Theological term
Imputation
654 sermons · All terms
1 Samuel 15:1-9
1 Samuel 15:1–9 presents the divine command to utterly destroy the Amalekites, an act that raises the perennial ethical objection: how can a just God command genocide? This study works through the text to show that the destruction of the Amalekites was not arbitrary cruelty but the measured, delayed judgment of a sovereign God upon persistently wicked people who had already demonstrated their guilt. Saul's failure to execute the command fully is traced not merely to tactical disobedience but to the deeper sin of rejecting the word of the Lord — a sin the preacher identifies as common to all who minimize or rationalize disobedience. The study closes by pointing to Christ as the one who, unlike Saul, always obeyed the Father perfectly, whose active and passive obedience is received by faith alone as the ground of the believer's standing before God.
2LCF Chapter 11 - Of Justification, Part 1
Justification is the cardinal article of the Christian faith — the doctrine on which the church stands or falls. This first of two sessions on 1689 London Baptist Confession Chapter 11 (paragraphs 1–6) surveys the definition of justification through the Confession, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the 39 Articles, then examines five reasons why departure from the biblical doctrine is catastrophic: it is a damnable error, it diminishes the holiness and justice of God, it contradicts God's eternal decree, it lessens the severity of sin and robs Christ of his exclusivity as Savior, and it destroys the believer's peace. The session closes by tracing the three historical errors the Confession's negations target — Roman Catholicism, Anabaptism, and Arminianism — and calls the hearer to treasure the precise forensic definition of justification as a bulwark against every corruption of the gospel.
The Procedure for Church Discipline, Part 1
Matthew 18:15 introduces Christ's binding procedure for church discipline within the local church — a subject that exposes both the authority of the head of the church and the love that drives the restoration of erring brothers. Four introductory matters are addressed before the first step is reached: the definition of formative and corrective discipline, the necessity of discipline as obedience to Christ, key presuppositions (including five biblical arguments for defined church membership), and the practice considered against common misreadings of Matthew 7 and Matthew 13. The purpose of discipline is shown to be threefold: the reconciliation and restoration of the offender, the purity of Christ's church for the glory of God, and the protection of the people of God from the spread of unchecked sin.
The Warning Against Despising Believers
Jesus' warning in Matthew 18:10–14 against despising fellow believers is neither a peripheral concern nor a suggestion for pleasant church life — it is a binding command addressed to the very tendency toward pride and contempt that lurks in regenerate hearts. The sermon works through three movements: the prohibition itself with its two supporting reasons (the ministry of angels and the redemptive mission of the Son of Man), the parable of the straying sheep (read in its Matthean context as pastoral recovery rather than evangelistic proclamation), and the Father's stated will that none of these little ones should perish. The congregation is pressed to see that when the Father, the Son, and the angels all esteem the little ones, any contempt shown by one believer toward another is an affront to the entire Trinitarian economy of redemption. The exhortation is concrete: kill pride at the root, receive rather than reject fellow believers, and willingly surrender Christian liberties rather than scandalize a brother for whom Christ died.
1 Samuel 12
1 Samuel 12 records Samuel's final public address to Israel at Gilgal, functioning as a covenant renewal ceremony in which Samuel vindicates his own integrity, indicts the nation for rejecting Yahweh as king, and summons the people to renewed covenantal obedience. The chapter exposes the characteristic human pattern of forgetting God's past deliverances when a new crisis arrives, a forgetfulness that is answered not by the people's merit but by God's own commitment to his name and to his covenant promises. The anchor of the entire chapter, and of the Christian's assurance, is verse 22: God will not forsake his people for his great name's sake, grounded in his free election and not in their fidelity. Hearers are therefore urged to maintain short accounts with God — confessing sin promptly, forsaking it, and pressing forward in simple, grateful obedience rather than wallowing in guilt as a form of Protestant penance.
