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Christian Living
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The Laws Concerning Property, Part III
Exodus 22:5–15 sets out case laws governing negligence, stolen property, and borrowed goods within the Mosaic Book of the Covenant. The passage is examined under the principle of general equity — the 1689 LBCF's standard for applying Israel's judicial law beyond its original theocratic context — showing that negligence carries a cost, and that responsible stewardship of property is a moral obligation in any body politic. The study moves through three subsections: the wandering grazing animal (v. 5), the uncontrolled fire (v. 6), and the cluster of laws governing entrusted and borrowed property (vv. 7–15), with sustained attention to the role of judges as God's vicegerents and the principle that the punishment must fit the provable offense.
October 23, 2022 - Sunday School Confessional Study - 2LCF 21
Christian Liberty, as confessed in 2LCF chapter 21, encompasses freedom from sin's guilt, power, and punishment through the finished work of Christ, as well as freedom in worship and obedience under the New Covenant. The study traces the confession's three-fold account of expanded New Testament liberty — release from the ceremonial law's yoke, greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and fuller communications of the Spirit — over against the identical substance of liberty enjoyed by Old Testament believers. Liberty of conscience is distinguished from Christian liberty proper: the former is a natural right grounded in the image of God, the latter a gospel privilege; both together guard against ecclesiastical tyranny, civil totalitarianism, and the demand for implicit faith. The session closes by warning that Christian liberty must never be perverted into licentiousness, but rather issue in joyful, cheerful obedience — serving the Lord without fear in holiness all the days of one's life.
2LCF21 - Of Christian Liberty (partial recording)
This exposition of 2nd London Baptist Confession chapter 21 (Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience) examines what freedom Christ secures for his people and what that freedom does not permit. The sermon works through three liberties from sin's bondage — from its guilt, its power, and its punishment — before turning to freedom in worship and obedience, distinguishing what Old and New Testament believers share and what New Testament believers enjoy in greater measure: freedom from the ceremonial law, greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and fuller communication of the Spirit. A substantial section treats liberty of conscience — freedom from ecclesiastical tyranny, civil totalitarianism, and moral impositions of men — and the sermon closes by warning against the perversion of Christian liberty into licentiousness.
A Defense of Self-Defense
Matthew 5:38–42, the fourth antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount, is frequently invoked to condemn self-defense, capital punishment, and military service — yet a careful reading reveals that Jesus is not contradicting the lex talionis of the Mosaic civil code but rather correcting the Pharisaic habit of applying that courtroom principle to personal, day-to-day relationships. The contrast is not Jesus versus Moses but Jesus versus bad hermeneutics: what the civil magistrate is authorized to do with the sword (Romans 13:1–4) stands entirely intact, and Exodus 22:2–3's legitimization of self-defense is nowhere repealed. The sermon works through Jesus' four illustrations — insult, property disputes, conscription, and benevolence — to show that Christ is calling his disciples to a disposition of patience and forbearance in ordinary life, not to a pacifism that would render them incapable of functioning in civil society.
When The Rooster Crows
Peter's three denials of Christ in Mark 14:66–72 expose the depth of the fear of man lodged in every human heart — a fear so strong that one of the Lord's closest disciples crumbled before a servant girl's accusation. The sermon traces the two stages of Peter's denial against the backdrop of Christ's own bold confession before the Sanhedrin, pressing the contrast between the Lord's fidelity and the disciple's cowardice. Yet the controlling note is not condemnation but grace: the risen Christ's two-word restoration in Mark 16:7 — 'and Peter' — demonstrates that denial is not the unforgivable sin, and that God forgives the tears of his people as readily as their formal confessions. Believers are urged to pray now, while things are well, for the strength to stand under pressure, and to marvel at the sovereign mercy that forgives what no man would.
What is Good for Man?
Ecclesiastes 7:1–14 poses the question raised in 6:12 — who knows what is good for man in this vain, shadow-like life? Working through the 'better than' sayings of the chapter, the sermon argues that what is genuinely good for man is often the very thing he instinctively avoids: sorrow, rebuke, and adversity. These are not ends in themselves but instruments by which God cultivates wisdom, exposes the emptiness of riches, and teaches his people their creaturely dependence, so that their hope is ultimately anchored not in temporal blessing but in the incorruptible inheritance secured by Christ.
A Psalm of Thanksgiving
Psalm 103 calls the redeemed to bless God with the totality of their being — not passively, but by deliberately rehearsing his mercies against the ever-present tendency to forgetfulness. The psalm moves from the forgiveness of sins as the chief and foundational benefit, through temporal preservation and physical provision, to the perfections of God himself — his mercy, his patience, his covenant faithfulness — as the inexhaustible ground of praise. The sermon presses the congregation to fight spiritual amnesia privately in prayer and publicly in corporate worship, and to understand that gratitude is not an optional ornament but a defining mark of those who walk worthily before God.
