Theological term
Solus Christus
88 sermons · All terms
The Second Missionary Journey, Part 9
Acts 18:12–28 traces the close of Paul's second missionary journey through three episodes: his trial before the Roman proconsul Gallio, his departure from Corinth back to Antioch, and a preview of the Alexandrian Jewish teacher Apollos. The exposition treats Gallio's dismissal of the Jewish charge against Paul as a model of properly bounded civil authority — punishing wrongdoing, not regulating theology — while also exposing Gallio's failure to protect Sosthenes as a departure from impartial justice. Paul's continued residence in Corinth after the hearing illustrates faith in the sustaining promises of Christ, and the sermon closes with a call to pray for faithful gospel preachers and an obedient people who respond to their ministry.
The Council at Jerusalem, Part 1
Acts 15:1–5 introduces the Jerusalem Council by presenting the Judaizing heresy in its starkest form: certain men from Judea taught that circumcision must be added to faith in Christ for salvation, striking simultaneously at the law's proper use and at the sufficiency of Christ's finished work. The passage is set in its chronological context, distinguishing the events of Galatians 2 from the council itself, and showing that the problem was not merely one of Jewish-Gentile social relations but a soteriological crisis with eternal consequences. Paul and Barnabas respond with uncompromising confrontation, the church at Antioch sends delegates to Jerusalem, and the passage closes with the same Judaizing demand surfacing within the Jerusalem church — demonstrating the universality and perpetuity of the tendency to add human merit to sovereign grace. The exhortation is to resist every form of works-righteousness and to preach the law and gospel in their proper distinction, so that sinners are directed to Christ alone.
The Arrest of Peter and John
The arrest of Peter and John in Acts 4:1–4 is not a setback to the mission of Christ but an instrument of its advance. The religious leaders of Israel — Sadducees especially — are provoked by the apostolic proclamation of resurrection in Jesus, yet even as the preachers are jailed, the Word of God prevails and the number of believers swells to five thousand. The sermon draws out from this episode the sovereignty of Christ over his church, the doctrine of justification by faith alone secured by Christ's active and passive obedience, and the pattern of suffering through which the gospel spreads. The hearer is called to present faithfulness as the only credible preparation for future persecution, and to trust that what is preached in chains cannot itself be chained.
The Angelic Word & Song
What did the angels announce to the shepherds on the night of Christ's birth, and why does it matter for sinners today? Expounding Luke 2:10–14, this sermon traces the angelic word and the angelic song under two headings, showing that the announcement is one of greatest significance, greatest joy, universal scope, and divine salvation — a Savior who is Christ the Lord, born in fulfillment of Old Testament promise (2 Samuel 7, Isaiah 9:6, Micah 5:2) and condescending from infinite glory to a feed trough. The sermon calls hearers to hasten their gaze upon this Christ, to hitch the joy of their lives to the triune God and His gospel alone, and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ for everlasting life.
The Mercy of God in the Ministry of Elisha
Four miracles in 2 Kings 4 — multiplied oil, a resurrected son, purified stew, and bread multiplied for a hundred men — demonstrate that Yahweh's mercy extends not only to kings and nations but to nameless, destitute individuals in the most ordinary circumstances of life. The prophet Elisha functions typologically throughout: his inadequacy, importunate prayer, and restorative acts all point forward to the Lord Jesus Christ, the true miracle-worker who alone can save sinners from their sins. Where Elisha can relieve physical need and point Israel to God, only Christ forgives sin through his life, death, and resurrection. The sermon closes with a call to gratitude, trust in God's sovereign provision over everyday anxieties, and faith in Christ alone for salvation.
The Unsurpassed Value of the Gospel
Paul's exhortation to Timothy not to be ashamed of the gospel in 2 Timothy 1:8–10 rests on the unsurpassed worth of the salvation it announces. The sermon works through the divine authorship of salvation, the basis of election in God's eternal purpose and grace rather than human works, and the pre-temporal covenant of redemption executed in the incarnation and atoning work of Christ. Because Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, believers have every reason to suffer for it without shame, and unbelievers are called to look to Christ alone for justification by faith apart from works.
The Faithful Father
Colossians 3:20–21 places two commands at the center of household religion: children are to obey their parents in all things as an act pleasing to the Lord, and fathers are forbidden from provoking their children lest they become discouraged. This exposition traces the negative prohibition of Colossians 3:21 through its Old Testament background in Deuteronomy 21 and its positive counterpart in Ephesians 6:4, examining how unrighteous anger, unbiblical discipline, and passive abdication each provoke children toward despair and rebellion. The fifth commandment functions here both as a mirror to drive children to Christ and as a continuing standard to which the Spirit then empowers obedience. Fathers are called to fear God first, to exercise discipline within an atmosphere of love, and to provide spiritual instruction — in the home and through the church — as their highest earthly stewardship.
