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Sermons and content from Union Church in Prescott, Arizona.
Episodes
Sunday Apr 30, 2023
Sunday Apr 30, 2023
Listen along as we continue our series through the book of Galatians.
Notes//Quotes:
Galatians 1:11-24
“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” - John 6:37
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.” John 15:16
Genesis 12:1-3
1 Peter 2:9-10
“But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.” - Luke 5:15-16
“In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.” - Luke 6:12
Ephesians 2:8-10
Connection Points:
- The revealing of Jesus reorients everything
- Commune with God as you go for God
- Notice preoccupations and pain points, and turn them to prayer
- Live into the presence, power, and promises of God
Sunday Apr 23, 2023
Sunday Apr 23, 2023
Listen along as we continue our time through Galatians.
Notes//Quotes:
Galatians 1:6-10 - Kim J Reading
That was another reason why local Jewish communities wo“Seen from an outsider’s perspective, Paul had done something totally unacceptable both to the local Jewish community and to the wider Greco-Roman society, the social and civic fabric of the towns in southern Turkey. For the Jews, he had declared that anyone who belonged to Messiah Jesus was part of Abraham’s family, an heir-in-waiting to the worldwide promises of Genesis, Isaiah, and the Psalms. For the local pagan communities, he had, without a by-your-leave, established a network of communities whose members did not worship the local gods, offering as their excuse the strange claim that they were Abraham’s family and thus entitled to the privilege granted to the Jewish communities.That was another reason why the local Jewish Communities would be horrified: If this new group were to claim the same exemption, without in fact being ethnically Jewish, would not the pagan authorities clamp down and maybe attack them all? Paul was upsetting the delicate, and at times fraught, social balance.”
- N.T. Wright
“When the glow of justification is ascribed to another, and a snare is laid for the consciences of men, the Savior no longer occupies his place, and the doctrine of the gospel is utterly ruined.”
- John Calvin
“First, it teaches that good works are enough to get to God. If all good people can know God, then Jesus’ death was not necessary; all it takes is virtue. The trouble is, this means bad people have no hope, contradicting the gospel, which invites “both good and bad” to God’s feast (Matthew 22:10). If you say people are saved by being good, then only “the good” can come in to God’s feast. The gospel offer becomes exclusive, not inclusive. Second, it encourages people to think that if they are tolerant and open, they are pleasing to God. They don’t need grace—they get eternal life for themselves. And so “glory for ever” (v 5) goes to them, for being good enough for heaven. The gospel, however, challenges people to see their radical sin. Without that sense of one’s own evil, the knowledge of God’s grace will not be transforming, and we will not understand how much God is glorified by the presence of anyone at all in heaven.”
- Timothy Keller
“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”
—1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Questions:
Is salvation the sheer grace of God—or is it something else?
To whom or what are we really looking to for salvation and to make sense of the world in which we live?
Sunday Apr 16, 2023
Sunday Apr 16, 2023
Listen along as we begin our series through the book of Galatians.
Notes//Quotes:
Galatians 1:1-5 - Larry and Jorgen Reading
Galatians 1:1-5
Acts 15:6-11
Acts 15:19-21
“Paul was against the legalism of the Judaizers because it usurped the work of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit and forced all converts to become Jews. It was not what was done that rankled Paul; it was why these things were done that produced his quick reaction. The system is one of “addition by subtraction”— adding to the gospel by subtracting the sufficiency of Christ and the Spirit.” - Scot McKnight
“Paul was preaching—and this is what the letter to the Galatians is all about—that whenever anyone believes in the crucified Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the risen Lord, that is already a sign that such a person is part of God’s true people, no matter what the person’s ethnic or moral background may be. New believers from a gentile background, Paul taught, were full members of God’s people without the demand for circumcision. Nor did they need the other regular signs of Jewish identity, the Sabbath and the food laws.” - NT Wright
”In this short letter, Paul outlines the bombshell truth that the gospel is the A to Z of the Christian life. It is not only the way to enter the kingdom; it is the way to live as part of the kingdom. It is the way Christ transforms people, churches and communities. We’re going to hear him solving their issues not through telling them to “be better Christians”, but by calling them to live out the implications of the gospel. Paul will explain to us that the truths of the gospel changes life from top to bottom; that they transform our hearts, our thinking and our approach to absolutely everything. The gospel—the message that we are more wicked than we ever dared believe, but more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared hope—creates a radical new dynamic for personal growth, for obedience, for love.” - Tim Keller, Galatians For You
1 Cor 3:10-15
“The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God.” - Rowan Williams
Values Graphic
“As a country we are turning away from religion, from community involvement, from patriotism, from marriage, from having children. We are turning toward money, toward work, toward politicizing everything, toward fewer interactions with people, toward more time online. How are our choices working for us? We are becoming less happy, more stressed, more depressed.” - Maxwell Anderson
They call it radical individualism. What this amounts to is simple enough. We in America have been socialized to believe that our own dreams, goals, and personal fulfillment ought to take precedence over the well-being of any group—our church or our family, for example—to which we belong. The immediate needs of the individual are more important than the long-term health of the group. So we leave and withdraw, rather than stay and grow up, when the going gets rough in the church or in the home. - Joseph Hellerman
All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is the City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting. - Augustine
Sunday Apr 09, 2023
Sunday Apr 09, 2023
Listen along as we look at the reality and ramifications of the resurrection.
