Sermons - Emmanuel Bible Church

The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father's will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that thirty years later he might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear.  – J. I. Packer 

When we are inwardly tossed by various tempests, and when Satan attempts to disturb our consciences, let us remember that Christ is The Prince of Peace, and that it is easy for him quickly to allay all our uneasy feelings. – John Calvin

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. – Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, Book of Common Prayer

The Lord loves thankful people. They never cease to praise him, and they regularly thank him. In both good times and bad times, they offer praise and thanksgiving to God. They worship the Lord, the God of times, without regard to what the times are like.  – Athanasius 

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. . . . And . . . pretty much anything . . . you worship will eat you alive.  – David Foster Wallace

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.  – C. S. Lewis

To reconcile offending man,  Make Justice drop her angry rod;  What creature could have formed the plan,  Or who fulfill it but a God?  No drop remains of all the curse,  For wretches who deserved the whole;  No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce  The guilty, but returning soul.  Peace by such means so dearly bought,  What rebel could have hoped to see?  Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought,  His Sovereign fastened to a tree. – William Cowper 

Question 33: What is justification?  Answer: Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.  – Westminster Shorter Catechism

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, in all your troubles and darkness, remember what you are and have. You have been loved with an everlasting love. You are supported by everlasting arms.  You are recipients of everlasting life and heirs of an everlasting kingdom, all sealed and made sure by the blood of an everlasting covenant.  Amen.  — Dale Ralph Davis 

The love of Christ! . . . It is like the blue sky into which you may see clearly, but the real vastness of which you cannot measure. It is like the deep, deep sea, into [which] you can look a little way, but its depths are unfathomable. It has a breadth without a bound, length without end, height without top, and depth without bottom.  —Robert Murray M'Cheyne 

Never mind that bread and wine, unless you can use them as folks often use their spectacles. What do they use them for? To look at? No, to look through them. So, use the bread and wine as a pair of spectacles. Look through them, and do not be satisfied until you can say, “Yes, yes, I can see the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” – C. H. Spurgeon

People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives … and when the bubble has burst, they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.  – Nate Saint, missionary martyr to Ecuador

The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they've grown, they will pollute the shadows.  – N. D. Wilson 

The love of Christ is rich and free;  Fixed on his own eternally;  Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove;  Long as he lives his own he'll love.  – William Gadsby 

If the Bible is telling us the truth about reality, then the universe we live in was created primarily with marital romance in mind. The heavens and the earth were created for the marriage of Adam and Eve. The new heavens and the new earth will be created for the marriage of Christ and his bride. The whole of cosmic reality exists as the venue for the eternal honeymoon of the perfect husband with his perfect bride in marital bliss forever and ever. This is the breathtaking claim of the Bible. There is more at stake in marriage than we ever could have known, without the mystery revealed in the Christian gospel (Eph. 5:32).  — Ray Ortlund 

Christian singleness is a testimony to the supreme sufficiency of Christ for all things, testifying that through Christ life is fully blessed, even without marriage and children. It prophetically points to reality greater than the satisfaction of the present age by consciously anticipating the Christian's eternal inheritance and the kingdom of God. Christian singleness lived as a testimony of this gospel truth is a redeeming singleness.  — Barry Danylak 

Genesis affirms a balance of sameness and difference between the sexes. This is a delicate balance that is difficult, but necessary, to maintain. Most theories of gender lose this balance, veering into extremes of uniformity (men and women are interchangeable) or polarity (men are from Mars, women are from Venus). Both extremes lose the fruitful tension expressed here in Genesis…. [The] origin story of sexual difference [between men and women] proclaims that our identities as men and women matter; they carry sacred significance and occupy a prominent place in this worldview.  — Abigail Favale

The Lord puts a special honour upon baptism, and it would be ill for us to neglect that which he so evidently esteems. Do not make any mistake, and imagine that immersion in water can wash away sin; but do remember that if the Lord puts this outward profession side by side with the washing away of sins it is not a trifling matter.  — C. H. Spurgeon

The Father is pleased with us because we are united to His Son. United to Christ, the Father loves us as He loves His Son and accepts us completely and unreservedly.  — Michael Barrett 

The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.  — Tim Keller

The gospel is a glorious declaration of the mighty acts of God when he invaded this earth in the person of his eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.  — John Blanchard

We are to consider, that though Christ is greatly exalted, yet he is exalted, not as a private person for himself only, but as his people's head; he is exalted in their name, and upon their account, as the first fruits, and as representing the whole harvest. He is not exalted that he may be at a greater distance from them, but that they may be exalted with him.  — Jonathan Edwards

Unbelief is the root of evil and the essence of evil. All our sinning grows out of unbelief in the living God and what He has said to us in Scripture.  — John Piper

“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all stories, and we can most truly say they all lived happily ever after. . . . All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.  — C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle

Only at the cross can Jesus be rightly known, not simply as a great moral teacher or as the most noble person who ever lived; nor only as a miracle worker or as an answer to this or that pressing question of the world. At the cross Jesus is revealed as the suffering Son of God, whose rejection, suffering and death reveal the triumph of God. Only at Golgotha can Jesus be rightly known as God incognito who reveals himself to those who are willing to deny themselves and follow him in costly discipleship. — James Edwards

