Cited in sermons
C.S. Lewis
68 sermons · All people cited
Ask FGBC Batch 8: Church Planting, Creation, Imprecatory Psalms & More | Reformed Baptist Theology
This Q&A episode addresses ten questions spanning ecclesiology, pneumatology, soteriology, and worship, drawing on confessional Reformed Baptist commitments throughout. Topics range from church planting and confessional subscription to the nature of saving faith versus assurance, the love of God for the non-elect, literal six-day creation, the theology of imprecatory psalms, and the regulative principle of worship as it applies to musical instruments and the offering. The consistent thread is that Scripture and the 1689 London Baptist Confession provide the sufficient framework for answering practical and doctrinal questions facing Reformed Baptist churches today.
The Danger of Neglecting the Means of Grace
Hebrews 2:1–4 issues the first formal exhortation of the letter: pay much closer attention to what you have heard, lest you drift away from so great a salvation. The sermon traces the logic from Hebrews 1 — the Son of God is the final and supreme Word of God, surpassing angels, prophets, and every prior mediator — to the terribleness of neglecting that Word. Three causes of drift are identified: over-familiarity with the gospel, allowing lesser things to displace the greater, and the hardening of the heart through closed ears. The remedy is the faithful use of the means of grace — the gathered assembly, preaching, baptism, and the Lord's Supper — through which Christ continues to speak to his people.
Life in the Wilderness and Canaan
Deuteronomy 8 sets the wilderness generation of Israel before the land of Canaan with a threefold movement: a reminder of God's providential humbling in the wilderness (vv. 1–5), a promise of abundant blessing in the land (vv. 6–10), and a solemn warning against the pride and forgetfulness that prosperity tends to generate (vv. 11–20). The wilderness was not divine cruelty but divine chastening — designed to produce dependence on God rather than self-sufficiency — a pattern the New Testament applies both to the believer's ongoing trials and to the person of Christ, who as the true Israel recapitulates the exodus, wilderness, and restoration that old covenant Israel failed to embody faithfully. The sermon closes by calling hearers to combat forgetfulness of God through regular remembrance of his word, his covenant, and his redemptive acts, recognising that the danger is never prosperity itself but the pride that severs gratitude from grace.
The Dominion of the Incarnate Son
Psalm 8 is not merely a meditation on creation but a messianic prophecy concerning the dominion of the incarnate Son of God. The sermon traces the psalm's double register — the glory of God manifest in the created order and the glory of God manifest in the incarnation — grounding that interpretation in the two New Testament passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul explicitly apply Psalm 8 to Christ: Matthew 21 and Hebrews 2. The exaltation of the God-man at the right hand of the Father, his conquest of the devil through death, and his propitiation for the sins of his people are shown to be the true fulfillment of the dominion language of verses 4–8. Believers are exhorted to silence the enemy's accusations against them by invoking the blood and righteousness of Christ, which is the ground of both justification and assurance.
The Eighth Commandment (Part 1)
The Eighth Commandment — 'You shall not steal' (Deuteronomy 5:19) — forbids far more than simple theft. This study works through the range of sins prohibited by the command, including burglary, robbery, kidnapping, fraud in its several forms, extortion, destruction of property, and religious theft. The internal dispositions that generate these external acts — covetousness, discontentment, and the idolatry of wealth — are examined through texts in Proverbs, 1 Timothy 6, and Matthew 6. The study closes by grounding the positive duty of honest labor and cheerful giving in the grace of the gospel, through which believers are freed from the dominion of covetousness and equipped to honor God with what He has entrusted to them.
The Description of Discipleship
Matthew 16:24–27 sets out the terms of Christian discipleship: self-denial, cross-bearing, and the daily following of Christ. The sermon distinguishes a superficial willingness to die for Jesus from the harder, quieter obedience of living for him — reading Scripture, praying, attending the assembly, and ordering family life under the Word. The whole argument is framed by the eschatological contrast between temporal gain and eternal loss, with the coming judgment of the Son of Man serving as the decisive motivation for prioritising Christ over wealth, comfort, and self. Justification by faith alone is never undermined; rather, the life of discipleship is presented as the necessary and inevitable fruit of genuine saving grace.
