Cited in sermons
John Calvin
990 sermons · All people cited
The Condemnation of Heartless Worship
Malachi 1:6–14 exposes a pattern of heartless worship among the priests and people of Israel who offered blind, lame, and stolen animals on God's altar — defective sacrifices that expressed contempt for God's table without a word being spoken. The sermon traces the prophetic structure of divine accusation, petulant human question, and divine refutation, then draws four implications: heartless worship is evil, it is common even among the redeemed, it reduces religion to external formalism, and it provokes the judgment of God. The application turns on the regulative principle of worship — that God alone defines acceptable approach to himself — and calls believers to pursue good theology, responsible leadership, and biblical worship, while calling the unconverted to look by faith to the Lamb of God.
The Glory of the Father and the Son
John 17:1–5 opens Christ's high priestly prayer with a petition that the Father glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify the Father — a reciprocal glorification whose goal is the glory of God Most High. The sermon works through three grounds for this petition: the salvation of the elect given to the Son in the covenant of redemption, the accomplishment of Christ's active and passive obedience as the basis of justification, and the restoration of the Son's pre-incarnate glory. The full deity of Christ is defended against subordinationist readings by surveying New Testament texts where the title theos is applied directly to Jesus, and the sermon closes with the call to pursue the knowledge of God and Christ as the very essence of eternal life — through Scripture reading, prayer, and faithful attendance upon the means of grace.
The Royal Purpose in the Incarnation
John 18:37 records Jesus declaring before Pontius Pilate, 'For this cause I was born,' identifying the incarnation with a royal purpose — he entered the world as king. This sermon expounds John 18:33–40, tracing the nature of Christ's kingdom (not originating from this world, yet encompassing it), the method by which that kingdom advances (through truth, not military force), and the prophecy of Isaiah 9:6–7 that illuminates both the king and his everlasting dominion. The listener is called to receive the truth Christ embodies rather than dismiss it as Pilate did.
The Decision of the Council
Acts 5:33–42 records the Sanhedrin's decision to beat the apostles and command them to cease preaching in the name of Jesus — and the apostles' rejoicing response. This exposition works through three movements: the council's murderous fury at Peter's gospel proclamation, the qualified wisdom of Gamaliel's historical and theological arguments for restraint, and the apostles' departure rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for the name. The sermon calls the congregation to a readiness for persecution that mirrors the apostles', grounded not in stoic resolve but in the altogether loveliness of Christ who is chief among ten thousand.
James 1:2-8
James 1:2–8 addresses two inseparable realities in the Christian life: the believer's response to trials and the believer's request during trials. Trials are not anomalies but expected instruments of divine sanctification — God's means of producing endurance, maturity, and conformity to the image of Christ. When wisdom is lacking in the midst of affliction, the prescribed remedy is not complaint but prayer, offered in faith to a God who gives liberally and without reproach. The double-minded man who doubts will be unsettled, unanswered, and unstable — a sobering warning to approach God with single-minded faith.
The Apostles' Defense before the Council
Acts 5:27–32 records the apostles' second arraignment before the Sanhedrin and their bold proclamation of the gospel under direct threat of punishment. Peter's reply — 'we ought to obey God rather than men' — establishes a permanent principle for the church: when civil or religious authority commands disobedience to God, the Christian is bound to God alone. The sermon expounds Peter's gospel proclamation in verses 30–32, treating the incarnation, crucifixion, exaltation, and gift of repentance as a coherent apostolic witness, and closes with exhortations to prepare for persecution, persevere in bold proclamation, and believe the message of forgiveness through Christ.
Genesis 10:1-32
Genesis 10, the 'table of nations,' traces the seventy nations descending from Shem, Ham, and Japheth after the flood — but Moses is doing far more than recording ethnography. The genealogy is a deliberate theological narrowing: from all nations, to Shem's line, to Eber's son Peleg, and ultimately to Abraham, identifying the family through whom the promised seed of Genesis 3:15 would come. The chapter also grounds the later Gentile inclusion in the covenant promises of God, confirming Noah's prophecy that Japheth would dwell in the tents of Shem — a reality James cites at the Jerusalem Council from Amos 9.