The Laws Concerning Homicide and Bodily Injury, Part 3
Exodus 21:33–22:15 sets out Israel's case laws governing property damage, animal theft, and home defense — laws designed not as an exhaustive legal code but as representative principles equipping judges to adjudicate equitably. Three features of biblical law emerge with force: the pervasive principle of restitution (the offender must make the victim whole, not merely 'pay a debt to society'), the absence of a prison system in the Mosaic economy, and the explicit legitimacy of lethal self-defense when a thief breaks in under cover of darkness. The sermon calls hearers to appreciate the pro-victim orientation of God's law and to think biblically about criminal justice, property rights, and self-defense in the present civil order.
The Laws Concerning Homicide and Bodily Injury, Part 2
Exodus 21:22–32 contains Israel's civil laws governing bodily injury to a pregnant woman, the discipline of servants, and liability for a goring ox — all concrete applications of the sixth commandment. The passage's language for premature birth employs the same Hebrew vocabulary used elsewhere in Genesis for childbirth, establishing that both mother and child (or children) are protected persons under the law, which the sermon applies directly to the ethics of abortion. The lex talionis (life for life, eye for eye) is examined not as a mandate for literal replication of injury but as a principle requiring proportionate punishment — neither too lenient nor excessive — a standard grounded in the dignity of every person as an image bearer of God.
The Light of the World
In John 8:12, Jesus declares 'I am the light of the world,' a claim that situates him within the great 'I Am' tradition of Exodus 3:14 and the Isaianic servant songs, asserting both his full deity as the eternal Son and the universal scope of his messianic mission to Jew and Gentile alike. The sermon traces the 'I Am' statements across John's Gospel, showing that Jesus consciously identifies himself with Yahweh and that the light-imagery of the Old Testament finds its fulfillment in his person and work. Darkness in John is not physical but ethical — the guilt, depravity, and rebellion of a world that hates the light — and the follower of Christ, by grace through faith, passes from that darkness into the light of life. The church is therefore called to hold forth the word of the gospel as light in a morally darkened age, trusting that God is able to transfer sinners from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his Son.
The Laws Concerning Homicide & Bodily Injury (Part I)
Exodus 21:12–21 applies the Sixth and Fifth Commandments through the judicial law of Israel, treating the capital offenses of murder, parental assault, cursing of parents, and kidnapping, then moving to laws governing non-fatal bodily injury and the discipline of servants. The sermon draws on the Noahic Covenant (Genesis 9:6), the abiding authority of civil government to bear the sword (Romans 13), and the general equity principle to argue that these case laws carry enduring moral weight even outside the Mosaic theocracy. Listeners are called to pray for civil governments to discharge their God-ordained duty of punishing criminal offenders, and to take seriously the fifth commandment's demand that parental authority be honored and enforced in the home.
The Law Concerning Servants
Exodus 21:1–11 opens what is commonly called the Book of the Covenant, the concrete judicial application of the Ten Commandments to Israel's civil life. The sermon situates this passage within the threefold division of the law — moral, ceremonial, and judicial — explaining why the judicial law expired with the Israelite commonwealth while its general equity retains moral use, and why the theonomic demand that modern civil magistrates enforce the Mosaic penal code lacks New Testament warrant. Working through three features of the law concerning servants — the limitation on service, the acquisition of a family during service, and the protection of female servants — the sermon argues that far from being barbaric, these laws reveal God's wisdom and kindness in restraining exploitation and protecting the vulnerable in a post-fall world.
The Reaction to Jesus and His Words
John 7:40–53 records the sharply divided public reaction to Jesus's preaching at the Feast of Tabernacles and the private opposition of the Sanhedrin to him and his followers. The crowd fractures over whether Jesus is the promised prophet of Deuteronomy 18 or the Christ himself, while the religious leadership responds not with argument but with contempt, attempting to silence him through force and scorn. The temple officers sent to arrest Jesus return empty-handed, confessing that no man has ever spoken as he has — a testimony that magnifies Christ's divine authority even as the Sanhedrin descends into lawlessness. The sermon calls hearers to abandon the confusion of the crowd and the hardness of the Sanhedrin, and instead to come to Christ in faith, receiving the everlasting life he freely offers.
The Thief on the Cross
Luke 23:39–43 presents the conversion of the thief on the cross as a concentrated exhibition of sovereign, effectual grace applied to a notorious criminal and insurrectionist in his final hour. The sermon examines the evidences of genuine conversion in the believing thief — fear of God, concern for the honor of Christ, confession of personal guilt, and faith in the Savior's kingdom — then turns to the graciousness and power of Christ's response: 'Today you will be with me in paradise.' The central pastoral burden is twofold: no sinner is beyond the reach of sovereign grace, and no sinner should presume upon a deathbed opportunity for repentance that may never come.