Notes//Quotes:
Galatians 1:1-5
“Jesus never wrote a book, raised an army, or ruled a realm. And yet he has become, by any measure, the most influential person who has ever lived.” Rebecca McLaughlin
“It is hard today to understand just how offensive the idea of a crucified messiah would have been to most first-century Jews. Since no one would have made up the idea of a crucified messiah, Jesus must really have existed, must really have raised messianic expectations, and must really have been crucified.” - Bart Ehrman
“One could simply dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind. However, there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant their testimony. That is not, in itself, unusual. Many zealous Jews died horribly for refusing to deny their beliefs. But these first followers of Jesus were not being asked to reject matters of faith based on events that took place centuries, if not millennia, before. They were being asked to deny something they themselves personally, directly encountered.” - Reza Aslan
“This event is psychologically surprising. It would have been as unexpected as Richard Dawkins, the vocal Oxford atheist, suddenly announcing that Jesus appeared to him in his study and that he was now a Christian. While we might think he was crazy, it would be hard to deny that something extraordinary had taken place to bring about such a complete reversal. In fact, the conversion of Paul is even more surprising than the hypothetical conversion of Dawkins, given that Paul embraced not a world religion with billions of followers but a despised, persecuted religious sect with no power and few adherents. Therefore, anyone who doubts the resurrection must provide a plausible account of why Paul underwent such a dramatic conversion in such a short period of time.” Neil Shenvi
“The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears itself out in a rat race it runs against itself.” - Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
“Paul's point (in writing) is not simply that God is now my Father and I am now His son. God, in Jesus' great work of redemption, was not establishing a series of isolated personal relationships with His individual followers. He was creating a family of sons and daughters—siblings—who are now "all one in Christ Jesus.” The saving work of Christ therefore has a corporate, as well as an individual, dimension. For Paul, the church is a family.” - Joseph Hellerman, When the Church Was A Family
"Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God’s family.” - Philip Yancey
“This isn’t about “going to heaven.” It is about the launch of God’s “age to come” here and now, in the midst of the messy “present evil age.” For Paul the “new age” began, when Jesus of Nazareth came out of the tomb on the first Easter morning. The gospel message is all about something that has happened in Jesus, as a result of which the world is a different place. Jesus-followers are summoned to recognize that they now live in that different world and are to order their lives accordingly.” - N.T. Wright
Our true Good Shepherd
Holds dirty feet in his
God-hands and asks us
To let him love us
Down to the dirt
Under our toenails
KJ Ramsey
Lord,
You are the Shepherd who is always more ready
To serve than we are to be served.
Wash us with the water of your welcome.
Wipe our imaginations clean
Of the assumption that we are too dirty to love.
May we let you love us down to the dirt under our toenails
And the darkness in the crevices of our souls
And so learn the direction of love is down.
For you are the God who gets on the ground.
KJ Ramsey
Wednesday Apr 05, 2023
Wednesday Apr 05, 2023
Jon reflects on aspects and angles of the cross in the book of Galatians.
Notes//Quotes:
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” - Galatians 1:3-5
“From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.” - Fleming Rutledge
“Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries such as chocolates, cakes, cigarettes and cocktails (although it might include this); it is actually denying or disowning ourselves, renouncing our supposed right to go our own way.” - John Stott
“You crazy Galatians! Did someone put a spell on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it’s obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives. His sacrifice on the cross was certainly set before you clearly enough.” - Galatians 3:1 - The Message
My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought
My sin, not in part, but the whole
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul - It is Well - Horatio Spafford
“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.” - Galatians 6:13-15
Monday Apr 03, 2023
Monday Apr 03, 2023
Listen along as we wrap up the book of Lamentations.
