Theological term
Conformity to Christ
8 sermons · All terms
The Believer and Trials
James 1:1–8 confronts believers with a counterintuitive command: count trials as pure joy. This exposition works through the believer's required response to trials (vv. 2–4) and the believer's required request during trials (vv. 5–8), grounding both in the theological truth that the testing of faith produces endurance and conformity to Christ. The sermon argues that ignorance of God's remedial purposes in affliction is the root cause of disordered responses — panic, complaint, and double-mindedness — and calls believers to ask God for wisdom to navigate suffering in faith, confidence resting on the character of a God who gives liberally and without reproach.
The Believer's Response to Trials
James 1:2–8 commands believers to count trials 'all joy' — a disposition that runs counter to every natural instinct. This exposition works through the passage in two movements: the believer's response to trials (vv. 2–4), which establishes the identification, expectation, disposition, and divine purpose of affliction; and the believer's request during trials (vv. 5–8), which calls for the pursuit of wisdom and the exercise of faith. The central burden is that God's redemptive purpose in suffering — conformity to the image of Christ — supplies both the ground for joy and the reason to seek wisdom rather than mere deliverance.
Matthew 8:23-27
Matthew 8:23–27 presents the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee as a window into both the true humanity and the full divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The passage exposes the disciples' little faith — not absent faith — and rebukes the perennial temptation to treat temporal prosperity as the measure of God's favor. Christ's presence in the boat does not exempt believers from storms, but it does guarantee that he will see them through every trial he ordains for their conformity to himself.
An Encouragement to Consider the Father's Purpose
Hebrews 12:3–11 calls suffering believers to consider the Father's purpose in divine discipline, not as evidence of abandonment but as proof of His fatherly love. The sermon works through three movements: a preliminary call to consider Christ who endured hostility, the presence of divine discipline as the demonstration of God's fatherhood, and the purpose of that discipline — that believers may be partakers of His holiness. The central pastoral concern is that God's people too easily forget the word of exhortation (Proverbs 3:11–12) when trials come, interpreting chastening as divine absence rather than divine presence. Believers are urged to resist despising discipline, to guard against weariness and discouragement, and to rest in the certainty that God works all things — including painful pruning — for their conformity to Christ.
1 Samuel 21:1-15
David's flight from Saul in 1 Samuel 21 traces a fugitive's desperate stops at Nob, Gath, the cave of Adullam, and Moab — each one a theater of divine providence operating through human weakness, foreign enemies, and ancient familial arrangements stretching back to Ruth. The narrative neither excuses David's deception nor leaves him without bread; God sustains his anointed man not because of David's faithfulness but because of Yahweh's grace, planned long beforehand. Christ, the greater David, stands behind every detail: he is the captain of the distressed, the indebted, and the discontented, and his people are called to see their own trials as the very means by which God conforms them to the image of his Son.
Divine Chastening and the Peaceable Fruit of Righteousness
Hebrews 12:5–11 confronts a perennial misreading of suffering: that the presence of trials signals the absence of God. Drawing on Proverbs 3:11–12, Deuteronomy 8:5, and the analogy of earthly fatherhood, the passage argues the opposite — divine chastening is the proof of divine sonship, not its contradiction. The sermon works through two categories: the presence of paternal discipline (vv. 5–10a) and its purpose (vv. 10b–11), showing that God's fatherly correction is perfectly calibrated to produce holiness and to conform his people to the image of Christ. The exhortation throughout is to run with endurance, refusing both despair under affliction and a false prosperity-gospel ease, trusting that the painful training yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.
Our Changed Resurrected Bodies
What kind of body will believers receive at the resurrection, and why must it be so radically different from the body that dies? Expounding 1 Corinthians 15, this sermon argues that the resurrection body is not merely restored to pre-mortem condition or even to Adamic perfection, but is transformed into conformity with Christ's own glorified body — physically, morally, and in full capacity for the beatific enjoyment of God. The driving application is that this eschatological hope is God's appointed means of promoting present holiness: those who truly desire to be like Christ hereafter will pursue Christlikeness now, mortifying sinful desires and setting their minds on things above.
Suffering and Our Substitute
Christians are called not merely to accept suffering as inevitable but to embrace it joyfully, after the pattern of Christ, who endured reviling and unjust punishment without retaliation. This sermon works through 1 Peter 2:21–24 under three headings — the calling to suffer, Christ as exemplar, and his penal substitution — drawing heavily on Isaiah 53 and Old Testament typology to establish that substitutionary atonement is the doctrinal foundation of Christian endurance. The doctrine of penal substitution — that God the Son bore in his own body the punishment due to guilty sinners — is defended as the irreducible center of the gospel, without which there is no comfort for the guilty and no hope for the dying. Hearers are called to make Christ's substitutionary work chief in their affections and to follow his non-retaliatory example in the face of suffering and provocation.