Of Good Works (part II)
The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, chapter 16, teaches that good works neither merit pardon of sin nor eternal life, yet are genuinely accepted by God — not on the ground of their own quality, but solely through the believer's union with Christ the Mediator. This session completes the chapter by examining first why good works are accepted in Christ (the Mediator's priestly office presenting both persons and works acceptable to God), and then the sixfold purpose of good works: expressing gratitude, strengthening assurance, edifying the brethren, adorning the doctrine of Christ, stopping the mouths of adversaries, and glorifying the triune God. The controlling application is that a right understanding of good works drives the believer away from every meritorious scheme and toward Christ alone, in whom both persons and performances are accepted.
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 Things God Hates
Proverbs 6:16–19 presents a numerical list of seven things God hates and finds abominable — a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among brethren. This sermon works through each item in canonical order, grounding the list in its immediate context (the portrait of the son of Belial in vv. 12–15) and in the broader testimony of Proverbs, the Psalms, and the New Testament. The abominable members (pride, lying, murder, the cunning heart, swift feet) and the abominable actions (perjury and discord) are each exposed and applied. The sermon concludes by urging hearers to pursue the opposites of each vice — humility, truth-telling, protection of innocent life, guarding the heart, swift pursuit of good, faithful witness, and peacemaking — and to rest in Christ, whose perfect obedience is the righteousness that covers remaining corruption in the believer.
The Believer's Race
Hebrews 12:1 commands the believer to run with endurance the race set before him, stripping away every weight and ensnaring sin. This exposition of that verse examines what the race requires and then opens Hebrews 11 to demonstrate that the 'great cloud of witnesses' are not spectators cheering the runner on, but testimonies given on the runner's behalf — each one declaring, from Abel to Polycarp, that God is faithful to his people whatever their circumstances. The sermon closes with a clear distinction between the ground and the motive of running: salvation is received by grace through faith in Christ alone, and it is from that standing that the believer is called to press forward with resolute endurance.
Chap. 15 - Of Repentance unto Life and Salvation
1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 15 treats repentance not as a meritorious work but as an evangelical grace — a gift sovereignly granted by God through the Holy Spirit, inseparable from saving faith. This study walks through all five paragraphs of the chapter, distinguishing the Greek definition of repentance as a change of mind from its fruits, exposing the danger of collapsing that distinction into a salvation-by-works scheme. The covenant of grace is shown to be the practical ground by which God provides and sustains both faith and repentance for the elect throughout their lives, including ongoing repentance for remaining sin.
The Arrest of Peter and John
Acts 4:1–12 presents the arrest of Peter and John by the Sanhedrin and Peter's Spirit-filled defense before the council, in which he declares Jesus of Nazareth — crucified and risen — as the sole name under heaven by which men must be saved. The sermon traces two movements: the sovereign advance of God's word despite the imprisonment of its preachers (the number of believers growing to five thousand), and the christological and soteriological content of Peter's address, which grounds salvation exclusively in Christ's active obedience, atoning death, and resurrection. The stone rejected by the builders has become the chief cornerstone, and those who refuse him will ultimately be crushed by him. The sermon applies these realities to the perpetual persecution of the church, the exclusivity of the gospel, and the urgent call to believe on Christ alone for salvation.
The Conversion of Matthew
Matthew 9:9–13 records the sovereign call of a tax collector — among the most despised and morally compromised figures in first-century Jewish society — to follow Christ and ultimately to author the first Gospel. The sermon works through three movements: Christ's effectual call of Matthew to discipleship, the feast Matthew hosts to honour Christ and evangelize his associates, and the confrontation with the Pharisees in which Jesus declares the nature of his mission — not to call the self-righteous but sinners to repentance. The account is pressed into seven marks of genuine discipleship, closing with an appeal to the unconverted to look to Christ as the great physician of sin-sick souls.
Wedding Stream
Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3:14–19 frames the theological heart of this wedding message: that the strength, knowledge, and fullness believers need for godly marriage flow entirely from what God has accomplished in salvation. The sermon moves from the doctrinal foundation of Ephesians 1–2 through the spiritual petitions of chapter 3, arriving at the practical marital responsibilities of Ephesians 5 — the wife's submission and respect, the husband's sacrificial love and leadership after the pattern of Christ and the church. Drawn from Luther's counsel and the creation account in Genesis, the message calls both husband and wife to reflect the mystery of Christ's covenant union with his bride in the daily conduct of their marriage.
