A Famine Not of Bread

Click here to listen to this sermon. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Picture a society where the path to God is blocked by invisible barriers of ritual impurity, where even a slight touch can render someone unworthy to approach the divine. This was the burden imposed by the Law of Moses, which had evolved into a complex web of manmade traditions by Jesus’ time. As the Pharisees enforced these laws, their rigid adherence overshadowed the essence of God’s commandments and His message of grace and forgiveness. In our text from Mark 7, Jesus confronts this distortion head-on, revealing a more profound truth about what truly defiles us and how we can genuinely draw near to God. The Law of Moses contained a series of statutes about what could make a person “unclean.” This was not a question about sanitation or good personal hygiene but applied to ritual purity. Unclean things defiled a person so that he could not draw close to God without first purifying...

To listen to this sermon click here. Or here. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! The Sixth Commandment: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). What does this mean?  We should fear and love God so that we lead a sexually pure and decent life in what we say and do, and husband and wife love and honor each other.” Christians get a little embarrassed when it comes to discussing human sexuality. In fact, if we took a poll here it might be interesting to see how many of your parents talked to you at any length about anything having to do with sex. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you never had that talk at all. And that’s a shame—because everybody else is talking about it, aren’t they? Our society, our televisions shows, our advertisements—they are all obsessed with sex. For Christians to ignore that and fail to present what God has to say about our sexuality is to leave an open door for the devil. So today, we will examine God’...