The Sunday Club teachers and the Adult team summaries our series looking at Meals with Jesus.
Prepared to Serve
Sermons by Chris Johnson (Page 36)
Chris leads a guided meditation on Luke 19:1-19 to deepen our understanding of the way in which Jesus brought security, acceptance and significance to Zacchaeus and a challenge to do the same for others.
How can we find assurance of eternal life? How can wealth be a hinderance? How does God make the impossible possible through Jesus? Does your faith touch your wallet as well as your heart? Chris explores how our security, acceptance and significance are rooted in grace and yet we are encouraged to invest for eternal returns.
What do we need to do to find the security, acceptance and significance we need? In this talk Chris highlights Jesus’ teaching that our hunger is rightly met through the gift of the Spirit. Our Heavenly Father is not reluctant to give Holy Spirit yet Jesus clearly teaches that we can not receive Him or His gifts if we do not persist in asking, seeking and knocking, recognising our desperate need of Him.
Whilst our need for security, acceptance and significance are fully met through our relationship with Christ our experience of these can vary. In the light of John 6: 1-11 Chris seeks to show how we can experience these in greater measure through trusting, receiving and obeying. In response he challenges us to offer the little we have to God, receive His gifts and get involved in His miracle.a
Everyone has a need for significance, security and acceptance. Jesus demonstrated how these needs cannot truly be met through independence, manipulation and idolatry but through trust, humility and worship. In our first talk we consider Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.
We conclude our short series looking at what the Apostle Paul calls trustworthy sayings. In Titus 3:5 we find a succinct declaration of why we are saved, how we are saved and what the result of being saved will be. In the light of this the Apostle Paul challenges us to devote ourselves to doing good. Chris highlights the role of the Spirit in regeneration and renewal as described in the passage which enables us to continue to live in and through grace.
As we continue in our survey of Paul’s trustworthy saying Chris explores the relationship between our willingness to endure and the promise of reigning with Christ. He highlights the need to pray for persecuted Christians but also to reflect correctly on our own walk with Christ.
In week three of our series looking at culture shaping slogans from Paul’s writings Chris looks at training in godliness and why it is of more value than physical training. He concludes with a challenge to make every effort to grow in godliness and offers some practical ways to do so.
In the second in our series of Paul’s T-shirt slogans Chris explores a trustworthy saying about Eldership. He seeks to understand why this is a key saying for Paul and how we can respond in our attitudes to our leaders and our own individual roles in shepherding the flock under our care.