The Scourging and Mockery of Jesus
What was Pilate attempting when he ordered Jesus scourged and permitted the soldiers' mock enthronement? This exposition of John 19:1–4 argues that Pilate's scourging of Jesus was a failed act of crowd appeasement by a governor who knew he was condemning an innocent man, while the soldiers' mockery staged a deliberate parody of royal investiture against one they took for a pretender to Jewish kingship. The sermon draws Isaiah 50 and 53 and Psalm 109 into the foreground to show that these sufferings were neither accidental nor outside the decree of God — the Father delivered up the Son, the Servant of Yahweh gave his back to those who struck him, and the imprecatory prayer of Psalm 109 illuminates the inner life of Christ before his accusers. The application presses the congregation to feel the weight of substitutionary suffering, to resist a superficial Christianity untouched by the cost of redemption, and to confess Christ's lordship now rather than in the judgment.
CTF 2025 - Session 4 – The Depth of God’s Eternal and Incomprehensible Nature
What does it mean for God to be eternal, and can finite creatures truly know an incomprehensible God? This conference session works through the classical doctrine of divine eternity — arguing from divine simplicity, immutability, and infinity that God's eternity is not endless temporal succession but the timeless, simultaneous, and perfect possession of boundless life — before turning to divine incomprehensibility, which is not a confession of ignorance but the recognition that the knowledge God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses the creature's capacity to measure or contain it. The session draws on Boethius, Augustine, Turretin, Charnock, Owen, and Bavinck to show that the two doctrines are inseparable, and closes with Solomon's prayer in 1 Kings 8 as a doxological meditation: if heaven itself cannot contain God, no created mind can comprehend him, and that inexhaustibility is the very ground of endless worship.
The Priority in the Believer's Life
Jesus commands his disciples not to worry about life, body, or tomorrow in Matthew 6:25–34, grounding the prohibition in three realities: God's providential care demonstrated in birds and lilies, the contrast between Gentile obsession and the believer's knowledge of a knowing Father, and the governing priority of verse 33 — seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. The sermon argues that carnal anxiety is theologically inconsistent for the Reformed believer: one who confesses God's comprehensive sovereignty in salvation yet surrenders to worry about temporal provision has applied Calvinism selectively. The antidote is not mere positive thinking but the cultivation of contentment rooted in the imputed righteousness of Christ, which grants entrance into the very kingdom we are commanded to seek first.
Ask FGBC #14: How do we connect modern day Israel to Old & New Covenant Promises?
How should Christians understand the modern state of Israel, the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, and the land promises in light of the New Testament? This Q&A exchange argues that the church is not a replacement for Israel but is the eschatological Israel of Old Testament prophecy — one people of God, Jew and Gentile together, united in Christ. Dispensationalism's two-peoples-of-God framework is evaluated and rejected on hermeneutical grounds, with Romans 11, the Davidic covenant, and the land promise examined in turn. The conversation broadens into the necessity of reading Scripture canonically and horizontally, the value of confessionalism, and the danger of allowing political rhetoric to distort biblical interpretation.
The Mission of the Disciples, Part 2
John 14:16–18 presents Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit as the resource by which the disciples would carry out the greater works of the gospel mission. This sermon works through the foundation of that promise — salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone, the love that flows from justification as the animating power of obedience and mission — before pausing to mount a sustained defense of Trinitarian theology proper. The preacher argues that biblicism without creedal guardrails, anti-intellectualism, and laziness have left the contemporary church vulnerable to the same Trinitarian errors the Nicene and Chalcedonian fathers labored to foreclose, and calls the congregation to pursue the knowledge of the triune God as the very substance of eternal life.
The Priority in the Believer's Life
Jesus prohibits anxiety over material provision in Matthew 6:25–34, grounding that prohibition in the sovereign care of a Father who already knows what His people need. The passage is expounded under two heads: the repeated prohibition against worry concerning life, body, and tomorrow (vv. 25–32), and the governing principle that believers are to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (vv. 33–34). The sermon argues that chronic anxiety about temporal things is functionally Gentile thinking — a failure to translate sound doctrine of divine sovereignty and providence into the ordinary rhythms of daily life. The remedy is not mere willpower but a rightly ordered theology: what a man truly believes about God will determine whether he lives as a kingdom-seeking servant or as one paralyzed by the concerns of this world.