The Importance of the Knowledge of Christ
The most important question ever asked — 'Who do you say that I am?' — exposes a crisis in the contemporary church: a Ligonier survey found that 78% of polled evangelical Christians answered that Jesus Christ is the highest creature of God, effectively the ancient Arian heresy. This sermon works through Matthew 16:13–20 as a launching point, pressing seven reasons why the knowledge of Christ is of supreme importance: He is the scope of Scripture, eternal life hinges on a right knowledge of His person, the gospel is about Him, He is the exclusive way of salvation, all redemptive benefits are found in Him, the church's commission is given by and about Him, and our present and future hope rests in Him alone. The practical import of Christology — rightly defined as the dignity of Christ's person and the virtue of His office — is shown to bear on worship, humility, beneficence, good works, and steadfast confession.
The Benefactions of the Ascended Christ
The ascended Christ does not cease his mediatorial activity after the resurrection — he pours out benefactions upon his church. Preaching through Acts 2:22–43, this sermon examines two of three categories of those gifts: his charismatic benefactions (the gift of preachers, the act of preaching, and the Spirit's empowerment for proclamation) and his soteriological benefactions (effectual calling and the forgiveness of sins). Believers are urged to pray for their preachers, to come eager to hear the Word preached, and to give thanks daily for the grace by which God raises dead sinners to life in Christ.
The Imprisonment and Release of the Apostles
Acts 5:17–26 records the arrest, miraculous release, and re-arrest of the apostles at the hands of a Sanhedrin dominated by Sadducees — the very men who denied the existence of angels. The angel who opens the prison doors and the apostles who immediately return to temple preaching together demonstrate that no earthly authority can silence the gospel of Jesus Christ. This passage is treated as a paradigm for the church's experience throughout history: faithful proclamation will always draw persecution, yet Christ is building His church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The sermon calls hearers to remember the globally persecuted church, to pursue the boldness of the apostles, and to believe the words of this life — the gospel of forgiveness and imputed righteousness in Christ.
The Divine Provision of Eternal Life
Isaiah 55 presents God's gracious and urgent invitation to sinners to receive the fullness of salvation — the refreshment, gladness, and nourishment of the gospel — entirely without cost, because the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 has already satisfied the purchase price. The sermon expounds the chapter in two movements: the invitation to come (vv. 1–5), grounded in the new covenant and secured by the Davidic king, and the call to faith and repentance (vv. 6–13), sustained by the sovereign power of God's Word. Believers are urged to treasure the abundance of every spiritual blessing already given in Christ, and unbelievers are warned not to squander their lives on what cannot satisfy while the Lord may yet be found.
The Continuing Growth of the Church
Acts 5:12–16 presents the continuing growth of the early church through signs and wonders performed by the apostles, the addition of believers to the Lord, and the healing of multitudes from Jerusalem and surrounding cities. The passage raises a sharp question about the nature and purpose of miraculous signs: were they a permanent feature of church life, or did they serve the specific redemptive-historical function of authenticating the apostolic word? This sermon argues that signs and wonders accompanied Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles precisely to confirm that God was speaking through them, and that the completed canon renders such confirming signs unnecessary — while the power of God continues in the gospel through the Spirit-wrought conversion of sinners. Believers are called to trust the sufficiency of Scripture, gather in unified worship, fear God genuinely, and rest their hope for salvation in faith in Christ alone.
The Judgment of God in the Early Church
Acts 5:1–11 records the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, struck down by God for lying to the Holy Spirit. This sermon works through the passage under two headings: the deceitfulness of the couple (vv. 1–4) and the death they suffered by God's direct judgment (vv. 5–11). The preacher grounds the episode in a high doctrine of God — holy, just, and a consuming fire — and insists that the primary practical lesson is the fear of God, not merely ethical instruction about honesty. The sermon closes with the gospel: no one can stand before this holy Lord God except Christ alone, and all who are savingly united to Him by faith stand in Him.
