Grace Church Elk Grove

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...

If civilization is like Legos, then it’s built around the same three basic kinds of pieces. There is the large, flat piece that you build everything on top of - that’s like the church. Then there are the three-by-three or four-by-four bricks that are the heart of every Lego build - this is like the family. And lastly you have the unique, more rare pieces that finish the project and keep it together - this is like the government. 

To...

Sometimes, there are supernatural and glorious things going on behind seemingly mundane situations.

In the same way, the passage before us this morning at first glance appears to be just a side note about a procedural question, about how to handle the collection of money. But behind these mundane procedures, there are battles for

God’s glory,

And truth about how God has constructed His world to be PROSPEROUS, and how God’s own INTEGRI...

This morning Paul continues his teaching on the resurrection, still dealing with skepticism. It’s voiced in v. 35: “Well, if there IS a resurrection, then what kind of BODY would you have?” 

If asked open to the resurrection, that question is just fine. But the question is asked with skepticism, with a MATERIALISTIC assumption. Materialism is the philosophy so common then and now that says that the only things that are possible are...

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is completing his teaching about Christ and Him crucified, with teaching on RESURRECTION - the belief that people who are dead and gone can be raised from the earth to new, physical life. Which is often the hardest part of the gospel to believe. For us, and for some Corinthians, who said that the whole concept of resurrection was a myth, an impossibility. So Paul previously gave us EVIDENCE of the resurrec...