The Necessity of Christ's Passion
Matthew 16:21–23 presents the first formal announcement of what Christ himself calls a divine necessity: he must go to Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the elders and chief priests, be killed, and be raised on the third day. The sermon traces this necessity through the covenant of redemption, the Old Testament prophetic witness — Psalms 22, 69, and 110, Isaiah 52–53, Daniel 9, Zechariah 9–14 — and a series of informal anticipations across Matthew's Gospel. Peter's sharp rebuke is examined as a representative failure to grasp the messianic agenda of a suffering Servant, and Christ's equally sharp response — 'Get behind me, Satan' — is shown to be the definitive affirmation that substitutionary curse-bearing is non-negotiable: error here is not a skin disease but a disease at the heart. The congregation is urged to hold fast to the doctrine of Christ crucified and risen as the only stable ground of perseverance in the Christian life.
Introduction to the 1677/1789 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith
The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith — formally composed in 1677 and adopted by particular Baptist churches in 1689 — stands in deliberate continuity with the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, adapting their language to reflect distinctively Baptist convictions while maintaining solidarity with the broader Reformed tradition. This introductory session traces the Confession's historical origins, its relationship to the First London Confession of 1644–46, and the legal and ecclesiastical context in which particular Baptists operated under the Act of Toleration. Six reasons are then advanced for why a 21st-century church should subscribe to a 17th-century confession: to define, defend, discriminate, discipline, distinguish matters of Christian liberty, and develop an appreciation for the history of the church. The session closes by urging that confessionalism, rightly understood, is not proud biblicism but the humble reception of gifts Christ has given to his church across the ages.
The Identity of the Good Shepherd
John 10:22–30 records the climactic confrontation in Solomon's Porch during the Feast of Dedication, where Jesus answers the persistent demand to declare his identity plainly. He does so not with new information but by pressing what he has already said — through his works, his doctrine, and his relation to the Father — culminating in the declaration 'I and my Father are one,' a statement the unbelieving Jews rightly understood as a claim to full divine essence. The sermon traces five movements in verses 25–30: the declaration, confirmation, rejection, recognition, and affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, with extended treatment of the sovereignty of God in salvation, the security of the sheep grounded in both the Son and the Father, and the ontological unity of Father and Son against both Arian and Sabellian error. Believers are called to rest in the particular, efficacious, and irrevocable redemption accomplished by the Good Shepherd, and those outside Christ are called to hear his voice and believe.
The Promise of Eternal Life
Isaiah 55 presents God's universal, gracious, and free invitation for sinners to come to Christ for life eternal — an invitation that has never changed from Genesis to Revelation. The sermon expounds the chapter in two movements: the invitation to come (vv. 1–5), grounded in covenant promise and secured by the Davidic king, and the exhortation to believe and repent (vv. 6–13), which calls sinners to faith and a change of mind toward sin. God's thoughts are not man's thoughts precisely because He pardons abundantly where man would not, and His word goes forth with certain efficacy to accomplish all He purposes in the salvation of sinners from every nation.
The Prohibition Against Judgmentalism
Matthew 7:1–5 is among the most frequently misapplied texts in Scripture, routinely weaponised to silence any and all Christian judgment. This sermon from the Sermon on the Mount demonstrates that Christ's prohibition targets not judgment as such but the censorious, fault-finding, hypercritical spirit endemic to the Pharisees and to fallen human nature generally. The preacher surveys five legitimate spheres of Christian judgment — identifying false teachers, exercising church discipline, addressing sins of elders, and rendering civil judgments — before expositing the speck-and-plank illustration as Christ's indictment of hypocrisy. The sermon closes with practical counsel for mortifying judgmentalism through dependence on the Holy Spirit, the pursuit of humility, and a right understanding of remaining corruption in oneself and in one's neighbour.