The Apostle and his Apostolic Task
Titus 1:1 opens with a two-word identification — 'Paul, a bondservant' — that is itself a monument to sovereign grace. This sermon works through Paul's self-designation as bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ, tracing the apostolic commission through Acts 22 and Acts 26 to show that Paul's entire ministry was aimed at three ends: bringing the elect to saving faith, securing their public ownership of the gospel, and ensuring that gospel truth adorns itself in godly conduct. The application presses both the congregation and the unconverted: appreciate God's appointed means of grace in faithful preaching, grip tightly the acknowledged truth, and adorn the doctrine of Christ with lives worthy of the gospel.
The Question Concerning Elijah
Matthew 17:9–13 records the disciples' question about the scribal expectation that Elijah must precede Messiah — an expectation derived from Malachi 3–4. Jesus resolves their confusion by identifying John the Baptist as the Elijah-figure who fulfilled Malachi's prophecy, thereby laying unmistakable claim to being Yahweh of hosts, the messenger of the covenant. The sermon moves through three elements: Christ's command to silence until the resurrection, the disciples' question about Elijah, and Christ's authoritative interpretation of Malachi. Throughout, the pattern of cross before crown is pressed upon the congregation as the ordained path to glory for both Christ and his people.
Past, Present, and Future at the Lord's Supper
The Lord's Supper operates across three tenses simultaneously: it is a memorial ordinance calling believers to remember Christ's humiliation, substitutionary suffering, and death as prophesied in Isaiah 53; it is a present means of grace conferring real spiritual communion with the exalted Christ by the Spirit, not merely a conscious recollection; and it is an eschatological anticipation, pointing the church toward the consummation when the ordinance itself will give way to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Against both Roman Catholic transubstantiation and a bare memorialist view, the sermon argues from 1 Corinthians 10–11 that the bread and wine remain unchanged in substance while serving as conduits by which the risen Lord nourishes and confirms the faith of His gathered people.
The Glory of the Father
John 17:1–5 records the opening of Christ's High Priestly Prayer, in which the incarnate Son petitions the Father to glorify Him in and through His approaching death, resurrection, and exaltation. The sermon expounds three grounds for that petition: the salvation of the elect, the accomplishment of redemption through Christ's active and passive obedience, and the restoration of the pre-incarnate glory to the God-Man. Central to the exposition is verse 3, where Christ defines eternal life as the knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ — a knowledge that necessarily issues in glorifying God, sustaining believers through trial, and grounding assurance not in personal performance but in the character and covenant of the triune God. Hearers are pressed to pursue that knowledge through the ordinary means of grace: the reading of Scripture, prayer, and faithful attendance upon the Word.
2LCF Chapter 8 - Of Christ the Mediator, Part 2
The deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, as confessed in 2LCF Chapter 8 paragraphs 1–3, stand as the twin foundations of orthodox Christology. This session from a series on the 1689 London Baptist Confession works through what the confession affirms — and what it denies — regarding both natures of the one Mediator, showing how its language recapitulates the early church's creedal formulations. The study demonstrates the deity of Christ from his self-identification as the divine 'I Am,' his equality with the Father, explicit New Testament declarations, Old Testament Yahweh texts applied to him in the New Testament, and divine prerogatives predicated of him. The humanity of Christ is then established from the birth narratives, apostolic declaration, and Christ's own evidential self-disclosure, preparing the ground for a subsequent session on the incarnation proper.
The Call of Samuel the Prophet
The call of Samuel in 1 Samuel 3 marks a decisive turning point in redemptive history — the transition from the era of the judges to the era of the monarchy, with Samuel functioning as God's appointed prophet and king-maker. The chapter opens with a judgment: the word of the Lord was rare in Israel, a condition the sermon argues is never accidental but always the fruit of covenant unfaithfulness, as God withdraws the lamp of His word from a people who have despised it. The Eli narrative exposes the consequences of passive, toothless pastoral authority, while Samuel's emergence illustrates the mercy of God who meets the absence of His word with a new voice. The sermon closes by pressing the abundance of available Scripture upon contemporary hearers as an undeserved grace, calling both believers and unbelievers to be where the Bible is preached and to receive Christ's imputed righteousness by faith alone.