Notes//Quotes:
Kim J Reading Lamentations 5:16-22
Title: Learning Lament
“Psychological closure for the community remains outside the range of this set of poems. It lay much further ahead and could not be achieved, so dramatic were the experiences they had undergone and were still undergoing. The modern preoccupation with closure impatiently rushes the sufferer to a premature conclusion. Closure must be allowed to take its own time. It is marked by the eventual acceptance that is able to integrate previous suffering into one’s life.”
- Leslie Allen
Psalm Laments:
Cry/Address (vs.1)
Complaint (vs. 2-18)
Confidence & Praise (vs. 19)
Deliverence (vs. 20-22)
“…Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” - Num. 11:4-6
“how long will this people despise Me. How long will they not believe in Me in spite of all the signs I have done among them?” - Num. 14:11
“whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
- Jn. 6:35
“I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they” - Num. 14:12
Snowflake: “is someone who has a an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, are over-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.” - Wikipedia
“Here the community is confessing the generational solidarity involved in its sinning.” - Leslie Allen
“The possibility of being beyond redemption is so alarming that many Jews refuse to end their reading of Lamentations with the book’s final verse. To this day, whenever the book is read, it is the custom in many synagogues to repeat verse 21 after verse 22.”
- Phillip Ryken
Monday Mar 27, 2023
Monday Mar 27, 2023
Listen along as we go through Lamentations chapter 4 and see how sin impacted every aspect of society and the hope for God's people then and now.
Notes//Quotes:
Lamentations 4:11-22 - Larry and Jorgen Reading
Lamentations 4 breakdown:
4:1-11 - Sin and Society
4:12-16 - Sin and Leadership
4:17-22 - Sin and Hope
“No English word quite captures it, though the older ‘Alas!’ came close. ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ are too trivial. The common rendering, ‘How …!’ treats it as an exclamation, but the word also contains an element of questioning: ‘How? Why?’ It stands at the head of the three darkest chapters in the book (1, 2 and 4), and it carries a sense of ‘How come? How can this possibly have happened?’ This is baffled pain, astonished suffering, lament mingled with protest, disbelief and questions.” - Chris Wright
Jeremiah 2:1-3
Jeremiah 2:11-13
"On this rock we can be destroyed: but it is rock, not quicksand. There is the chance to build.” - Derek Kidner
Jeremiah 6:13-15
Rejoice and be glad! That’s the first surprise. Could there be any human being capable of rejoicing in the midst of the horrors described in this whole chapter? The words shock us, until we see to whom they are addressed—Lady Edom. And then we perceive their sharp irony. From the prophet Obadiah and others we know that Edom not only refused to help Judah when Nebuchadnezzar invaded, but rejoiced in the downfall of Jerusalem, took advantage of it to seize some of Judah’s wealth, and assisted in the capture of the fleeing population. ‘Go ahead then,’ says the Poet. ‘Enjoy your treachery while you can, but know that God’s judgment is coming your way soon.’ The cup was a standard metaphor for the wrath of God—metaphorically filled with a wine that would lead to drunkenness and exposure. And then, out of the blue, a single line of assurance to Lady Zion herself. While Edom’s judgment is yet to come, Judah’s is ‘completed’. - Chris Wright
“At their best, the prophets, priests, and kings of the Old Testament foreshadowed Christ’s coming. At their worst, they showed why his coming was so necessary.” - Philip Ryken
“Out of the miry clay
We will rise up someday
Sorrow won't always last
The dark will surely pass
Woe to the wicked ones
For what their hands have done
God is our righteous judge
And He will raise us up”
The Porter’s Gate - Daughters of Zion
Sunday Mar 19, 2023
Sunday Mar 19, 2023
Sunday Mar 19, 2023
Sunday Mar 19, 2023
Lamentations 2:1-13
“the three goals of the initial poem—articulating grief, helping the community take responsibility for their shortcomings by means of spiritual interpretation, and helping members turn in prayer back to God as the only one who could take them beyond their catastrophe—are repeated in the second poem but at a more emotive and strident level in order to drive these messages home and encourage the community to turn to God in their own prayer.”
- Leslie Allen
"In the dust of the streets
lie the young and the old;
my young women and my young men
have fallen by the sword;
you have killed them in the day of your anger,
slaughtering without pity."
- Lamentations 1:21
“The Lord has done what he purposed; he has carried out his word; which he commanded long ago; he has thrown down without pity;
he has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes.”
- Lamentations 1:17
“But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.”
- Deuteronomy 28:15-20
“What would happen to our faith if we believed that God reigns sovereign over both our celebration and our suffering?”
