call them that! People like: Erin, Tami, and Molly on staff, Glenn Sonnee and Roger Thelen. 

-While some people called by God and recognized by the church to serve in this office, let’s remember that all of us are called to “deacon” each other each time we get together. In fact, every time we gather as the church, we should be looking for opportunities to “deacon” each other, just like Jesus “deaconed” us.

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by mikethestrand on October 12, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on October 12, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/10/12/1-timothy-38-13-sermon-manuscript/

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