Cited in sermons
Bruce Waltke
63 sermons · All people cited
The Christian Husband and Father
Proverbs 4:1–9 opens a sermon that traces the pattern of transgenerational wisdom-transmission from David to Solomon to Solomon's children, and uses it as the framework for a thorough biblical account of what faithfulness looks like for a Christian husband and father. Drawing extensively from Proverbs, the sermon argues that a godly husband fears the Lord, deals honestly with his sin, loves his wife as a gift, provides for and protects her, communicates with kindness, and maintains sexual fidelity; and that a godly father extends that same godliness toward his children through love, instruction, and both verbal and corporal discipline exercised within an orbit of affection. The sermon is marked throughout by a Reformation soteriology — salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone, not by exemplary parenting — and closes with direct exhortations to fathers, mothers, and young men preparing for marriage.
The Faithful Christian Mother
Proverbs 31:28–30 grounds this sermon on the faithful Christian mother in four doctrinal categories: her condition before God, her influence over her children, her authority over her children, and her responsibility toward her children. The fear of the Lord that marks the virtuous woman is not a natural disposition but a new-covenant gift of sovereign grace, as Jeremiah 32:40 and Romans 3:18 together demonstrate. Because salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, the mother's instruction, example, discipline, and love flow from a regenerate heart rather than from moralism. Mothers are exhorted to maintain dependence on God, to ground child-rearing in Scripture rather than cultural trends, and to persevere in a calling that is high, demanding, and ultimately accountable to God.
The Believer's Commitment to the Lord
Proverbs 3:5–6 issues three demands upon the believer: an entire commitment of wholehearted trust in the Lord, an exclusive commitment that repudiates reliance on one's own darkened understanding, and an exhaustive commitment that acknowledges God in every circumstance and station of life. The sermon traces the doctrine of total depravity as the necessary background for the prohibition against self-reliance, exposing three characteristic expressions of that self-reliance — autonomy, rejection of godly parental counsel, and reception of ungodly influences — before concluding with the promise that God will direct the paths of those who acknowledge Him. The practical summons is to employ the ordinary means of grace — Scripture, prayer, corporate worship, and family instruction — as the concrete shape of a life committed to trusting the sovereign God.
The Theological Basis for Motherhood
Titus 2:3–5 grounds the calling of older and younger women not in cultural expectation but in the gospel of grace. The passage moves from the virtues older women must embody, to the domestic relationships and personal character younger women are to cultivate, to the theological warrant undergirding all of it: a woman who professes saving faith yet neglects these duties brings reproach upon the very word of God she claims to believe. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and the imperatives of Titus 2 describe the life of sanctification that flows from that redemption, not the means of obtaining it.
The Child and Parent Relationship, Part 2
Ephesians 6:4 commands fathers not to provoke their children to wrath, but to bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord — a positive obligation grounded in the fifth commandment and the sanctifying work of the Spirit in the believer's life. This sermon expounds that single verse within the broader household code of Ephesians 5:22–6:9, situating Christian parenting as a fruit of sovereign grace rather than a means of earning it. The prohibition against provoking children is unpacked through five practical failures — unrighteous anger, unbiblical discipline, inconsistency, partiality, and imbalance of law and gospel — before the exhortation to train and admonish is developed from the book of Proverbs under four marks of a faithful parent. The sermon closes with concrete applications: pray for children, provide for them, protect them, preach law and gospel to them, and be present with them.
The Wisdom of Little Things
Proverbs 30:24–28 presents four creatures — ants, rock badgers, locusts, and spiders — that are little on the earth yet exceedingly wise, each compensating for weakness through a distinct form of wisdom. The sermon argues that these creatures function as divinely appointed patterns for human imitation, both temporally (in diligence, self-defense, unity, and perseverance) and spiritually (in preparing for the day of judgment, fleeing to Christ as refuge, advancing together as the church, and persisting in heavenly ambition). Self-awareness of one's own weakness is the prerequisite to each form of compensatory wisdom, and pride is its chief enemy. The great spiritual application is that the weak and feeble, who have no righteousness of their own, find their only refuge in Christ — the rock of salvation who hides them from the torrent of God's just wrath.