The 8th Command - You Shall Not Steal
Exodus 20:15 — 'You shall not steal' — encompasses far more than common burglary. This study works through the range of sins prohibited by the Eighth Commandment, from robbery and kidnapping to fraud, extortion, the destruction of property, and the robbing of God through withheld tithes, before examining the inner dispositions — covetousness, discontentment, and idolatry — that drive those external violations. The theological grounding for the command rests on three pillars: God's sovereignty as owner of all things, the position of man as steward and vice-regent, and the recognition that an attack on another's property is an indirect attack on the life that property sustains. The study closes with a direct application to civil government, arguing that unjust taxation, inflation, and redistributive economic systems are themselves violations of 'you shall not steal.'
The Bread of Life Discourse, Part 1
John 6:22–34 records the opening exchange of the bread of life discourse, in which Jesus confronts a crowd whose pursuit of Him is driven entirely by physical appetite rather than spiritual need. The sermon works through three movements: the exposed motive of the people (vv. 22–26), the Savior's exhortation to labor for food that endures to everlasting life (vv. 27–29), and the crowd's demand for a sign to rival Moses (vv. 30–34). Central to the exposition is Jesus' declaration that the 'work of God' is faith in the One the Father has sent — a faith that is itself God's gift — and His identification of Himself as the true bread of God who comes down from heaven to give life to the world, surpassing the manna of the wilderness and extending to every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
The Consubstantiality of the Son, Part 1
John 5:16–23 records the Jewish charge that Jesus made himself equal with God — and Christ's unequivocal affirmation of that charge. Working through verses 16–23, this sermon demonstrates that Jesus responds not by correcting a misunderstanding but by confirming, through four lines of argument, that he is consubstantial with the Father: sharing the same works, the same love, the same life-giving power, and the same sovereign rule. The stakes are ultimate — to dishonor the Son is to dishonor the Father, and to lack the Son is to lack God entirely.
2LCF Chapter 8 - Of Christ the Mediator, Part 1
Chapter 8 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession opens with the pre-temporal appointment of Christ as mediator in the covenant of redemption, then moves to the historical stages of that mediatorial work, beginning with the incarnation. The confession affirms that the Son of God, consubstantial and co-eternal with the Father, took on true human nature — with all its essential properties and common infirmities, yet without sin — so that two whole and distinct natures are inseparably united in one person: the hypostatic union. Drawing on John 1, Hebrews 2, 4, and 7, Galatians 4, and the Chalcedonian Definition of 451, the study traces the biblical and creedal foundations of Reformed Christology, and shows how the confession's language connects the Reformed Baptist tradition to the settled Christological consensus of the ancient church.
The Depravity of Man
Romans 1:18–32 presents the universal human condition as one of willful suppression of God's self-disclosure in creation, resulting in inexcusability before a holy God. The sermon traces three movements in the passage: the revelation of divine wrath, the reason for that wrath in humanity's idolatrous exchange of the Creator for the creature, and the nature of God's judgment as a punitive giving-over of sinners to the very sins they pursued. The sermon argues that the preaching of the law — including the full weight of human depravity — is indispensable to the proclamation of the gospel, because sinners must understand their ruin before they will look to the remedy of blood atonement in Christ alone.
December 1, 2021 - Wednesday Night Bible Study - Exodus 20:1-3 (1st Commandment)
Exodus 20:3 — 'You shall have no other gods before me' — is expounded through both its prohibitions and its positive demands. The first commandment condemns atheism, polytheism, syncretism, idolatry, sorcery, and heresy, while positively requiring the knowledge, love, fear, obedience, trust, and worship of the one true and living God alone. The sermon draws on Romans 1:18-32 to show that ungodliness — disordered thinking about God — is the root from which all societal unrighteousness springs. The sermon closes with a call to repentance, to flee to Christ as the remedy for every violation of this commandment, and to cultivate the knowledge of God as the chief guard against idolatry in its ancient and modern forms.
The Pharisee and the Publican
This exposition of Luke 18:9–14 examines the parable of the Pharisee and the publican as a penetrating diagnosis of self-righteousness and a declaration of justification by faith alone. The sermon works through the occasion of the parable, the contrasted characters of the two men, and Christ's concluding verdict that the tax collector — not the Pharisee — went home justified. The central contention is that acceptance before God rests entirely on the imputed righteousness of Christ received through faith, not on any moral performance or religious accomplishment, and that those who understand this will be marked by humility rather than contempt toward others.
