TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 5:7-12 What do we do when we have no control? James describes patience in the face of waiting for the Lord to return. This passage tells Christians to trust in God's timing and purpose during challenging seasons, finding strength in enduring faith. Our moment of history is merely the beginning of the full restoration of al…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 4:11-5:6 What are the dangers of power and wealth for those who follow Jesus? The world’s values and God’s kingdom values are reversed. He challenges us to prioritize God's kingdom over worldly possessions and consider the ethical use of our wealth. This is more than wise stewardship, but using wealth as a power for the sa…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 4:4-10 How does God relate to us, and how do we relate to him? James describes the relational aspect of submission to God, emphasizing the need to resist worldly desires and draw near to God. Following Jesus is not abstractly knowing him but putting one's life under his leadership with humility and repentance. God sees, lo…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 3:13-4:3 What does a mature follower of Jesus look like? This section shows a picture of someone whose beauty and goodness are genuine. In a city of manufactured self-image, James gives us an alternative personhood based on the gospel. The result is someone who can make peace and avoid conflict because they have everything…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 17:13-24By Redeemer Presbyterian Church West Side

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 3:1-18 How much do my words matter? Our culture examines every tweet, every statement, and even silence. Examining the power of our words according to this passage, we see how James emphasizes the responsibility that comes with our speech. Our communication flows out of our heart orientation and so we are to use our words …

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 2:14-26 What is the connection between what we believe and what we do? This passages dives into the complex but inseparable link between faith and works. James challenges Christians to manifest their faith through active engagement, illustrating how genuine faith transforms our lives and impacts the world. A faith without …

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 1:27-2:13 If everyone is shown mercy by God, then how can we withhold mercy? This passage confronts the church for showing favoritism within their community. James challenges us to confront and overcome biases, superiority, judgment, and pride, reflecting God's impartial love for all. Living this way is not merely morally …

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 1:19-26 How does a person learn from and live like Jesus? James explores the concept of heavenly wisdom versus earthly wisdom. This passage emphasizes the importance of seeking and applying God's wisdom in decision-making, relationships, and daily life.By Redeemer Presbyterian Church West Side

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 1:2-4,9-18 How does trouble help us? Delving into the paradox of finding joy in the midst of trials, this passage encourages Christians to embrace challenges as opportunities for growth. James recognizes how time, grace, and endurance refines and strengthens our faith. Testing and trials come from within and without our so…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | James 1:1-8 How does a Christian experience life under a new faith? Examining James' foundational message and his background, this passage challenges Christians to follow Jesus through tangible deeds, illustrating the transformative power of authentic faith. That faith depends on an external wisdom and strength.…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Isaiah 53:4-6, 25:6-9 All of the forgiveness and mercy we need and long to share come from one source. The death and resurrection of Jesus provide the healing that the world needs. His wounds are his people’s life. His suffering is their salvation. The true story of the resurrection is the downpayment on the promises of everlast…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 12:12-19 John witnessed the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, fulfilling the prophecy of the Messiah riding in humility on a donkey. The crowd welcomes Him with shouts of "Hosanna," recognizing Him as the long-awaited King. The significance of Jesus' entry, not as a conquering earthly king but as the Prince of Peace…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 5:2-11 In the Beatitudes, Jesus delivers a profound teaching on the characteristics of those blessed by God. He pronounces blessings upon the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness' …