The Promise of the Messiah
Genesis 3:14–24 contains the first announcement of the gospel — the proto-evangel — in which God promises that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent, though at the cost of his own suffering and death. The sermon traces four observations from verse 15: the Redeemer would be a man born of a woman, would accomplish victory through suffering, through death, and in total victory over the devil. The latter half of the passage is then examined for the hope that extends beyond the fall: Adam's naming of Eve as 'mother of all living' as an act of faith in God's promise, and God's provision of tunics of skin as a typological foreshadowing of blood atonement. The hearer is urged to cast faith upon the seed of the woman — the Lord Jesus Christ — who has done what Adam and Eve, and what every sinner, could not do for themselves.
The Problem of Sin and the Mercy of God
Proverbs 28:13 identifies sin as the universal human problem and prescribes confession and forsaking of sin as the divinely appointed remedy. The sermon examines four aspects of the problem — the twin assumptions of universal sinfulness and the instinct to conceal it, biblical examples of attempted cover-up from Genesis to Acts, the common methods by which sinners suppress or redefine sin, and the cursed outcome of impenitence in both this age and the age to come. The remedy is traced through the exercise of faith (confession as agreement with God and trust in Christ's blood and righteousness), genuine repentance (forsaking sin rather than merely regretting it), and the certain merciful result — not a possibility but a promise — for all who lay hold of Christ as surety.
The Faithful Christian Mother
Proverbs 31:28–30 presents the faithful Christian mother not merely as a moral exemplar but as a woman whose fear of the Lord is itself the fruit of sovereign grace — a grace Jeremiah 32 promises God will plant in the hearts of his covenant people. The sermon works through four aspects of the Christian mother's calling: her condition before God, her influence over her children, her God-given authority over them (rooted in the fifth commandment), and her fourfold responsibility to instruct, to set an example, to discipline, and to love. Mothers are urged to press law and gospel upon their children tirelessly, to embrace corporal and verbal discipline without apology, and to find their ultimate confidence not in their own faithfulness but in Christ, the stellar Savior, whose life, death, and resurrection is the only ground of acceptance before God.
The Wisdom of Little Things
Proverbs 30:24–28 presents four creatures — ants, conies, locusts, and a spider or lizard — each marked by inherent weakness yet possessing a compensatory wisdom that enables them to thrive. Expounding Agur's numerical proverb, this sermon draws out four corresponding virtues for the people of God: industry in preparation, caution before danger, unity in cooperation, and persistence under adversity. Both temporal and spiritual dimensions of each lesson are developed — from Sabbatarian labor ethics and self-defense to readiness for the day of judgment and the endurance of the Christian race. The whole is gathered under a call to honest self-awareness: to know one's limitations, refuse indolence and complaint, and by grace overcome through wisdom.
The Ethics of Motherhood
Titus 2:3–5 sets older women in the church as instructors of younger women in the domestic virtues that honor the created order and adorn the doctrine of God. Against a cultural moment that treats the word 'mother' as offensive and obliterates God-wrought gender distinction, the passage calls women to love husbands and children, to exercise discretion, chastity, and diligence in the home, and to submit to their own husbands — not as cultural accommodation but as a reflection of the eternal created order grounded in Genesis and reaffirmed by Christ's redemption. The overarching rationale Paul supplies is theological: the conduct of women in household and church either blasphemes or adorns the Word of God before a watching world. The sermon closes by grounding every duty in grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, warning that no degree of faithful motherhood constitutes grounds for justification.
The Problem of Sin and the Mercy of God
Proverbs 28:13 sets the problem of sin and its remedy in sharp relief: the one who covers his sin will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes sin will have mercy. The sermon works through the anatomy of sin-covering — denial, minimization, blame-shifting, and self-righteousness — with biblical examples ranging from Adam and Eve to Ananias and Sapphira, demonstrating the futility of every human attempt at self-atonement. Confession is shown to be not merely verbal acknowledgment but a saving act of faith in Christ, inseparably joined to repentance, whereby the sinner lays the hand of faith upon the surety of the new covenant and receives imputed righteousness. The closing application calls both unbeliever and believer to stop covering sin and look in faith to Christ, the only authorized covering for guilt before a holy God.
