Trinity 9

1 Corinthians 10:1-13 - Trinity Nine - August 17, 2014
Written for Our Learning

The Apostle Paul does not want us to be ignorant.  No teacher wants his students to be ignorant.  He wants them to know what he knows.  Consider his subject matter.  He wants us to know the Bible.  The Bible that he used as his textbook when writing to the Christians in Corinth was of course the Old Testament prophets, along with the New Testament Gospels that by this time had already circulated throughout the growing Church, wherever the Apostles had gone.  The Gospels are the history of the life of Christ, the Son of God.  The Old Testament is the history of the life of God’s chosen people, the children of Israel.  The events of the Old Testament are not just historical events that have some religious or moral lesson to them.  They are more.  They are the accounts of what God did through and for his people in order to teach them of their future redemption in Christ.  And they continue to teach us.  

Trinity 9

Luke 16:1-9 - Trinity IX - August 5, 2012 

Forcing Mammon to Serve Our God

There are two religions in the world.  People either believe and trust in the one true God, or they believe and trust in a false god.  People either worship the God who made them and who gives them all that they have, or they worship false gods who have no power at all to provide lasting satisfaction.  The essence of idolatry, that is false worship, is the worship of creation instead of the Creator.  True worship, on the other hand, is not simply an intellectual recognition that God exists or that he is the Maker of all things.  To know that there’s a creator is not to know God.  It’s not simply a matter of admitting that there’s a higher power out there, or that this higher power is ultimately good that one worships God.  Even unbelievers, who see no use for God to become man, or to shed his blood on the cross for sins, are able to figure this out – that God is good.  So what of it?!  So God is good because he gives to people what they love more than him?  That’s a fine way to define God’s goodness, isn’t it?  Yet we see this all the time as the insatiable world chases after all the stuff that fills the earth. 

But no, true worship that is not by nature idolatrous requires something much more than this.