Application:

The Christ of Christmas is the King we bow before and gladly receive because of His humility and mercy to we rebels.

Let me suggest ways to celebrate this Christmas… not with parties and presents but in this way:
1. Lay down your weapons! The king of Christmas comes and calls us to unconditional surrender so that we may receive the blessings of His kingdom.

This calls for admitting our own defeat and complete need for Christ to re-orient our lives with Him at the center.

This involves giving up the delusion that we are good enough in ourselves to do God’s work and entrust ourselves to Him who died for sinners and rose again for their justification so that we may be accepted by the Father and be received with the rejoicing of Heaven itself at our repentance!

2. Stop building the kingdoms that oppose Jesus Christ. The Sure Word of Christ tells us that all those who do not gather with him scatter.

This calls us to live as those who want to build on Christ’s sure foundation. It is an act of humility to say to the Lord “re-order my life according to Your Word.”

3. Share in the building of Christ’s Kingdom!

This calls us to carry the Good News to others – not because we have arrived but because we know the One who has arrived… in Heaven at the Father’s right Hand.

The audio for this Reformation Day sermon will, Lord willing, be uploaded in a few hours.

The site was inoperable for at least 12 hours or more.

I was able to run a software package that diagnosed the problem and repaired it.

The site is now operable again – or you wouldn’t be able to read this!

Thanks to God for grace to get this back up and running.

Some people who have attempted to download the actual sermon file by clicking “download” and “save as” cannot download any thing.

I’ve had this problem myself.

People can listen online but not download.

I was able to download when going to this page:

I have no idea why it’s possible to download from one page instead of another. It just worked.

I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this and I apologize for the technical difficulties!

I am adding scripture memory for each Lord’s Day. These scriptures are primarily drawn from William Ames’ Sketch of the Christian’s Catechism except where he uses the same passage for each Lord’s Day.

This is to test this material because it has a reputation of being very good at addressing the kind of person who says they are interested in learning more about our Lord, but who aren’t so interested in the “Church”.
(Are they sincere? Who knows… but it may be the grace of God at work drawing people to Christ! Because it lets us focus on the text of Scripture, it’s worth testing!)

So if it works well and seems to be potentially useful for an evangelistic Bible Study, it would be something that could be used for a home bible study or other similar evangelistic outreach.

We shall see.

After the celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord, I hope to return to the series on Genesis and the Life of Abraham.

We’ll just see how it all goes. Some are sad I’m taking a break from it!