The Christian Husband/Father
The duties of the Christian husband and father are examined through the book of Proverbs, with Proverbs 4:1–9 as the anchor text and wide-ranging support from Deuteronomy and the New Testament. The sermon sets forth the godly husband as one who fears the Lord, deals with sin, provides for his household, protects his wife, communicates faithfully, and maintains sexual purity. The Christian father is then treated under four heads — being a godly man, loving his children, instructing them in word and life, and disciplining them with both verbal correction and, when necessary, the rod — all exercised in love rather than anger or indulgence. The closing application calls fathers to confess sin before their households, pray for and preach law and gospel to their children, and rest not in their own performance but in the imputed righteousness of Christ.
Genesis 40:1-23
Genesis 40 records the imprisonment of Pharaoh's chief butler and chief baker alongside Joseph, the dreams God gave them, and Joseph's divinely sourced interpretation of those dreams. The chapter turns on Joseph's declaration that interpretations belong to God alone — a polemical claim against Egyptian dream-divination — and on the bitter irony that the butler, restored exactly as Joseph predicted, promptly forgot the man who served him. Working through the three movements of the chapter (the imprisonment, the dreams, and their fulfillment), this study shows God's providence operating through every injustice and disappointment to advance Joseph toward his appointed exaltation, demonstrating that God never forsakes his people even in the deepest pit.
The Death Penalty
Genesis 9:6 grounds the biblical mandate for capital punishment in the image of God: to shed human blood unlawfully is to assault God himself, and the prescribed penalty reflects the weight of that offense. This sermon works through the Noahic covenant as a common-grace ordinance never abrogated, traces the continuity of capital punishment into the New Testament through Romans 13, and then systematically answers both biblical and pragmatic objections — including the mistranslation of Exodus 20:13, the pacifist reading of Matthew 5:38–42, and the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Believers are called to submit to the whole counsel of God on this issue, even where it cuts against cultural sentiment, because consistency with Scripture requires affirming what God has commanded for the governance of civil society.
Genesis 37:1-36
Genesis 37 presents the opening of the Joseph narrative: the dreams God gives to the favored son of Jacob, and the murderous hatred those dreams ignite in his brothers. The chapter lays bare the doctrine of total depravity — not as an abstraction, but as nine covenant sons who strip their brother, cast him into a pit, and sell him into slavery while eating a meal over his cries. Yet the brothers' treachery is the unwitting instrument of divine providence: they mean it for evil, but God overrules it for the very exaltation the dreams foretold. Joseph's story is also read as typology, with John Gill's extended parallel showing Joseph as a type of Christ — beloved son, rejected by his own, sold, reckoned dead, yet ultimately exalted.
Genesis 36
Genesis 36 presents the genealogy of Esau (Edom), a passage easily dismissed as a bare list of names. This study examines why Moses inserts this extended genealogy at the precise hinge between the narrative of Isaac and the narrative of Jacob, arguing that it serves as a demonstration of divine faithfulness: God fulfilled every promise made to the non-elect son — nationhood, territorial blessing, and temporal prosperity — which grounds the believer's confidence that His covenant promises to the elect will be no less certainly realized. The contrast between Esau's temporal inheritance and Jacob's spiritual and eternal inheritance sharpens the distinction between common providence and saving grace, and the goodness God shows even to the reprobate is intended to lead sinners to repentance.
Genesis 35
Genesis 35 traces Jacob's return to Bethel, the deaths of Rachel and Isaac, the treachery of Reuben, and the enumeration of Jacob's twelve sons. The chapter centers on God's sovereign renewal of His covenant with Jacob — reiterating the promises of seed and land given to Abraham and Isaac — at precisely the moment Jacob is most fearful and morally compromised. The sermon argues that God's repetition of covenant promises is not for His own memory but for the stabilization of His people's faith, and that the means of grace — Scripture, prayer, corporate worship, and the Lord's Supper — function as God's appointed conduits for fortifying His people to persevere through affliction, loss, and moral failure.