The Unity and Charity in the Church
Acts 4:32–37 presents Luke's summary portrait of the early Jerusalem church under three headings: its unity, its apostolic instruction, and its generosity. The sermon argues that the voluntary, cheerful sharing of material resources among the believers was not a social programme but the fruit of gospel preaching — the apostles' witness to the resurrection of Christ produced the grace that moved God's people to give. Crucially, the passage grounds charity in justification: the people of God are not charitable in order to be saved, but because they have been saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. Hearers are called to examine whether their own generosity reflects the one-heartedness that true faith produces, and to resist any reduction of Christian giving to state-coerced redistribution or voluntary moralism divorced from the gospel.
Genesis 9:1-17
Genesis 9:1–17 records the establishment of the Noahic covenant, a common grace covenant God makes with all flesh — universal in scope and perpetual in duration — to preserve the created order as the stage for the proclamation of the gospel. The passage divides into the covenant's stipulations (vv. 1–7) and its sign (vv. 8–17), with the stipulations covering the propagation of life, provision through diet, and the protection of life via capital punishment. The theological ground of the death penalty is the image of God: to murder a man is to assault the divine image, and the only commensurate response is execution by the civil magistrate. Romans 13:1–4 confirms that this mandate is not confined to the Mosaic economy but continues wherever civil government wields the sword as God's appointed avenger.
The Prayer of the Church
Acts 4:23–31 records the first corporate prayer meeting of the apostolic church, gathered under threat from the Sanhedrin. The sermon traces three movements in the prayer — invocation of God as Creator and sovereign, exposition of Psalm 2 as prophetic preparation for the rage of nations against Christ and His people, and supplication not for the removal of threats but for boldness to preach the Word. The central argument is that a robust theology of creation, scriptural authority, and divine sovereignty is the necessary foundation of faithful prayer, and that the church's primary calling — confirmed by what the early church actually asked of God — is the bold proclamation of the gospel.
Genesis 8:1-22
Genesis 8 records the abatement of the flood, the exit of Noah's family from the ark, and God's covenantal promise never again to destroy every living creature by water. The chapter is structured as a mirror image of chapter 7: everything that came upon the earth in judgment now reverses in restoration. Noah's first act upon leaving the ark is not to secure food or shelter but to build an altar and offer burnt offerings — the response of a man who walks with God by grace through faith. God's promise in verses 21–22 establishes what will be developed in chapter 9 as the Noahic Covenant, a common-grace covenant that stabilises the created order so that God's redemptive purposes may unfold until Christ comes to deal definitively with sin.
The Deliberation of the Council
Acts 4:13–22 records the Sanhedrin's deliberation over Peter and John following the healing of a lame man and the apostolic proclamation of Christ's resurrection. The council faces an insoluble dilemma: the miracle is undeniable and publicly known, yet to leave the apostles unchallenged is to permit the gospel to spread unchecked. This sermon traces two broad movements — the deliberation of the council (vv. 13–17) and the attempt to silence the apostles (vv. 18–22) — and draws out the benefits of being with Jesus as seen in the apostles' boldness and wisdom, alongside the liabilities that attend any attempt to suppress the word of God. The application presses believers to pray for men of gospel courage and to resist every pressure, civil or ecclesiastical, to silence the name of Christ.
Genesis 7:1-24
Genesis 7 records the command to enter the ark and the arrival of the floodwaters — a worldwide, catastrophic judgment of God upon all flesh outside the ark, and a sovereign act of divine preservation for Noah and his household. The flood is not myth or moral fable but datable history, rooted in the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15: God preserves the seed of the woman so that Messiah may come. Noah's righteousness did not merit God's grace; rather, grace preceded and produced the faith that issued in obedience, with justification preceding sanctification — a pattern consistent throughout both Testaments. The ark stands as a type of Christ, the refuge for all of God's Noahs, and the passage calls believers to the same costly, faithful obedience Noah displayed in a faithless world.