The Prohibition Against Partiality
James 2:1–4 issues a direct prohibition against partiality — the sin of showing favoritism based on economic status, ethnicity, or social rank within the gathered assembly of Christ's body. The sermon works through the command of verse 1 and its illustrative example in verses 2–4, while devoting substantial attention to demonstrating that James's soteriology is fully consistent with Paul's: salvation is by sovereign grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, with works serving as the necessary evidence of genuine saving faith rather than its ground. The persistent tendency to judge by externals and to divide the body of Christ into cliques and factions is exposed as a form of sinful judgmentalism that usurps God's own prerogative as judge.
The Olivet Discourse, Part 16
Matthew 25:41–46 presents the judgment of the unrighteous as the precise structural mirror of the judgment of the righteous: those who depart into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels are distinguished from those who inherit the kingdom not by degree of works but by the presence or absence of saving faith. The sermon defends, through nine arguments drawn from the text and from Galatians 2:21, that this passage does not teach justification by works — the sheep and goats are already determined, the kingdom is inherited not merited, and the good works function as evidence of faith rather than its ground. The 'least of these my brethren' is shown, through Matthew 10 and 12, to refer specifically to Christ's disciples, so that reception or rejection of them constitutes reception or rejection of Christ himself. The passage concludes by calling all hearers to be found in Christ — clothed not in their own righteousness but in the righteousness of God through faith — as the only preparation for the certain judgment to come.
The Reformation of the Church
What does it mean for the church to be 'the pillar and ground of the truth'? Expounding 1 Timothy 3:14–16, this sermon examines the identity and confession of the church through three descriptions Paul gives in verse 15 — the house of God, the church of the living God, and the pillar and ground of the truth — before applying the doctrinal legacy of the sixteenth-century Reformation to the contemporary church. The great Christological confession of verse 16 is shown to be the theological center around which all church conduct, worship, and proclamation must orbit. The sermon calls the church to guard sola scriptura, justification by faith alone, the regulative principle of worship, and a proper Christology against the perpetual drift toward pragmatism, experientialism, and Romanizing errors.
The Astonishment of Paul
Paul's opening salvo in Galatians 1:6–9 is a study in holy alarm: the apostle marvels not with wonder but with grief that the Galatian churches are so quickly defecting from the gospel of grace to a Judaizing corruption that mingles law-keeping with faith. The Judaizing heresy — like Roman Catholicism, the New Perspective on Paul, and the Federal Vision after it — does not abolish Christ but supplements him, which Paul declares is no gospel at all, because justification is either entirely by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, or it is not justification at all. The sermon traces three movements in the passage: Paul's astonishment at the defection, the nature of the false gospel as something that is 'not another,' and the double anathema pronounced on all who pervert the gospel regardless of their authority. The application calls hearers to a 'blessed intolerance' toward gospel corruption, to precision in doctrine, and to the personal embrace of Christ's doing and dying as the sole ground of acceptance with God.
Free Grace Baptist Church - July 31, 2016 PM
Psalm 67 is a missionary psalm framing the church's reception of divine mercy, blessing, and communion not as ends in themselves but as the grounds and means of global gospel proclamation. Working through the psalm's two movements — the petitions of verses 1–5 and the promises of verses 6–7 — the sermon argues that the church's prayer for herself is inseparable from her obligation to make the way of God known among all nations. The application is pointed: the church's mission is the proclamation of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and she must pray the psalms boldly, believing that God can turn idolaters — whether ancient Canaanites or modern Islam — to the living God through the foolishness of preaching.
The Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch
Acts 8:26–40 records the Spirit-orchestrated conversion of an Ethiopian eunuch through Philip's proclamation of Christ from Isaiah 53. The passage is set within the fulfillment of Isaiah 56's promise that eunuchs and Gentiles would be brought near to God in the messianic age — a promise Luke deliberately highlights as the risen and exalted Christ builds his kingdom to the uttermost parts of the earth. The sermon expounds the substitutionary suffering of the servant of Yahweh as the content of Philip's evangelism, the great exchange of 2 Corinthians 5:21 as the ground of justification, and the proper order of faith then baptism as the pattern of apostolic practice. Hearers are pressed to ask whether they understand the gospel, to believe it without delay, and — if already believing — to submit to baptism as an act of obedience and a means of grace.