Genesis 32:1-33:20
Genesis 32–33 traces Jacob's return to Canaan through two defining encounters: his anxious preparation to meet the murderous Esau, and his night-long wrestling match with the angel of the Lord at Peniel. The passage displays the doctrine of providence at its most intimate — God present with his elect patriarch through angelic visitation, theophany, and sovereign orchestration of Esau's heart, all in service of preserving the Messianic seed. Jacob's prayer in 32:9–12, structured around God's command, his own unworthiness, a specific petition, and the covenant promise, models how the saints argue for deliverance on the basis of God's own glory. The Peniel encounter is the turning point in Jacob's life: renamed Israel, he emerges reborn — courage replacing cowardice, humility replacing arrogance — to meet Esau in reconciliation and settle at last in the land of promise.
Genesis 30:25-31:21
Genesis 30:25–31:21 narrates Jacob's negotiation with Laban over wages, his departure from Haran, and his flight toward Canaan after twenty years of servitude. The central question the passage presses is whether Jacob's prosperity arose from his own shrewdness or from the sovereign God of the covenant — and the narrative answers decisively in favor of divine providence, paralleling the earlier mandrakes episode in chapter 30 and anticipating the Exodus. The sermon traces Jacob's spiritual maturity, the covenantal logic that ties the Abrahamic land-and-seed promise to this one family's preservation, and God's faithfulness to His people in both prosperity and affliction.
Genesis 27
Genesis 27 presents the deception of Isaac by Rebekah and Jacob to secure the patriarchal blessing, and a careful reading reveals that every member of the family acts in an unprincipled manner — yet God's covenantal promise advances without interruption. The blessing conveyed upon Jacob is the Abrahamic covenant itself being passed to the son of promise, a line that runs through Israel and terminates in the Lord Jesus Christ as the seed of Genesis 3:15. Ambrose's allegory, endorsed by Calvin, illuminates the typological force of the episode: as Jacob entered the presence of his father clothed in borrowed garments carrying their distinctive odor, so believers enter the presence of the heavenly Father clothed in the imputed righteousness of Christ. The chapter is a sustained argument for the sovereignty of divine election and the grace of God, which operates not because of human virtue but in spite of its spectacular absence.
Genesis 25:1-34
Genesis 25 records the closing of Abraham's life and the opening of Isaac's story, setting the stage for the covenant line to advance through election rather than nature or merit. The passage contrasts Ishmael's twelve princes — fulfilling God's promise to Hagar — with Isaac's barren household, where twenty years of earnest prayer precede the miraculous conception of twin sons whose prenatal struggle prefigures the enmity between Israel and Edom. The chapter culminates in the profaneness of Esau, who despises his birthright for a single meal, illustrating the danger of immediate gratification over covenant inheritance — a warning the author of Hebrews applies directly to apostasy. God's sovereignty in election, his faithfulness across generations, and the incremental advance of the covenant promise toward Christ are the governing themes throughout.
Judah and Tamar
Genesis 38 interrupts the Joseph narrative to focus on Judah, the man through whom the Messianic line would descend — and the portrait is not flattering. Judah marries a Canaanite, fathers wicked sons, withholds Shelah from Tamar in violation of levirate obligation, and solicits what he believes to be a roadside harlot. Yet God, faithful to His covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, protects the seed through Tamar's act of faith and brings forth Perez, the ancestor of David and of the Lord Jesus Christ. The sermon calls hearers to marvel at a grace that saves wretched sinners — not because of their worthiness, but because God always does what He has promised to do.
Genesis 23
Genesis 23 records the death of Sarah and Abraham's purchase of the cave of Machpelah — a passage that reads like a legal contract but carries profound theological weight. Abraham's insistence on paying full price for the burial plot, rather than accepting it as a gift from the Canaanites, reflects the same principle he articulated in Genesis 14: he will not allow any pagan to claim credit for what God has promised. The purchase functions as a sacramental down payment on the covenant promise of the land, anticipating Israel's future inheritance of Canaan in its entirety. The sermon closes by drawing on Hebrews 11 to commend the faith of Sarah, who — through childlessness, displacement, and affliction — judged God faithful who had promised.