Free Grace Baptist Church - September 19, 2018 Bible Study
Genesis 6:8–22 presents the flood narrative not primarily as natural history but as a theological tableau of human depravity, divine justice, and sovereign grace. The passage establishes a foundational biblical pattern: grace precedes and produces righteous conduct, so that Noah is not found righteous because he earned grace, but rather found blameless because God first granted him grace. The sermon traces the stark literary contrast between Noah, a man made just by divine mercy, and an earth filled with corruption and violence ripe for God's wrathful judgment, while drawing typological connections between Noah as a second Adam and the Ark as a figure of Christ, the shelter from divine wrath. Hearers are called to recognise that the same grace operative in Noah is the only distinction between the redeemed and the condemned, and to remain faithful in a faithless generation by looking beyond present trials to the God who sovereignly guides his people through judgment to life.
Livestream - Baptism: Wim Kerkhoff
Acts 8:26–40 records the conversion and baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, and this exposition sets that account against its Old Testament backdrop in Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 56 to show that what is happening is not merely one man's conversion but the fulfillment of covenant promises: the inclusion of those doubly excluded from the assembly of Israel. The sermon works through three movements — the divine appointment of the contact, the gospel communication beginning from Isaiah 53, and the conversion issuing in immediate baptism upon confession of faith. The central application is that God is characteristically and eagerly a saving God, that believers' baptism follows faith as its ordained external sign, and that no sinner — whether powerful or poor, crisis-converted or quietly brought to faith — is beyond the reach of sovereign grace.
Genesis 6:1-8
Genesis 6:1–8 presents some of the most contested verses in the Pentateuch alongside some of the clearest. The identity of the 'sons of God' in verses 1–4 has generated three major interpretive traditions — angelic beings, tyrannical rulers, and the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain — and the sermon surveys each view while favouring the Sethite interpretation without demanding confessional certainty on it. Verses 5–8 then deliver an unambiguous portrait of universal human depravity and the righteous judgment of God, interpreted through the theological categories of anthropomorphism and anthropopathism to guard the immutability and impassibility of God against misreading. The sermon closes by showing that grace precedes conduct in Noah's case, establishing the pattern that runs through all of Scripture: God's sovereign grace produces the righteousness it requires.
Genesis 5:1-32
Genesis 5 presents the genealogy of Adam through the godly line of Seth, tracing the covenant community from creation to Noah and ultimately to the Lord Jesus Christ. The relentless refrain 'and he died' across eight patriarchs confirms the execution of the curse pronounced in Genesis 3, while the singular exception of Enoch — who walked with God and was translated without death — serves as a visible foretaste of resurrection and eternal life. Walking with God, as Enoch's life demonstrates, is not reserved for extraordinary vocations but is the calling of every believer in every station of life, actuated by faith in Christ and ordered by the law of God as the rule of life.
Free Grace Baptist Church - September 2, 2018 PM
The wisdom of God in the gospel is displayed not in the nobility, intelligence, or virtue of those he saves, but in his sovereign, gracious election of the weak, the base, and the despised — so that no flesh might glory in his presence. Expounding 1 Corinthians 1:26–31, this sermon identifies the three spiritual blessings Christ has become for his people — righteousness (justification by imputed obedience), sanctification, and redemption (glorification) — as the full ordo salutis secured in union with Christ. The ground of salvation is traced through Romans 5, Philippians 3, Zechariah 3, and Acts 13 to demonstrate that the entire plan of redemption flows from God's sovereign grace, not human merit. The inevitable and proper response of those who have received these blessings is to glory in the Lord alone, not in themselves.