The Divine Invitation to Eternal Life
Isaiah 55 is a divine summons addressed to sinners without merit or money, calling them to receive the full salvation accomplished by the servant of Yahweh in Isaiah 53. The chapter divides into two movements: an invitation to come to water, wine, and milk — representing a complete and free salvation — and a call to respond in faith and repentance while the Lord may be found. Three reasons ground the call to believe and repent: the incomparable nature of God whose thoughts and ways exceed ours in mercy, the sovereign efficacy of God's word which never returns void, and the promise of eschatological joy, peace, and the reversal of the curse. Believers are exhorted to examine whether they have displaced God with idols, legitimate or otherwise, and unbelievers are pressed with the urgency that the day of access to God will not last forever.
The Vision of the Unrivaled Majesty, Part 2
Isaiah 6:1–7 confronts the reader with the unrivaled majesty of the triune God and the radical grace that answers the creature's ruin. This exposition completes an earlier morning sermon by examining the third point of the passage: the blessed atonement from the altar of the Lord, in which a seraph carries a live coal from the altar to purge Isaiah's unclean lips. Atonement comes from the Lord alone, through sacrifice alone, and it comforts, confirms, and fits the pardoned sinner for renewed service — a pattern illustrated by David in Psalm 51, Peter in John 21, and codified in the 1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 18. Hearers are called to reflect often on the greatness of God, to refuse self-atonement, to use the means of grace faithfully, and to flee to Christ whenever despair lays them low.
Free Grace Baptist Church - November 29, 2015 PM
Evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, yet the people of God are called not to despair but to persevere in the things they have learned — above all, the Holy Scriptures. Expounding 2 Timothy 3:13–15, this sermon contrasts the downward trajectory of false teachers with the upward call to Timothy: continued faithfulness grounded in the Word of God, which is able to make one wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. The Old Testament is shown to be thoroughly Christ-centred, pointing to one way of salvation in both testaments — by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Parents are charged to bring their children under the Scripture from childhood, and all believers are urged to persevere through faithful use of the means God has ordained.
He Saved Us
Salvation by works, whether in whole or in part, is a criminal doctrine — so the Apostle Paul insists in Titus 3:5–7, and this sermon works through that text under four headings: the one at work in salvation (God alone, not man), the nature of salvation (regeneration, renewal, and justification), the foundation of salvation (Jesus Christ exclusively), and the certainty of salvation (grounded in the immutable decree of election and the perfecting work of the triune God). The washing of regeneration is not water baptism but the sovereign operation of the Holy Spirit making dead sinners alive, paralleling the new-covenant promise of Ezekiel 36. Justification is a legal declaration in which Christ's righteousness is imputed to the believer and received by faith alone — not supplemented by any work of the believer's own. Both the regenerate and the unbeliever are called to rest solely upon Christ, the one foundation of all salvation.
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.
The Identity of the Son of Man
Matthew 16:13–17 confronts every hearer with the most consequential question ever asked: who is the Son of Man? Working through Christ's question to the disciples, Peter's confession, and the beatitude Jesus pronounces over him, this exposition demonstrates that the title 'Son of Man' points not primarily to Christ's humanity but to Daniel's cosmic ruler given an everlasting dominion, and that Peter's identification of Jesus as 'the Christ, the Son of the living God' is the climax of Matthew's Galilean narrative. The sermon argues that this confession is not the product of human wisdom or religious sensitivity but of the Father's sovereign, gracious act of revelation — and that those who receive it are called to live and die in accordance with it.
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.
The Final Charge
The final two verses of 1 Timothy close Paul's first letter to Timothy with a charge that is as urgent as it is simple: guard the deposit and avoid the dangers. This sermon works through the nature of that deposit — the gospel of God, owned by God, entrusted to Paul and passed to Timothy and the church as stewards — and the dangers that threaten it: the profane and idle babblings of false teachers whose contradictions are falsely called knowledge. The application presses the church to see that faithful gospel preaching is inseparable from the glory of God, the edification of believers, and the salvation of sinners, and that the only power sufficient to sustain that fidelity is the grace with which Paul both opens and closes the epistle.