The Purity of God's Word
Proverbs 30:5–6 presents two inseparable claims: every word of God is pure, and God is a shield to those who trust him. This sermon expounds the purity of Scripture as an attribute derived from the character of God himself, extends it across every genre and testament, and anchors it in the New Testament's own witness to its inspiration and authority. The warning of verse 6 — that adding to God's words brings divine rebuke and the verdict of liar — is applied not only to unbelieving Judaism, Roman Catholic tradition, and Charismatic continuationism, but to the Reformed believer's own temptation to bind consciences where God has not legislated. Hearers are called to read the whole counsel of God daily, to rest in its sufficiency, and to resist every impulse to place human words on a level with or in competition with divine revelation.
Genesis 20:1-18
Genesis 20 records Abraham's deceptive half-truth to Abimelech, king of Gerar — a relapse into the same sin committed in Egypt — and God's sovereign intervention to protect both Sarah's honor and the line of promised seed. The passage reveals that not every pagan city is a Sodom: God's common grace produces genuine integrity in Abimelech, whom the Lord acknowledges and restrains, while Abraham's fear exposes a distrust of divine providence that God graciously overcomes. The birth of Isaac in chapter 21 is secured not by human faithfulness but by the sovereign God who closes and opens wombs, curses those who threaten His covenant people, and blesses those who bless them. The sermon calls believers to rest in the past faithfulness of God as a present argument against fear and self-protective deception.
The Joy of Keeping God's Law
Proverbs 29:18 sets before us two contrasting conditions: the lawlessness that follows the absence of God's revealed word, and the happiness that accompanies obedience to that word. This sermon works through the classic Reformed threefold use of the law — civil/political, pedagogical, and normative — applying the first two uses to the unbeliever and the third to the justified believer. The practical conclusion is that keeping God's law is simultaneously a consequence of justifying faith, a means of promoting assurance of salvation, and an expression of gratitude to God for sovereign grace.
Genesis 19:12-29
Genesis 19:12–29 recounts the deliverance of Lot from Sodom and the destruction of the cities of the plain, and this study expounds both events as windows into the character of God and the weakness of the righteous. Lot's spiritual sluggishness — his lingering, his misplaced requests, and his compromised family — traces back to the wrong choice recorded in Genesis 13, illustrating how an unscriptural settlement among the worldly dims spiritual discernment over time. Yet the text twice identifies God's mercy, not Lot's righteousness, as the ground of his deliverance, and verse 29 explicitly connects that deliverance to God's covenant with Abraham. The practical call is to think biblically about residence, vocation, and marriage, and to rest in the imputed righteousness of Christ while pursuing practical godliness.
Genesis 19:1-11
Genesis 19:1–11 confronts readers with the full depravity of Sodom: every inhabitant, old and young, assembles to commit sexual violence against the angelic visitors. The passage demonstrates that God's judgment upon the cities of the plain was just and righteous, because the wickedness was total and unrepentant. The study moves from the narrative to a systematic survey of the Bible's teaching on homosexuality — from the creation order in Genesis 2, through the Levitical prohibitions and Pauline condemnations in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6, to the sobering word of Christ in Matthew 11 that rejecting the gospel carries a heavier judgment than Sodom itself bore. The closing application holds out the gospel as the only genuine remedy: homosexuality is a sin like other sins, and where there is sin, there is forgiveness through the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Antithesis between the Upright and the Wicked
Proverbs 29:27 declares a mutual abomination between the upright and the wicked — a reality rooted not in mere personality conflict but in the God-ordained enmity of Genesis 3:15. This sermon traces that antithesis from its origin in the protoevangelium through its characteristics in Proverbs 30:11–14 (rebelliousness, self-righteousness, arrogance, and oppression), and into its New Testament confirmation in John 15 and 1 John 3. Believers are called to respond to a godless generation not with violence or character assassination, but with righteous indignation tempered by tears, faithful parental discipline, proclamation of God's law, and the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.