The gospel of Jesus creates a restorative community. The Apostle Paul instructs the Galatian church to restore and support one another with a spirit of gentleness when facing moral failures. He emphasizes the principle of sowing and reaping, encouraging them to invest in the Spirit by persistently engaging in acts of kindness and righteousness. The…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 18:15-17,21-22; 7:3-5, 5:23-24 Jesus instructs his followers to forgive not just seven times, but seventy-seven times, emphasizing the limitless and boundless nature of forgiveness within the Christian community. Jesus' teaching underscores the transformative power of forgiveness, encouraging his disciples to extend grac…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Isaiah 55:7:Psalm 32:1-7 Isaiah calls for repentance and turning to the Lord, emphasizing God's abundant mercy and willingness to pardon those who forsake their wicked ways. Psalm 32 reflects the joy and freedom of those whose sins are forgiven. Together, these passages convey a message of divine mercy, forgiveness, and the tran…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | 1 John 1:7-10; 2:1 John emphasizes the transformative power of walking in the light of God's truth. He underscores the cleansing nature of Christ's blood, highlighting the importance of acknowledging our sins and seeking forgiveness for a restored relationship with God. The passage also encourages Christians to live authenticall…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Romans 8:31-39 The high watermark of Romans 8 (and New Testament theology) is found in these verses, reminding the followers of Jesus that what protects and assures them is God’s love. Here the trinitarian love of Father, Son and Spirit explodes in waves of assurance, joy and power. The trials of life cannot overcome the victory…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Romans 8:18-30 Suffering and glory are linked in the Christian life, as they are linked in Christ’s life. Martyn Lloyd-Jones argues that glorification (v30) is God’s ultimate goal for his children. That is, that they would experience “full and complete deliverance from sin and evil…in body, soul and spirit.” So God is working “a…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Romans 8:12-17 One of the main challenges of faithfully following Jesus is experiencing subjectively what is true of Christians objectively. Perhaps no greater experience is the Holy Spirit helping us experience that we are sons and daughters of God, adopted into his family with unlimited access to his care, wisdom, compassion a…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Romans 8:1-13 Romans 8 is a rich reservoir of the implications and assurances of following Jesus, and the Holy Spirit central to the chapter's richness. We will spend four weeks working through the chapter finding assurance and hope to live out our vision in 2024. This first sermon will explore how the Spirit sets us from sin an…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 The Holy Spirit reveals God’s wisdom to followers of Jesus and stands in opposition to what Scripture calls the wisdom of the world. One seeks to find answers to life through God and his word, the other seeks those answers as if God doesn’t exist. Our current cultural moment that conceives of truth as social…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Ezekiel 37:1-3, 9-14 Ezekiel was a man whose theology was born in the pain and passion of his own and his people’s suffering. It is out of that pain we find words of hope rooted in the Spirit’s power to bring life, a power that goes back to Genesis 1 where the Spirit of God was ‘hovering over the waters’. The question facing Eze…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 2:1-12 The birth of Jesus was the arrival of a King whose presence in the world ‘disturbs’ us the way it did Herod; a word that means “acute emotional distress”. As Wright put it, this news is political dynamite. Jesus is the true king of the Jews, and Herod is the false one.” And the arrival of the Magi underscores that…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 1:1-14 Unlike Matthew and Luke, John’s reflection on the birth of Jesus is more of a philosophical meditation than a historical retelling. He sets the birth of Jesus in the context of Genesis (In the beginning) and in a way that challenges the Greek view of reality. Jesus’ birth will bring light into darkness, just as we fi…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Luke 1:39-56 Luke narrates the story of Jesus’ birth through the story of Mary, who in this passage breaks into what is one of the most famous songs in all of Christendom. For Mary the news that God had seen her and her people caused her to burst into song. Jesus’s birth, as we will see in Herod’s story, is a threat to those alr…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 1:18-25 The story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s gospel is seen through the eyes of a troubled Joseph. While Luke narrates the story through an excited Mary. Matthew paints the sober picture of a man who just found out that his fiance is pregnant. Would Joseph follow the expected path and divorce Mary? Or would he exercise…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Luke 3:1-10 John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, was the last of the “Old Testament” prophets. His words challenged those who heard him as he sought to prepare their hearts for Jesus’ arrival. Advent is a season, in the words of Fleming Rutledge, that “is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, re…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 11:13-16; 12;22-29 Perhaps the most familiar chapter in Hebrews is chapter 11 which lists multiple spiritual biographies to demonstrate that the motivation for running the race is a longing for a better country (11:16). The death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus assures us that our destiny is not a dark, foreboding m…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 11:39 - 12:12 Because the ‘world is no friend to grace’, faith becomes a long obedience in the same direction. Or as the metaphor found here, a race that requires perseverance. We are told that in order to run the race of faith we must fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. What does that mean and…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 7:18-28 Jesus is not just our source of encouragement, but perfection, a frequent theme in Hebrews that NT Wright defines as “God is working at bringing his world to perfection and doing what is necessary to make it complete”. We long to be whole and for the world to be whole. Jesus as our eternal priest (7:21; 28) is