The Incarnation of the Word, Part 2
John 1:15–17 presents the preeminence of the incarnate Word and the fullness of grace and truth that flows from Him to needy sinners. The testimony of John the Baptist — that Christ ranks before him because He was before him — is an affirmation of Christ's co-eternity, distinctness, and consubstantiality with the Father, in accord with the Nicene Creed. Verse 17 is not a sharp antithesis between Moses and Jesus but a contrast in the mode of divine revelation: the law was mediated through Moses, while grace and truth came through the mediator Himself, who is the very embodiment of God's glory. The sermon calls hearers to stand in awe of the preeminent Redeemer, to find every spiritual need met in His inexhaustible fullness, and to close with Christ without delay.
The Thief on the Cross
What does the conversion of a man guilty of insurrection and murder on the day of his execution reveal about the grace of God? This exposition of Luke 23:39–43 traces the marks of sovereign grace in the dying thief — his fear of God, his ownership of personal guilt, his acknowledgment of Christ's sinlessness, and his faith cast entirely upon a crucified Lord — before turning to the willing and able Savior who, in the extremity of his own suffering, assures a notorious criminal of immediate paradise. The sermon argues that justification is by faith alone, apart from works, baptism, or religious knowledge, and that the distinguishing mercy shown to one thief and withheld from the other is the clearest emblem of sovereign grace. Hearers are pressed not to presume on a deathbed conversion but to cast themselves now, by grace, upon the mercy of Christ.
The Governing Principle of Kingdom Life
Anxiety is not a private struggle but a theological failure — a contradiction of the sovereignty of God confessed in the pew but abandoned in the heart. Expounding Matthew 6:25–34, this sermon works through Christ's fourfold structure in the Sermon on the Mount: the command not to worry, the indictment of those who do, the contrast between Gentile anxiety and covenant-child confidence, and the governing principle that kingdom life is regulated by seeking first God's kingdom and righteousness. The sermon closes with eight dangerous fruits of worry and a call to trust that the God who is absolutely sovereign in salvation is equally sovereign over food, clothing, and every daily crisis.
The First Missionary Journey, Part 10
Acts 14:8–18 presents Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, where a miraculous healing of a congenitally lame man provokes the crowd to mistake the apostles for Zeus and Hermes. The sermon moves through three movements: the healing and its spiritual significance, the apostles' repudiation of pagan worship, and Paul's proclamation of the living God to a purely pagan audience. Particular attention is given to the doctrine of divine impassibility — the classical confession that God is without passions — as the necessary corollary of divine immutability, with pastoral argument that this doctrine secures rather than undermines the believer's confidence in God's unchanging love and justice. The sermon closes with an appeal to repent of all idolatry and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Savior for sinners.
The First Commandment
The First Commandment — 'You shall have no other gods before me' (Deuteronomy 5:7) — demands both the rejection of every rival and the cultivation of genuine knowledge of the true and living God. The sermon works through the specific sins condemned by the commandment (atheism, polytheism, syncretism, idolatry, sorcery, heresy, and creature-worship), grounding each in Old and New Testament texts, before turning to the positive obligations the commandment requires: knowing God as Trinity, knowing His divine perfections, and knowing His external works in creation, providence, and redemption. The commandment functions pedagogically to expose humanity's chronic unfaithfulness and drive sinners to repentance, and normatively to call the redeemed to a rigorous, lifelong growth in the knowledge of who Yahweh is.
The Past as a Present Reminder
Hebrews 10:32–39 calls suffering believers to recall God's proven faithfulness in former days as the present ground for ongoing endurance. The apostle first rehearses the Hebrew Christians' early trials — public reproach, solidarity with persecuted brothers, and joyful acceptance of plundered possessions — showing that heavenly-mindedness, not stoic willpower, sustained them then and must sustain them now. He then exhorts them not to cast away their confidence, grounding Christian perseverance not in moral grit but in faith in the Son of God who loved and gave himself for his people. The sermon applies this to every believer: remember what God has done, set your hope on the enduring possession in heaven, and press forward by faith rather than drawing back to perdition.