From time to time I put sermons I give up here. Not because I think they are particularly good, even less that they are model sermons. I can't even guarantee that I agree with everything I said then - I am (of course) learning all the time. But someone may be interested.
You can use the filters below to restrict which sermons you see. Sermons will be sorted newest first, which means that they appear in reverse order from that in which they were delivered.
It helps to get some feedback that your actions in life are having the desired effect. When you order something online, you get a message on the screen that says, "Thank you for your order," and within two minutes an email arrives in your inbox to tell you that your order has been received.
We haven't had one for a while, but I do love watching a royal wedding. When you have a royal wedding, usually you have one member of the royal family marrying somebody else who is also rich and famous—possibly a member of a royal family of another country, or just somebody with substantially good upbringing.
Part of the reason why it's fun to watch a royal wedding is that it is not about you. You are watching how the other half live, and you are watching a ceremony that you know would never be yours. But there's something magical about it.
It is easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining. What do you do when it isn't? If your life begins to fall apart, perhaps fall apart in connection with your family, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your health, what do you do then? Now, as we've worked our way through this letter of James, we've seen that he's been helping us think this through. And today, in the final verses of his letter, he brings the various threads of his letter together to try to give us an answer of how do you keep going with Jesus when life feels like it's falling apart.
We're blessed in this church to have a great many people who work in the medical world. We have doctors, we have nurses, we have various other people who actually work in roles in the medical world, and that's a good thing, because when you become sick you need a doctor, assisted by a great many other medical staff who can help find out what is wrong and tell you what can be done to deal with your sickness.
Let me ask you a question: Do you need to be good in order to go to heaven? Do you have to do good works, good deeds, to get to heaven? That is a really important question, is it not? Because where you spend eternity really matters. This life we live in now is short; the most any of us will get is probably 100 years, relative to which eternity is a very, very long time. So where you get to spend eternity, well, there is no more important question for you than that.
Well, like almost every grown-up, I have forgotten almost everything they taught me when I studied for my GCSEs. However, when we did GCSE English, we had to read some novels of a 19th-century author called Thomas Hardy. Not to be confused with the present-day actor of the same name.
There are many different kinds of Christian book that get published. One of them is the missionary biography: stories that tell how someone of a previous generation took the good news of Jesus Christ to a part of the world where he had never been heard of. Frequently, these stories include some dramatic accounts of God intervening to help. There are many difficulties encountered — someone perhaps about to run out of money, and they prayed, and providentially the next ship from London carried everything that they needed.
Let me ask you a question: what kind of thing is Christianity? Or maybe you say, “Okay, that's obvious — it's a religion.” Or maybe it is. Maybe that's a helpful label; maybe it's not.
Some people helpfully point out that religions generally are about the human race trying to climb up a ladder towards God, whereas Christianity is about God coming down from heaven to reach us. So in some ways, the label “religion” is not helpful when applied to Christianity. This is something different from anything else called a religion.
Part of being a Christian is to witness to other people about the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of you are really pleased to hear that. I suspect a number of us had been secretly hoping nobody would ever say that to us, because we find the thought of speaking about the Lord Jesus with others terrifying and difficult. If that is you, you're not alone. Lots of people find it difficult.
Part of being a Christian is to witness to other people about the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of you are really pleased to hear that. I suspect a number of us had been secretly hoping nobody would ever say that to us, because we find the thought of speaking about the Lord Jesus with others terrifying and difficult. If that is you, you're not alone. Lots of people find it difficult.