The Unashamed Commitment to the Gospel
2 Timothy 1:9–10 sets before the reader the entire arc of God's redemptive plan, from its eternal origin to its historical execution in the appearing of Jesus Christ. The text answers Paul's command to Timothy in verse 8 — to be unashamed of the gospel and to suffer for it — by grounding that command in the glorious nature of the gospel itself. Salvation originates not in human will or works but in God's sovereign purpose and grace, decreed before time began and administered through the effectual calling of the elect. Because Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, the preacher and every Christian has every reason to hold fast to this message without shame and to labor in its proclamation without relenting.
2LCF Chapter 7 - Of God's Covenant, Part 3
Covenant theology is not abstract speculation but the architectural blueprint of all Scripture, and a faulty grasp of it distorts both law and gospel. This session works through 1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 7, paragraph 3, tracing the covenant of grace from its first announcement in Genesis 3:15 through the Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants as progressive, concentric revelations of the same redemptive promise, culminating in the new covenant ratified by Christ's blood. The eternal covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son grounds the covenant of grace, so that for sinners, grace is free and unconditional, while for Christ, it was a covenant of works demanding exact, entire, and personal obedience. The session closes with the axiom that 'the covenant of grace is the covenant of works kept for us,' and applies this structure to the necessity of sola fide against Federal Vision, Baxterian, and Roman Catholic distortions.
4 Aspects of the Incarnation
Galatians 4:4–5 contains one of the most compressed statements of the gospel in all of Scripture, setting forth the incarnation of the eternal Son of God as the decisive corrective to the Galatian error of adding legal works to faith in Christ. This sermon examines four aspects of the incarnation: the timing sovereignly appointed in the eternal covenant between Father and Son, the triune glory visible in the Father's sending of both Son and Spirit, the double humility of Christ being born of a woman and born under the law, and the twofold purpose of redemption and adoption. The application calls hearers to be astonished at God's sovereign plan, to know the Trinity rightly, to rejoice in Christ's condescension, and to rest solely in His finished work — neither adding legal performance nor trusting in one's own standing as a professing Christian.
The Eschatological Incentive for Discipleship
Matthew 16:27–28 presents two eschatological realities — the final judgment at the second coming of Christ and, in verse 28, the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 — as motivating incentives for Christian discipleship. The cross precedes the crown: disciples are called to self-denial, suffering, and allegiance to Christ precisely because a day of reckoning is coming in which the Son of Man will reward each person according to his works. Far from competing with justification by faith alone, that judgment according to works publicly evidences the true and lively faith of those who are hidden in Christ, whose righteousness alone enables the justified to stand before a thrice-holy God. Believers are therefore exhorted to bear the cross daily, fix their hope on the coming glory, and pursue the holiness that eschatological certainty demands.
The Description of Discipleship
Matthew 16:24–26 sets before every professing believer a three-part description of discipleship: self-denial, cross-bearing, and following Christ. This sermon argues that Jesus is not addressing unbelievers with a program for earning salvation, but is describing the necessary shape of a life already transformed by sovereign grace — a life in which self is renounced, suffering for Christ is embraced as a daily reality, and nothing in this world is valued above the soul. The exhortation is direct: examine whether your life is ordered around Christ or around self, repent where it is not, and trust not in your own self-denial but in Christ's perfect obedience and resurrection.
2LCF Chapter 6 - Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof
1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 6, paragraph 1–5, traces the fall of man from its covenantal roots through its universal consequences and the only remedy found in Christ. The covenant of works established a principle of justice in the garden, making Adam's transgression a covenantal violation with representative consequences for all his posterity — every faculty of soul and body wholly defiled, every man by nature a child of wrath. The divine purpose in the fall was not an accident requiring a divine plan B, but was ordered by God according to His wise and holy counsel to manifest both His justice in reprobation and His grace in the redemption of the elect by the second Adam. Believers are freed from the power, guilt, and condemnation of sin by Christ alone, yet remaining corruption persists through this life, driving the regenerate to the means of grace.
