Matthew: The Road to Renewal

Listen along as we look at Matthew 3:1-12 and how John the Baptist paves the road toward renewal.

Sermon Notes/Quotes:

Matthew 3:1-12 
Isaiah - 40:3-5
Malachi 3:1, 4:1-5

“By the foolishness of preaching, Christ’s kingdom must be set up.” - Matthew Henry

“That John baptizes in the Jordan is a reminder of Israel’s baptism in Exodus by Moses’s parting of the waters. Israel had to face death as it walked across the dry land between the walls of water. John’s baptism calls Israel again to face death that it might live. Repentance is about the life and death of the people of Israel.” - Stanley Hauerwas

“The same sun which melts wax hardens clay. And the same Gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins” –Charles Spurgeon

“I who write and most of us who read inevitably belong, at least in inclination, to one of these two groups or types: we are either (mainly) serious Bible students or we are (mainly) serious servants of the modern world…(It is not fair for any of us to say that “I, thank heaven, am a member of ‘the middle,’ ” that always superior group!) We must learn to read the words “Pharisees and Sadducees” and to see ourselves or we will miss half of Matthew.” - F. Dale Bruner

The wrath of God is not the irritability of God; it is the love of God in friction with injustice. It is the warm, steady, patient, but absolutely fair grace of God in collision with manifest selfishness. - F. Dale Bruner

Romans 6:23

“The sinful heart is never transformed by conformity to the imperatives but only by relationship with the One who cleanses hearts.” Elyse Fitzpatrick