The Descent into Idolatry
Romans 1:18–32 presents the universal condemnation of mankind, tracing the descent from the suppression of general revelation into full-blown idolatry and its attendant vices. The wrath of God is not an incidental doctrine but the necessary backdrop to the gospel: ungodliness precedes unrighteousness, and when God is rejected, judicial abandonment follows — God gives men over to the very sin they have chosen. Idolatry is not merely an ancient phenomenon but the root of every vice list Paul enumerates, and contemporary idols of false religion, mammon, and self demand the same vigilance the Apostle John commands: 'Little children, keep yourselves from idols.' The only antidote to idolatry is the gospel, in which the righteousness God demands is also the righteousness He supplies through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
The Mission of the Twelve
The mission of the Twelve in Matthew 10:5–15 is not a universal mandate for all gospel ministry but a historically specific, geographically confined commission to the lost sheep of the house of Israel — the necessary first movement in a salvation-historical arc that culminates in the Great Commission of Matthew 28. The sermon works through four observations: the scope, nature, provision, and response to the mission, demonstrating that the sign gifts authenticated apostolic preaching rather than being ends in themselves. The sermon closes with a sober warning drawn from verse 15: greater gospel privilege demands greater accountability, and to hear the word faithfully preached and refuse it is a more grievous offense than the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Christ and the Centurion
Matthew 8:5–13 presents a Roman centurion whose faith surpasses anything Jesus has found in Israel, and whose encounter with Christ becomes a theological announcement: the Abrahamic promises are now being fulfilled in the inclusion of Gentiles and the judgment of unbelieving ethnic Israel. The centurion's approach to Christ models three marks of genuine faith — a plea grounded in misery rather than merit, profound humility before the Lord's authority, and unshaken confidence that Christ's spoken word alone is sufficient to heal. The sermon calls hearers to examine whether they stand in faith or unbelief, and to rest entirely in Christ's authority and grace rather than any personal worthiness.
The Two Claims
Matthew 7:21–23 presents one of the most sobering scenes in Scripture: a multitude of religious professors standing before Christ on the day of final judgment, presenting their prophesying, exorcisms, and miraculous works as credentials for entrance into the kingdom — only to hear the words, 'I never knew you.' This sermon argues that Jesus is not here calling his people to try harder or obey more, but is exposing and condemning works righteousness as the very lawlessness he will judge. The false professors' error is not a lack of religious activity but a failure to rest in Christ alone, whose perfect obedience is the sole ground of the sinner's acceptance before God. Assurance of salvation is found not in rigorous self-examination of one's works but in extra-spective faith resting on the free promises of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The Necessity of Brotherly Love
Hebrews 13:1–3 closes a sustained argument about Christ's supremacy with three concrete imperatives: let brotherly love continue, show hospitality to strangers, and remember the prisoners. The sermon exposes how easily Christians drift into self-centeredness and forgetfulness, measuring these duties against the full weight of New Testament witness — from the upper room discourse to the epistles of Peter and Paul. The application is direct: genuine remembrance of suffering believers requires not mere sentiment but prayer, tangible aid, correspondence, and the willingness to identify with those in chains as fellow members of the one body of Christ.
Galatians 1:6-10
Galatians 1:6–10 confronts the Galatian churches' rapid defection from the gospel of grace to a Judaizing heresy that added circumcision and law-keeping to faith as a condition of justification. The sermon argues that any addition of human merit to the work of Christ — however small — destroys the gospel entirely, because salvation is either by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, or it is by the law, and the two cannot be mixed. The Apostle Paul's double pronouncement of anathema on false gospel teachers is examined in its Old Testament background (the herem principle) and applied as a call to doctrinal precision, vigilance against indifference, and refusal to supplement the finished work of Christ.
The Marriage Relationship
Colossians 3:18–19 calls wives to submit to their own husbands and husbands to love their wives without bitterness — two commands that cut precisely against the natural grain of each. This sermon argues that both duties are grounded not in social utility or natural sentiment but in the gospel itself: the wife's submission images Christ's submission to the Father, and the husband's love images Christ's self-sacrificial love for the church. The sermon draws on Ephesians 5, 1 Peter 3, and 1 Corinthians 11 to show that ontological equality between husband and wife is fully compatible with functional differentiation of role, and closes by pressing both commands back onto the cross as the only sufficient motive and resource for obedience.
True and False Religion: Fasting
True religious fasting is assumed by Christ, not commanded as a merit-earning ritual, and is to be practiced in secret before God alone. Expounding Matthew 6:16–18 within the broader Sermon on the Mount context of exceeding Pharisaic righteousness, this sermon examines fasting under three headings: the assumption that the regenerate will fast, the warning against hypocritical display for human approval, and the corrective of ordinary, unannounced normalcy in one's daily conduct. The controlling application is that the believer's religious observances — almsgiving, prayer, and fasting — flow from justifying grace already received, not toward securing acceptance with God, which rests solely on the active and passive obedience of Christ imputed by faith.
The Preface to the Lord's Prayer
What does it mean to address God as 'Our Father in heaven' before a single petition is spoken? This sermon on Matthew 6:9 argues that the preface to the Lord's Prayer is not a formality but a theological foundation: the invocation shapes the entire posture of prayer. Six truths embedded in the two words 'Our Father' are examined — that God is personal, gracious, hearing, caring, loving, and alone to be addressed — followed by two truths in the phrase 'in heaven': that God is transcendent and omnipotent. The sermon closes with a pointed call to examine whether one can honestly pray 'Our Father' at all, since access to the Father comes only through faith in the Son.