Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

The Text: Obadiah

Judges 11

On the one hand, people have every reason to not put their trust in princes. The princes let them down over and over, again and again. You would think that people would stop doing that. Every promised wave of reforms is promising to fix all the problems that were caused by the previous wave of reforms. We are like that woman in the gospels—the more the doctors treated her, the more the problems continued (Luke 8:43). But the reason we keep resorting to these “princes” is that we assume, in our faithlessness, that we have no other options. We must either trust in this prince or that one, musn’t we? And the answer presented by this psalm is a clarion no.

The Text: Isaiah 9

THE TEXT: Isaiah 8

The nature and character of God is of course worthy of all praise and adoration. But we are finite, and sinful on top of that, and so we cannot even begin to praise Him as He deserves to be praised. Nevertheless, the effort must be made. As forgiven sinners, how on earth are we going to declare His worth? What are we going to do? Shout? Stand on a chair?One of the ways that Scripture assigns to us is the method of declaring His works—the mighty works that He accomplished down here where we live. This is something we can do, and David shows us the way.

THE TEXT: Judges 10

THE TEXT: Isaiah 8

With a handful of exceptions, Christians are overwhelmingly united in their willingness to worship God on the first day of the week. After all, we have been doing this for two thousand years, and we are rarely questioned about it. Why not just go with the flow? The answer to that question is that we should want to be deliberate Christians in everything we offer up to God. We never want to be guilty of the “will worship” that Paul condemns in Col. 2:23. We are constrained to offer to God what He requires of us, and not anything else. So why do we worship on the first day of the week? Why didn’t the Church remain with the seventh-day Sabbath of the Jews?

The Text: John 11:1-6