Brotherly Love - 1 Peter 1:22-25
What does it mean to love the brethren, and what is the source of that love? Expounding 1 Peter 1:22–25, this sermon works through three interlocking realities: the common Christian experience of soul-purification through Spirit-wrought faith alone, the command to love one another with a fervent, self-sacrificial agape love, and the regenerate new birth through the incorruptible word of God that grounds and generates that love. The exhortation is concrete: foster genuine fellowship, receive as well as give, and resist the tendency to confine brotherly love within the narrow boundaries of denomination, theological system, or Christian liberty — for our identity is in Christ, not in any confessional tradition.
God the Righteous Judge
Psalm 94 presents God as the righteous judge who hears the cry of His oppressed people, sees the wickedness of their persecutors, and will not ultimately abandon His inheritance. This expository treatment works through the chiastic structure of the psalm, showing how the cry for justice (vv. 1–3) is answered by justice administered (vv. 20–23), and how the folly of those who deny God's omniscience mirrors the divinely-given wisdom of His people. The sermon draws out the covenant comfort of God's chesed — His steadfast faithfulness to those He has chosen — as the ground of peace in the midst of affliction, and closes with a direct call to repentance for any who remain outside of Christ.
Live Stream - June 12, 2022
Spiritual growth is not merely a personal benefit but the primary means by which the church of Christ is built up as a strong, enduring structure. Expounding 1 Peter 2:1–5, this sermon argues that believers are called to mortify the self-serving sins of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and evil speaking — all of which collapse the very foundation upon which other believers must stand — and to cultivate an insatiable desire for the pure word of God as their appointed means of growth. Christ is the chief cornerstone and the ultimate builder of his church; believers are living stones whose solidity or weakness determines what the next generation inherits. The congregation is exhorted to press on in sanctification and doctrinal growth not to earn their justification — which rests on faith alone in Christ alone — but to be the solid building blocks upon which children, new believers, and future generations of the church may be securely built.
The Call for Christian Growth
Unrepentant sin and a failure to desire the Word of God are the chief hindrances to Christian growth — and that growth is not merely a personal blessing but a corporate responsibility. Working through 1 Peter 2:1–5, this sermon argues that believers are living stones being built into a spiritual house, and that weak, doctrinally shallow Christians produce a structurally unsound church. The exhortation is concrete: mortify the sins of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander; cultivate an insatiable hunger for the pure milk of the Word; and do so knowing that justification rests on faith alone while sanctification calls every believer to steady, disciplined growth.
Live Stream - June 05, 2022
First Peter 1:22–25 grounds the command to fervent brotherly love in the doctrine of regeneration. The passage distinguishes between the natural, emotional bond of phileo and the deliberate, self-sacrificing agape the redeemed are called to exercise toward one another within the covenant community. Justification is by faith alone — faith understood not as a meritorious act but as passive reception of Christ's finished work, wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit's regenerating power. The sermon closes with exhortations to pursue unhypocritical, reciprocal, cross-denominational love, and with a warning to those who have heard the gospel preached and have yet to submit to it in faith.
Brotherly Love
What grounds the command to love fellow believers, and what does that love look like in practice? Expounding 1 Peter 1:22–25, this sermon argues that brotherly love among believers is not merely a moral duty but flows necessarily from regeneration — the purification of the soul through faith worked by the Holy Spirit. The sermon carefully distinguishes passive, receiving faith from any works-based or neonomian construal of 'obeying the gospel,' grounding the command to love in the incorruptible seed of the new birth. Application presses toward sincere, unhypocritical, self-sacrificial love that crosses denominational and theological-liberty lines, because the bond of the brethren is founded on the eternal word of God, not on natural or doctrinal affinity.
The Greatest Commandments
Matthew 22:34–40 records a Pharisaic lawyer testing Jesus with the question of which commandment is greatest. Jesus answers by citing the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4–5 and the neighbor-love command from Leviticus 19:18, thereby summarizing the entire Decalogue under two heads: love to God and love to man. This sermon argues that Christ's endorsement of these two commandments confirms the abiding validity of the moral law for New Covenant believers, who are called to keep it not as a means of justification but as the Spirit-wrought response of those already justified by faith alone. The hearer is pressed to recognize that the law's demand — to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as oneself — drives the believer perpetually to Christ, in whom alone that demand has been perfectly met.
Chapter 13 - Of Sanctification
The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter 13, sets forth sanctification as a real and personal moral transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit through the Word, inseparably joined to justification yet categorically distinct from it. The confession distinguishes the dominion of sin — broken decisively at regeneration — from the remnants of corruption that remain in every part of the believer throughout this life, producing an irreconcilable war between flesh and Spirit. Against both perfectionism and antinomianism, the chapter insists that sanctification is neither a checklist of religious performance nor a license for presumption, but a progressive, Spirit-empowered conformity to Christ that never constitutes the ground of acceptance before God. Hearers are urged to reject the conflation of justification and sanctification — whether in Roman Catholic merit theology, the New Perspective on Paul, or Federal Vision — and to rest acceptance with God solely on the imputed righteousness of Christ.