The First Murder
Genesis 4:1–16 records the first fratricide in human history, and this exposition reads that account as a theological document revealing the rapid escalation of sin from the fall in chapter 3. Cain's rejection is traced not to his vocation as a farmer but to his faithlessness — Abel's offering was accepted because it was offered in faith (Hebrews 11:4), while Cain's externalism and lack of genuine faith made his sacrifice an abomination. God's patient, gracious overtures to Cain before the murder underscore divine long-suffering, while Cain's murder of Abel illustrates the antithesis of Genesis 3:15 — the seed of the serpent attacking the seed of the woman — and the sermon closes by setting the blood of Abel, which cries out for condemnation, against the blood of Jesus, which speaks forgiveness.
The Consequences of the Fall
Genesis 3:14–24 records the divine sentences upon the serpent, the woman, and the man after the fall, but within those judgments God announces the first gospel promise. The Proto-Evangelion of verse 15 — that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent — is the programmatic nucleus of all subsequent redemptive history, finding its fulfilment in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Headship and labor, often misread as punishments of the fall, are shown to be pre-fall ordinances whose distortion, not existence, is the consequence of sin. The sermon closes with the coats of skin as an enacted prophecy of blood atonement and the expulsion from Eden as a mercy that preserves fallen man until the Second Adam secures permanent access to the tree of life.
The Sermon in Solomon's Porch, Part 1
Peter's sermon in Solomon's Porch (Acts 3:11–21) opens with a pointed denial: the healing of the congenitally lame man was not accomplished by apostolic power or godliness, but by the name of Jesus Christ, the glorified servant of Yahweh announced throughout the Old Testament prophets. The sermon works through three considerations in verses 11–16 — the God who glorified the servant, the sinners who rejected him, and the servant who healed the lame man — showing that Peter's staccato recitation of Jerusalem's guilt is not cruelty but evangelism: men must know the weight of their sin before the call to repent and be converted carries any urgency. The healing itself illustrates the completeness of Christ's saving work — perfect soundness, public and undeniable — and the authority he exercises from the right hand of the Father is the same authority by which sinners are saved today.
The Fall of Man
Genesis 3:1–13 confronts the reader with the anatomy of humanity's first rebellion against God: the serpent's subtle theological assault on God's word, the creature's willing capitulation, and the sinner's instinctive flight from the Creator. The sermon traces three movements — the temptation to sin (vv. 1–5), the fall into sin (vv. 6–7), and the reckoning with God (vv. 8–13) — showing how Satan's tactics in Eden (insinuating doubt about God's word, denying divine judgment, impugning divine goodness) remain the pattern of every temptation. The doctrines of federal headship, original sin, and divine sovereignty over the fall are drawn out from the text, and the Adam-Christ parallel of Romans 5 frames the only remedy: the skull-crushing seed of the woman who succeeds where Adam failed.
The Healing of the Lame Man
Acts 3:1–10 records the healing of a man lame from birth at the gate called Beautiful, and this exposition argues that the miracle is not an isolated wonder but a typological and redemptive event that displays the name and power of Jesus Christ while setting the stage for apostolic gospel proclamation. The man's condition — congenital, public, and long-standing — ensures that the miracle is conspicuous and undeniable, functioning to authenticate the apostles as God's spokesmen and to magnify the glory of the enthroned Christ. The church's calling, illustrated by Peter's declaration that he possesses no silver or gold but only the name of Christ, is the proclamation of the gospel and the forgiveness of sins, not the amelioration of every temporal need society presents. Those genuinely conquered by sovereign grace, like the healed man, are marked by worship, praise, and desire for the public means of grace.
Genesis 4:16-26
Genesis 4:16–26 traces two diverging lines from Adam: the ungodly line of Cain, marked by escalating sin, polygamy, and bloodlust, and the godly line of Seth, which ends with men calling on the name of the Lord. The passage raises questions about cultural achievement, common grace, and the preservation of God's people in the midst of rampant wickedness. Eve's naming of Seth reveals genuine covenant faith in the promise of Genesis 3:15, trusting that God would yet raise up the seed of the woman. The sermon calls believers to grow in faith as those who possess not only the promise of the Redeemer but its fulfillment in Christ.