Welcome to the City North Baptist sermon archive! We offer most sermons online within a week of the message being given.
Four indicators of genuine faith
God never intended faith to be a set of mental beliefs, isolated from real life. To be genuine, faith has to work in real life. As the writer of this letter starts to wind things up, he challenges his readers to put his teaching about faith into practice. Join us as Pastor Murray extends the challenge to us today in four particular areas of life – 1. how we relate to strangers, 2. how we care for prisoners, 3. how we preserve our sexual purity, and 4. how we stay content in a materialistic world. Whoever said the Bible isn’t relevant to the 21st century!
Continuous worship
Listen as we consider what it means for us to worship God with all our lives and what place singing has in our broader life of worship.
Hebrews 12:14-29
Listen as Pastor Dave continues our study into the book of Hebrews focusing on what God has done for us and how we might live in response.
Praying for help
In the Psalms we find great encouragement in the prayers of God’s people. We learn what it means to be in close relationship with God and how we too can be confident that he hears us and answers our prayers. Listen as Pastor Dave shares from Psalm 17 how King Davids prayer for help turned to an expression of hope and praise to the living God.
Divine discipline
How do you respond to hardships in your life? Listen as we consider the exhortations of the writer to the Hebrews, as he urges his readers to remember the encouraging word of God and the good purposes of God, even when we face hard times. And then, let us resolve to press on.
Encountering God personally
To those who genuinely look for Him, God promises make Himself known (Jeremiah 29:13). But how does He actually do this? Psalm 19 answers this question for us. Firstly, He “speaks” to us through the world of nature. Secondly, He “speaks” to us through His written Scriptures (the Bible). Thirdly, He “speaks” to us personally by exposing our sinful hearts and convicting us of our need to be made right with God Himself. As we take this journey of seeking to know God, it will eventually lead us to the One who alone can remove our sin and make us right with God… the Lord Jesus Christ… our Rock and our Redeemer!
Faith that never gives up
In the Bible the Christian life is often compared to a long distance race. But as we all know, many runners in these races don’t make it to the finish line. Sadly, that is also true of some who claim to be Christians today. For a variety of reasons they lose heart and give up. It seems that the book of Hebrews had these sorts of people in mind, and today’s passage is a word of strong encouragement to these people. Whatever difficulties you may be facing, and they are an unavoidable part of life for every Christian, it’s *always* worth it to run the race of life with perseverance and to keep fixing your eyes on Jesus. This is the faith that gets every genuine believer triumphantly to the finish line.
People of faith
Listen as Pastor Dave looks at how God empowers, sustains and rewards people of faith.
The fool says…
Psalm 14 is a song for the people of God. It helps us understand how we should feel when we see a world which has turned its back on God.
Choosing to believe the invisible God
For most people the whole matter of faith has a mysterious, even scary, element to it. Can I trust the parachute to open when I jump out of the plane at 2000 metres? What factors inform decisions like these? The Christian life is a life of faith and this fact is graphically illustrated again in our passage today as we look at the experiences of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Jacob, Moses and Rahab. In many different ways they were all challenged to “see Him who is invisible” (verse 27). They were called to intentionally choose to put their hope and confidence in the promises of a God whom they could not actually see. And that is exactly what we are being asked to do today… to believe in the God who has given us Jesus Christ and invites us to put our trust fully in Him.
Worthy of our praise
Listen as Pastor Dave unpacks what we can learn from the psalmist’s experience as to why God is worthy of our praise.
The journey of faith
The Christian life is a journey… a journey of faith. And perhaps no one models this better for us than Abraham. He was far from a perfect man (thankfully!), but his continual dependence on God over his lifetime still speaks powerfully to us today. Here was a man who implicitly believed the promises of God and clung to those promises year after year. Some of them were fulfilled in his lifetime. Some were not. Yet his unwavering faith that God would one day fulfil those promises enabled him to live and die a contented man. Even today those who have faith in Jesus Christ are called ‘children of Abraham’. The entire Christian life, ’from first to last’, is a journey of faith as we learn in daily life what it means to love, obey, trust and serve our faithful God.