Grace Church Elk Grove

This is the start of a new Christ in the Old Testament series. The Bible is a whole, one story, all of it pointing to one person: Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. So, it is no wonder that we see the Old Testament and the New point forward or backward to him. This series will look at specifically how the Bible looks forward to Jesus. We will begin this week with Jesus' own words, as he teaches Nicodemus precisely how this ...

Sometimes the Scriptures are to be studied, the way you study for a class. But there are other times when we are not to so much study but INHABIT a text. We are to let it swirl around us, capture our imaginations, and let it take us to the heavens or a foreign land that we’ve never known. 

Such is Psalm 29 - it’s not here for us to completely get our arms around it, but to let it take us to a place and a perspective we’ve never know...

We all face fear, because we all have enemies. These enemies come in three flavors: the world, our flesh and the devil enemies from this world, in the form of temptations, and disasters and people who hate us; our own flesh, in the form of wrong desires and illness and weakness; and spiritual powers directly, in the form of the devil and his servants.

This enmity did not start with communism or Darwinism or Islam. It started in the ...

We don’t know the occasion, but we can make educated guesses. The end of Judges - which was when David was born - records for us that the people of Israel had become no different in their sin than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Thus David’s life was not that different from Lot’s - they were both surrounded on all sides by really wicked people. Not just the nations - the Jews themselves. But David was a man after GOD’s own heart, which put him at...

This Psalm is very hard to outline. It’s all over the place - one second David asks God to protect him from his enemies; the next he is asking God to forgive him his sin; the next he is asking God to protect him, because of his integrity.

The reason for this is that this Psalm is HUMAN. There really was a David. He really was hounded by treacherous enemies who really wanted to kill him and his family and wipe his name off the face o...

Sometimes the perspectives of the Old Testament feel so foreign to us, and maybe a little embarrassing. For instance, in Psalm 21 today, the candid, unvarnished talk of vanquishing enemies. After all we are Americans, living in 2025, enlightened by college degrees, with no enemies left. Haven’t WE have progressed beyond all that?

But we must interrogate that embarrassment. For I am convinced one reason why we live in a time of chaos...

Today I want to briefly give three truths we must remember BEFORE we set ourselves to our tasks in life. Three remembrances we must sink our feet down into, in order to be rightly grounded, in our work. Now, I’m going to talk like an uncle to our graduates and near-graduates, but really, I’m talking to all of us. For God has already prepared work for ALL of us to do.

Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on May 18th to lea...

Today we are considering HOW we get STRONG, and why we MUST be strong.

We are in a COSMIC battle, against enemy forces that are seen and unseen. So Paul in Ephesians 6 COMMANDS us to be strong. This is no time to pet and cuddle and luxuriate in our weaknesses. 

But that does not mean God REMOVES our weaknesses. Instead, as God said to Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” 

Listen to this episode from Pastor Jed’s sermon on May...

The question today is HOW do we get OFF the beach and begin surfing? For it is so easy to HEAR an excellent sermon about that, as we did last week, and then . . . Nothing changes.

As a brother mentioned to me this week, of all our modern sins, perhaps ACEDIA is our deepest. The worst sins are the ones we do not know we have, which is why we don’t know what that word means. It means “sloth”, but more like an emasculated inability to ...

The resurrection will not fit into any neat, sentimental holiday box. We see this, not only by looking at the specific details of the story, but also by considering the FEEL, the atmosphere of the story.

The atmosphere crackles with something alien - as if something outside the system has invaded our world - something greater - something you can put in Coke commercial. Thus the writers do not hesitate to include the very real errors...

The grace of God, given in love, creates both BLESSINGS and CURSES.

This has always been the way of God. God works through COVENANTS in the world. A covenant is a solemn agreement or arrangement between two parties. And God’s great covenant is one of grace. Grace is an undeserved GIFT. The gift of WELCOME. After all, with every sin, God is the one most offended. So it is a gift for any of us to be welcomed by Him.

So this is a mass...

As Paul concludes his first letter to the Corinthians, we must remember how it started: it was all about Christ crucified. Which means this entire letter has been about LOVE. For Christ is the standard, the very definition of love.

Love is not something we define for ourselves. Love is GIVEN and must be received. Love was given in a real MAN; it came with a whip; and it was poured out in bread and wine, in a body broken and blood s...