ho…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 3:12-13; 4:14 - 5:10 The writer of Hebrews is concerned that in ‘these last days’ (1:2) our hearts will harden just as the Israelites’ hearts did in their wilderness journey. A hard heart manifests itself in cynicism as well as indifference to God and others. Therefore we need encouragement from others and from Jesus, ou…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 2:1-11 Having celebrated the glory of Jesus as the ‘radiance of God’s glory’(Hebrews 1:3) the writer issues a warning to pay attention to what has been heard (2:1). Implicit in this text is the real danger of ignoring the salvation procured for us by Jesus, either through indifference or suffering. We find in these verse…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 7:15-29 Epistemology is a fancy word for how we know things. Jesus concludes the sermon challenging his listeners to reflect on the nature of truth and wisdom. The current cultural narrative surrounding truth and wisdom is relativistic and individualistic. Truth is what I/we define it to be, and that to suggest otherwise…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 6:19-24 The current cultural narrative is that to be on the right side of history is to believe that religion is on the wane and through science, technology and political ideology the history will increasingly bend towards justice. Jesus directly contradicts this narrative by challenging his followers to look beyond mate…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 5:38-48 Eugene Peterson wrote, “The world is no friend to grace.” Jesus’ summary of the currency of love in his culture as selective and conditional (You have heard) stands in contrast to the love he has come to demonstrate and restore. One of the ironies of our cultural moment is that the call for tolerance has coincide…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 5:17-20 The current cultural narrative (You have heard it said) with respect to ethics and morality, can be summarized as ‘everyone has the right to do what is right and wrong for themselves’. Jesus roots the ethics and morality of his Kingdom in the objective law of God, which he has come to fulfill. This sermon is an o…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 5:13-16 The current cultural consensus concerning identity is that it is chosen not received. In other words we are free to the extent we can choose who we are and how to live without external constraints. The modern answer to the ancient question: “Who am I?” is: be true to myself. Jesus counters that answer with the fi…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Luke 6:17-26 Jesus compares and contrasts two different visions of how to live in this world. Every individual and culture has basic beliefs about the nature of reality that is based on faith. These are often defined as worldviews and are unconscious assumptions that inform our daily lives. How we spend our time. How we view our…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 11:25-30 The series begins with Jesus calling those who are weary and burdened to come to him and yoke themselves to him. Our increasingly post-Christian culture has left us weary and burdened by cynicism, despair, depression and disillusion. This is the fruit of yoking ourselves to the current cultural narratives we wil…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Revelation 21:1-6; 22:20-21 Knowing the end of a story transforms how you see every earlier chapter of the story. Here we get a glimpse of the end of the story, and it is beyond our wildest dreams. All evil, every last vestige of it, has been finally defeated and expunged from the world. All suffering will be made up for and swa…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Revelation 19:6-10 The future is heading toward a feast, which will be a great unending celebration. Feasting is a joyful response of thanks for the fruitful end of our labors. The church’s mission is to prepare for the feast of Jesus, to invite everyone, and to be changed into beauty. For God’s glory and out of love, Christians…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Matthew 25:31-46 The verse, “Judge not”, may be the most recognized verse in the Bible today. Our culture recoils at the idea of judgment. And yet it’s impossible to live as a human being in the absence of all judgment. We are all evaluating one another, all the time, though we may each have different standards for doing so. And…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Romans 8:18-25 We need hope to get through life. We need to believe that there’s a better future possible, that there are good days ahead. To live utterly devoid of all hope is to live in despair. But hope can often be little more than wishful thinking unless there is a solid basis for it. For the Christian, hope is a guaranteed…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | Hebrews 2:5-11 The world, according to the biblical story, is heading somewhere. We’re not going round in circles, with civilizations rising and falling for ages without end. There is indeed a “world to come” in which Jesus will rule over all things with perfect justice, wisdom, power, and love. In fact, that world is already he…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 17:20-23; Philemon 1:8-18 The 21st Century Church is filled with contradictions. For the first time, Christians are in nearly every language and social group around the world. The tide of growth and vitality is tipping to the developing world, yat at the same time the church is split into thousands of smaller denominations.…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 17:6-8; 1 Timothy 3:14-16 The Reformation Church regained many core truths of the church: Christians are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, as revealed by Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone. Against corrupt religious and political elites, many put themselves in peril to reform God’s people. …

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 15:5-6; 1 Timothy 2:1-6 The Medieval Church became an alternate society, eventually protecting Western culture from extinction during the dark ages after Rome’s collapse. Despite many problems, many sought mystical unity with Jesus or sacriifcial service to the world. Monastic societies attempted to create a pure embodiment…

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE | John 15:18-20; 1 Timothy 4:1-13 The Early Church grew for centuries as a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire. Mostly outsiders and poor, they eventually replaced the old pagan religions. That journey was hard, filled with sacrifice and love. No guidebook existed to show them the way and the early leaders crafted sense out of…