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Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: July 19, 2015 | 10:00am
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SERMON SERIES:
Practicing Faith, Hope, and Love
By a nod of the head, how many of you, when you were younger, would at this time of summer begin to get anxious about school? How many of you would get excited for school? Turn to your neighbor and I want you to tell them what it was you most looked forward to each new school year.
This Sunday, we are beginning a new series of messages that will take us through the month of August up until the first Sunday of September. This series is going to focus on a short letter written by a man named Paul the Apostle, and it was written to a small church in a city called Thessalonica, it’s called…1 Thessalonians.
During these next 7 weeks, we are going to look at this letter for one purpose: how it will help us grow in the areas of faith, hope, and love. In each of his letters to new groups of believers, Paul recognizes that if they can do these three, the rest is mostly just details. These three are Faith, Hope, and Love.
Now, you’ll notice that the title of this morning’s message is Church 201. Two hundred level classes are those you take after the introductory courses. What we will deal with in 1 Thessalonians is, what I believe, the second primary stage in our development as a community of faith. Stage one, believing that what the Bible says to and about me is true and has authority. Stage two, living as though those we read in the Bible are true. And the way Paul, time and again, addresses the church, in its life together is by calling her to three things. Can you guess what they are? Faith, Hope, and Love.
Church is meant to be a dynamic event. When people gather to hear Jesus through the Spirit, one of the things they see in this man is his constant movement. In other religious expressions, there is a destination that you can reach if you become enlightened enough or holy enough or smart enough. Not Christianity; followers of Jesus are constantly learning and discovering new things, but not for the sake of enlightenment. We grow in knowledge so that our lives will be changed. As a result, our actions will be different.
Download the entire transcript here: Acts 17 1-9 Introduction