God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. — Hebrews 12:7b–11

Wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. And wimpy Christians won't survive the days ahead. — John Piper

A believing sight of God's glorious majesty should affect us all with Godly fear.  — Matthew Henry

When earth-bound men want symbols of power they conjure up mighty beasts and birds of prey. Russia elevates the bear, Britain the lion, France the tiger, the United States the spread eagle – all of them ravenous. It is only the Kingdom of Heaven that would dare to use as its symbol of might, not the Lion for which John was looking, but the helpless Lamb, and at that, a slain Lamb.  — J. P . Love

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music; and those who want to squander the church's resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common. — David F. Wells

Adversity has slain her thousand, but prosperity her ten thousand. — Thomas Brooks

There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God's favor to them in life, through death and on forever. — J. I. Packer

The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us. — Tim Keller

One generation … believed the gospel and held… that there [are] certain social, economic, and political entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel, but identified with the entailments. The following generation denied the gospel: the “entailments” became everything. – D. A. Carson

Question 30: How does Christ execute the office of a king? Answer: Christ executes the office of a king, in subduing us to Himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all His and our enemies. – Keach's Catechism, 17th Century

Almighty God, who for our redemption gave your onlybegotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. — Book of Common Prayer, Easter Vigil 295

Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. — John Updike

It is right to praise you, Almighty God, for the acts of love by which you have redeemed us through Jesus Christ our Lord. On this day he entered the holy city of Jerusalem in triumph, and was proclaimed as King of kings by those who spread garments and branches along his way. Let these branches be for us signs of his victory, and grant that we who bear them in his name may ever hail him as our King, and follow him in the way that leads to eternal life. — The Book of Common Prayer

“Anyway, to answer your question, well . . . I used to believe in those things but in this job . . . well . . . I guess I've seen too much corruption in people to believe them anymore. We're not just rooted to this world, we're also a part of it. I don't think we can ever be perfectly free or pure. We can't rise above who we are.” After a long pause that stretched into awkwardness, Tessa asked softly, “Can someone else lift us?” – Steven James, The Rook

There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ. There do we meet in Jesus Christ infinite highness and infinite humility. He is higher than the kings of the earth for He is King of kings and Lord of lords. So great is He that all men, kings, and princes are as worms of the dust before Him. . . . And yet . . . none are so low or inferior, but Christ's condescension is sufficient to take a gracious notice of them. His condescension is great enough to become our friend, to become our companion, to unite our souls to Him in spiritual union, to take our nature upon Him, to become one of us, that He may be one with us. – Jonathan Edwards

Here might I stay and sing– No story so divine! Never was love, dear King, Never was grief like Thine. This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. – Samuel Crossman

The love of Christ is rich and free; Fixed on his own eternally; Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove; Long as he lives his own he'll love. – William Gadsby

Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious: See the Man of Sorrows now; From the fight returned victorious, Every knee to Him shall bow. Crown Him! Crown Him! Crowns become the Victor's brow. – Thomas Kelley

The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay upon the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to Him is not to believe that He loves you. – John Owen

Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed. – G. K. Chesterton

In Jesus' mouth the human word becomes God's Word. When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God's Word becomes again a human word. Thus all prayers of the Bible are such prayer, which we pray together with Jesus Christ, prayers in which Christ includes us, and through which Christ brings us before the face of God. . . . If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not, therefore, first ask what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ. We must ask how we can understand the Psalms as God's Word, and only then can we pray them with Jesus Christ. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible. But I often spent a quarter of an hour to an hour on my knees struggling to pray while my mind wandered. Now I rarely have this problem. As my heart is nourished by the truth of the Word, I am brought into true fellowship with God. I speak to my Father and to my Friend (although I am unworthy) about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word. —George Muller

The Christian call to evangelism is a call not simply to persuade people to make decisions but rather to proclaim to them the Good News of salvation in Christ, to call them to repentance, and to give God the glory for regeneration and conversion. We don't fail in our evangelism if we faithfully present the Gospel and yet the person is not converted; we fail only if we don't faithfully present the Gospel at all. —Mark Dever

If a seminary graduate is of average gifts, we think he should pastor a church. If he has above-average gifts, we think he should pastor a large church. But if he has exceptional gifts, we think he should teach in seminary. I say in schools of theology that this is not the way it should be. In my view, the worst should teach, the more gifted men should pastor churches, and the very best should be missionaries. Paul and Barnabas were the best and they were missionaries. —James Boice

If you have been truly born again you have a new and holy nature, and you are no longer moved towards sinful objects as you were before. The things that you once loved you now hate, and therefore you will not run after them. . . . The man who puts his trust in the Lord sees the pleasures of sin in a new light. . . . The flesh sees honey in the drink, but faith at once perceives that there is poison in the cup. Faith spies the snake in the grass and gives warning of it. Faith remembers death, judgment, the great reward, the just punishment and that dread word, eternity. — C. H. Spurgeon

[God] had respect to himself, as his last and highest end, in this work; because he is worthy in himself to be so, being infinitely the greatest and best of beings. All things else, with regard to worthiness, importance, and excellence, are perfectly as nothing in comparison of him. All that is ever spoken in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God's works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God.  — Jonathan Edwards