The First Prediction of the Passion
Matthew 16:21 records Christ's first formal prediction of his passion — his necessary suffering, death, and resurrection in Jerusalem. The word 'must' (Greek dei) expresses not mere probability but the absolute necessity of the atonement, grounded in the immutable decree of God, the covenant of redemption, and the prophecies of the Old Testament Scriptures. The sermon traces three observations in verses 21–23: the declaration of the divine plan, its rejection by Peter, and its affirmation by Christ. The application presses the exclusivity of the cross as the sole ground of salvation and calls hearers to look to Christ in faith, trusting not in moral reform but in his perfect obedience, atoning death, and bodily resurrection.
The Exceeding Riches of God's Grace
Ephesians 2:8–9 presents the doctrine of salvation as originating entirely in the triune God — elected by the Father before the foundation of the world, redeemed through the blood of the Son, and sealed by the Holy Spirit. Preached on Reformation Day, this exposition traces the grace-alone, faith-alone framework of the Five Solas back to their Pauline foundation, demonstrating that the Protestant Reformation was a recovery of plain biblical reading rather than a theological novelty. The sermon confronts the human tendency toward self-credit in salvation by exposing total depravity in Ephesians 2:1–3, so that the 'but God' of verse 4 lands with full force. Hearers are urged to abandon every ground of boasting and to look to Christ alone for salvation.
The Place of Good Works
Ephesians 2:10 establishes that good works occupy a precise and necessary place in the Christian life — not as a condition of salvation, but as its inevitable consequence. This sermon traces the Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone through Paul's letters to the Romans and the Galatians, exposing the Roman Catholic error of collapsing justification and sanctification into a faith-plus-works scheme and demonstrating why any such admixture invalidates grace entirely. Drawing on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the 1689 Confession, and writers from Machen to Gill, the sermon argues that the predestinating grace of God not only secures the salvation of the elect but also sets them on a course of holy living. Believers are exhorted to neither hide behind sola fide as a license for indolence nor to mistake moral performance for the ground of their acceptance before God.
The Warning Against Heresy
Matthew 16:5–12 records Christ's warning to His disciples to 'take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees' — a command the disciples immediately misread as a remark about physical bread. This exposition works through three movements: the warning Christ issues, the disciples' failure to comprehend it, and the clarification Christ graciously provides. The sermon argues that a small doctrinal error, like leaven, silently pervades and corrupts an entire religious system, and draws direct lines from Pharisaic works-righteousness and Sadducean rationalism to contemporary threats — Arminianism, Roman Catholic merit theology, and theological liberalism. The congregation is urged to prize the means of grace, resist the addition of human tradition to Scripture, and rest in justification by faith alone in Christ alone, recognising that it is revealed truth, not human will, that produces saving faith.
Christ Our Passover
Paul's declaration in 1 Corinthians 5:7b — 'Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us' — grounds the Apostle's call to holiness in the atoning work of Christ. This exposition traces the Passover typology of Exodus 12 through six correspondences between the Old Testament type and the anti-typical Lamb: the sacrificial lamb, its unblemished character, its slaughter, the blood's application, its particular scope, and its vicarious nature. Christ's death satisfies divine wrath against the sins of his people and simultaneously breaks sin's dominion, calling believers to pursue holiness as those truly unleavened before God.
The Thief on the Cross
Luke 23:39–43 presents three condemned men at Calvary — two criminals and the sinless Christ — and the radical difference between their responses exposes the nature of saving faith, sovereign grace, and the distinction between physical and spiritual death. The wretched criminal blasphemes even in his torment, seeking only physical deliverance; the repentant criminal confesses his guilt justly deserved, rebukes blasphemy, and clings by faith alone to a crucified King whose kingdom is eternal. The passage stands as the premier biblical refutation of works-based justification: this man was justified fully and clothed in Christ's righteousness with only hours of sanctification remaining, a display of free and sovereign grace that calls every unbeliever to repentant faith before death — which is fixed, though its day is unknown.