- Soong Chan Rah
“This whole question of divine anger (ira dei) has been the subject of some sharp debate in the history of the church. It became known as the question of divine possibility (the quality or aptness in God to feel, suffer, or be angry) or impassibility (the denial of those qualities). Under the strong advocacy of Gnosticism (a philosophy that combined Greek and Oriental ideas with Christian teaching and professed access to truth that was a mystery to outsiders) a doctrine of God emerged that took the strongest exception to any claim that God could feel or suffer anything or that He could be angry.”
- Walter Kaiser
“believed that the God of the Old Testament was a ‘Demiurge’ (a god subordinate to the supreme God and responsible for the creation of evil) whose involvement in war, suffering, and judgments disqualified Him from being the God of grace and goodness whom Marcion found in most of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament.”
- Walter Kaiser
“Lactantius, wrote his De Ira Dei, ‘The Anger of God.’ For him passions or emotions were not in themselves evil, but avenues of virtue and goodness when kept under control. Furthermore, God must be moved to anger when He sees sin and wickedness in men and women just as He is moved to love them when they please Him.
- Walter Kaiser
“He who loves the good, by this very fact hates the evil; and he who does not hate the evil, does not love the good; because the love of goodness issues directly out of the hatred of evil, and the hatred of evil issues directly out of the love of goodness. No one can love life without abhorring death; and no one can have an appetency for light, without an antipathy to darkness.”
- Lactantius
“our problem with anger is that we define it as Aristotle did, ‘the desire for retaliation’ or a desire to get even and get revenge for a slight or real harm done to us. With anger goes the idea of a ‘brief madness’ and ‘an uneasiness or discomposure of the mind, upon the receipt of an injury, with a present purpose of revenge.’ But Lactantius defined anger as ‘a motion of the soul rousing itself to curb sin.’
- Walter Kaiser
Sunday Mar 05, 2023
Sunday Mar 05, 2023
Listen along as we begin our time in the book of Lamentations.
Notes//Quotes:
Lamentations 1:1-22
Title: Learning Lament
“In her book Journey through the Psalms, Denise Hopkins examines the use of lament in the major liturgical denominations in America. The study found that in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, The Catholic Lectionary for Mass, The Hymnal for the United Church of Christ, and in the United Methodist Hymnal, the majority of the Psalms omitted from liturgical use are the laments.”
- Soong-Chan Rah
“This trend is not only in the mainline traditions but in the less liturgical as well. In Hurting with God, Glenn Pemberton notes that lament constitutes 40 percent of the Psalms, but only 13 percent of the hymnal for the Churches of Christ, 19 percent of the Presbyterian hymnal, and 13 percent of the Baptist hymnal emphasize lament. Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) licenses local churches in the use of contemporary worship songs and tracks the songs that are most frequently sung in local churches. CCLI’s list of the top 100 worship songs in August of 2012 reveals that only 5 of the songs would qualify as lament. Most of the songs reflect themes of praise.”
- Soong-Chan Rah
“the first of the five Lamentations has one monotonous theme repeated five separate times: ‘There is no one to comfort’ (1:2, 9, 16, 17, 21).
- Walter Kaiser
“In section one (vv. 1-11) Jerusalem, is personified as a woman. Her present state is sharply contrasted with what she once was (vv. 1–3). Her forsaken roads, abandoned gates, grieving priests and maidens, exiled princes and nobles all tell part of her sad story (vv. 4–7). The reason for this wretched state of affairs (already hinted at in v. 5) is her awful sin (vv. 8–9). Even her sanctuary has been decimated (v. 10) trading her treasures to find food during the harsh famine (v. 11).” - Walter Kaiser
“For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name;” Isaiah 54:5
8 Jerusalem sinned grievously;
therefore she became filthy;
all who honored her despise her,
for they have seen her nakedness;
she herself groans
and turns her face away.
9 Her uncleanness was in her skirts;
she took no thought of her future;[d]
therefore her fall is terrible;
she has no comforter.
“O Lord, behold my affliction,
for the enemy has triumphed!”
10 The enemy has stretched out his hands
over all her precious things;
for she has seen the nations
enter her sanctuary,
those whom you forbade
to enter your congregation.
- Lamentations 1:8-10
“I called to my lovers,
but they deceived me…”
- Lamentations 1:19
12 “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger. 13 “From on high he sent fire; into my bones he made it descend; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all the day long. 14 “My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by his hand they were fastened together; they were set upon my neck; he caused my strength to fail; the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.”
- Lamentations 1:12-14
“The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word;” - Lamentations 1:18
“These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” ….“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the Lord.”
- Jeremiah 29:1 & 4-9
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” - Matthew 5:43-45
“do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.” - Jeremiah 27:9