A Famine Not of Bread

To listen to this sermon click here. or here. “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! The church was packed for the funeral of a lady in her upper eighties. She and her late husband had had five children, and here they were, along with a whole bunch of grandchildren and even more great-grandchildren. Add in the spouses of the various generations, plus nieces and nephews and their children, and the church was pretty much filled with family, all coming before God to thank Him for this woman’s life and to commend her back to Him. But what if this woman had not happened to meet her husband way back in the 1940s? What if they had not gotten married? Half of the people in the church, from the middle-aged grandparents to the little kids squirming in the pews, would not exist. The union of that man and woman had consequences they co...

Click here to listen to this sermon. “You shall have no other gods” (Exodus 20:3). Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Our summer sermon series is on the Ten Commandments. Before we start on the Commandments themselves, however, we should reflect on why they were given in the first place. We go back to the father of the Hebrews—Abram—and to the covenant that God had made with him and his descendants. The Lord promised Abram a son, and, through that son, many heirs who would inherit the land He showed him. But Abram’s offspring would first live as slaves in a foreign land for many years until the time was right to bring them to the Promised Land. At the time of our text, the children of Israel had been in Egypt for 430 years. Though once treated favorably for Joseph’s sake, a new king had arisen who neither recognized Joseph, nor more importantly, Joseph’s God. Jealous of their fruitfulness and strength, Pharaoh set taskmasters over the Isr...