The Baptisms of Jesus
Christian baptism is grounded not merely in ecclesiastical command or apostolic precedent, but in the two baptisms of Christ himself: his water baptism in Matthew 3, where he publicly undertook to 'fulfill all righteousness' through perfect active obedience to the law, and the baptism of divine wrath he endured at Calvary — the cup of God's fury poured out upon him as the substitute for his people. Justification rests on both the doing and the dying of the Redeemer: his active obedience provides the righteousness sinners lack, and his passive obedience absorbs the condemnation they deserve. Those who go into the baptismal waters go not on the basis of their own achievement but because Christ was overwhelmed in their place, and they are called from that point forward to follow the Lamb wherever he goes — into service, suffering, and fidelity to his Word.
The Healing of the Sick at Gennesaret
Matthew 14:34–36 records the healing of the sick at Gennesaret, a summary passage that Matthew uses to display the sovereign power and compassionate mercy of the Son of God. The passage demonstrates a progression from lesser to greater: Christ's mastery over food, storms, and physical illness points to His supreme authority to forgive sin and heal the spiritually dead. The fitting response to recognising who Jesus is — as modelled by the men of Gennesaret — is to come to Him in faith, to bring others to Him, and to rest in the justifying righteousness that is imputed to the sinner through faith alone in Christ alone.
The Nature of the Gospel
Galatians 1:1–5 is not merely a greeting but a compressed summary of gospel truth that Paul will defend throughout the entire epistle against the Judaizing error of faith plus works. Working through five observations drawn from verse 4, this exposition establishes that Christ's death was voluntary, substitutionary, liberating, decreed by the Father, and designed to terminate in the glory of God alone. The sermon argues that sovereign grace — not human decision, will, or merit — is the only ground of salvation, and that right understanding of this gospel inevitably produces doxology rather than self-congratulation.
The Content of Doxology
Jude's closing doxology (vv. 24–25) is not mere liturgical ornament but a theologically loaded ascription of praise to the Lord Jesus Christ that answers the heresy Jude has been combating throughout the epistle. The sermon works through three observations: Christ's exclusive preservation of his people, his singular greatness as the only God, the only Savior, and the only wise one, and the deserved praise that flows from those realities. The practical force is that the Christian's confidence under trial and the church's resistance to false teaching both rest on this one Christ, who keeps, presents faultless, and reigns with glory, majesty, dominion, and power, both now and forever.
The Christian Mother
What does it mean to be a Christian mother, and where does a mother's calling derive its power? Preaching from Proverbs 31:30, this sermon argues that a woman who fears the Lord is the only adequate foundation for the vocation of motherhood — not sentimentality, moral effort, or natural affection. Four aspects of the Christian mother are examined in order: her spiritual condition (she is saved by grace, not by good mothering), her influence (immeasurable and God-ordained), her authority (grounded in the Fifth Commandment itself), and her responsibility to instruct, model, discipline, and love her children in light of law and gospel. Mothers are urged to find their ultimate encouragement not in their own performance but in the righteousness of Christ imputed to them by faith alone.
The One Who Justifies the Ungodly
Romans 4:5 announces that God justifies the ungodly — a declaration that seems to violate the standard of Proverbs 17:15, which condemns justifying the wicked. The doctrine of imputation resolves the apparent tension: God reckons, credits, and accounts righteousness to sinners not on the basis of moral transformation but on the basis of Christ's active and passive obedience received through faith alone. Three acts of imputation structure the biblical argument — Adam's sin imputed to his posterity, the elect's sin imputed to Christ, and Christ's righteousness imputed to the elect — establishing that the gospel upholds rather than undermines divine justice. This sermon was preached in the context of a Lord's Supper service, directing communicants away from any sense of personal worthiness and toward the finished work of Christ as the sole ground of acceptance before God.
The Significance of the Resurrection
Romans 4:25 presents what Charles Hodge called 'a comprehensive statement of the Gospel': Christ was delivered up because of our offenses and raised because of our justification. This sermon expounds the two parallel clauses of that verse, arguing that the death of Christ was a particular, substitutionary, propitiatory sacrifice for the definite sins of God's elect, and that the resurrection is the Father's public attestation that the atonement was fully accepted and justification secured. The practical implication is that justified sinners — not improved moralists — have peace with God and an unshakeable hope grounded not in exemplary preaching but in the historical, redemptive work of Christ.