Sermons

Sadly, we live in a world that is full of pain and suffering.

It’s easy to feel powerless to help. Even if we wanted to alleviate everyone’s pain, we just don’t have the resources to help more than a few people. We resonate with Peter’s words from that reading: “Silver and gold I do not have.”

The government also does not have the resource to help everyone who is in need. You could print Acts chapter 3 verse 6 and display it above every hospital reception desk: “Silver and gold have I none”.

Heaven and earth revolve around Jesus. Life and death revolve around Jesus.

If you were here last time, we looked at these same verses in Acts, and I said two really quite shocking things about how central Jesus needs to be to life.

Number 1: Jesus does not call us to have him as a hobby or an interest, but to have our entire lives revolve around him, his priorities and his purposes.

Number 2: Not one us does this. We all treat Jesus as less important than he really is. And this is the number one thing wrong with the world today.

We live in a broken society. A fragmented society. A scattered society.

Our relationships with each other are broken. Our relationship with God is broken.

Let me illustrate by listening in on the questions people have been asking since Tuesday’s bomb attack in Manchester.

“How could someone do that to their fellow human beings?” Our relationships with one another are broken.

“Why does God not stop something like that from happening?” Our relationship with God is broken.

Do you ever wish you could live in the time of Jesus. There are great events in the 4 gospels that we only get to read about. Wouldn’t it be good to have seen them for yourself? To have heard Jesus deliver the original Sermon on the Mount, first-hand. To have shaken the hand of the paralysed man who’d been healed. To have eaten some of the foot Jesus produced for the crowd of 5000.