Sermons

When you take inventory of the world today, our nation today, maybe your family today, how confident are you in our leadership’s ability, your boss’s ability, or your ability to lead things to a good end? How confident are you that they or you will identify what is best, choose to pursue it, and have the capability to achieve it? The passage this week will remind us that when we ask these questions of God, everything changes. And that’s good news.

For many of us, a nightmare situation we dread is that we’ll wake up one day, when our life is coming to an end, and realize we’ve wasted our whole life. How can we have any confidence that our lives will have any real meaning or lasting impact? This week’s passage will show us that a life that follows Jesus is a life full of meaning. So, we can live confidently and with courage because we know that in Christ, none our life will be a waste.

When I ask people what’s the one thing they’d want to ask Jesus to do in and around their life, the most popular answer is make peace. This passage will ask us to consider if there is ever anything we should put ahead of peace and the answer will be, “Yes”. As much as we want peace, and as much as Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, Jesus also wants us to pursue truth; to be truth-tellers. That’s because it’s more loving to give people the truth of Jesus than a false peace.

A question I’ve been asking people for months is, “If you could ask Jesus to do one thing in your life, your family, your neighborhood, what would it be?” The one thing I’ve heard the most is the desire for peace; the desire for wholeness, rest, health, rightness. In a time like ours, that can feel pretty far-fetched, but it’s not. Our passage this week will affirm our desire for peace, show us where we can find it, and also show us we each are the ones Jesus might use to make it.

Fear is on the rise in our time. Report after report shows that people in the United States are far more afraid than they used to be. One of Fountain City’s core values is courageous faith; choosing to trust and follow God even when it’s risky. Why would we value that? How can we actually pursue it? We’ll see from the Apostle Paul’s life it has everything to do with resting in God’s will.

Words are powerful things. They shape nations, companies, and lives. We consume an unending stream of slogans and campaigns that want to influence and shape us. Last week we celebrated Easter, the good news that Jesus is alive, and we talked about how because He’s risen, our lives have real hope and purpose. This week, we’re going to look at what we do with the gospel of Jesus while we live in a culture flooded with competing claims of good news.

Every year, Easter Sunday serves as a hallmark of our Christian faith; a day when billions of people around the world will gather to hear afresh the centerpiece our faith: that Jesus Christ is risen, that he’s alive! Our brief passage from Acts will lead us to consider this question: what difference does Jesus’s resurrection really make in your life? The answer will be loud and clear: because Jesus is alive, your life can have real hope and real purpose with no illusions.

In one of his greatest books, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis helps show us a struggle we all have in recognizing the true source of our security and significance. What is it in life that assures me that I’ll be secure? And what assures me that I’m significant? These are two of our most essential needs as human beings. Our passage this week will call us to find joy and peace in putting our trust in the only true source that will satisfy our need: Jesus Christ.

So much of the book of Acts is about growth; growth of the gospel, growth of believers, growth of the church. It’s easy to read this history of the early church, or even to hear ministry leaders talk about similar events in our generation, and think, “That’s not my life. My life is way more ordinary than that.” This week, from this passage, we’ll see that God’s goal is the growth of the gospel, and we are all a part of that…no matter how ordinary our lives may appear.

A good but difficult question we are often asked is, why? Why do we do certain things, believe certain things, or go to certain places? It’s a good question because “why” forces us to think and answer truthfully. This week, one of the questions that arises is why do Christians share the gospel and why do they persist in sharing the gospel even in hard, challenging places? The answer we’ll see is because He wants us to, and because it will be believed.