Category Archives: Faith

Mk 10:52 – “Your faith has healed you” – sermon notes

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Text: Mark 10:52

An effect: ‘healed’

‘Sozo’ = to save.

We tend to think of salvation as

  • accepting Jesus into our hearts
  • experiencing the love of God
  • going to heaven when we die

Clearly, salvation for Bartimaeus involved physical healing.  But there is a hint in the word itself that something more than physical healing is going on here: he received his sight; and he became a disciple (v52)

Mark 10 – ‘to inherit eternal life’ (v17), ‘to enter the kingdom of God’ (vv23-26), and ‘to be saved’ (v26) are used synonymously.…

Faith, hope and love in Jesus’ ministry

Walking With Giants Posted on by

The familiar Christian triad of faith, hope and love occur not only in the writings of Paul but also in the ministry of Jesus himself.

Faith is prominent in passages such as Matt. 6:30; 8:10, 26; 9:2, 22, 29; 14:31; 15:28; 16:8; 17:20; 21:21; 23:23.

The idea of hope (even if not always the actual word) occurs in Matt. 9:2; 14:27; Mark 5:36; 6:50; 9:23; John 11:11, 23, 40, etc.

And love, pre-eminent of the three, is stressed in passages including Matt.…

Why will people not come to Christ?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Joel Beeke and Mark Jones, in A Puritan theology: doctrine for life, outline some of the human impediments in the way of a person coming to Christ for salvation.

1. Neglecting the Christ of the Bible.

Some people fail to come to Christ because they pay little or no regard to the Christ of the Bible.  They seek a Christ of their own imagination; they seek Christ on their own terms.  We do not urge such people to read the Bible as a mere duty, or because in doing so they will have some kind of mystical experience.  …

Genesis 22 – “Abraham, kill your son”

Walking With Giants Posted on by

The account (in Genesis 22) of how God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, is one of the most problematic in the whole of scripture.  It seems to teach that blind, irrational faith is a ‘good thing’, even the result is that you are willing to slaughter a member of your own family because you think that God has told you to do it.  Of, course, God prevented Abraham from killing Isaac in the end (Gen 22:12), but that does not seem to get us off the hook: we presume that Abraham would have gone through with the terrible deed if God had not intervened.…

James 2:14-26 – Is your faith in good working order? – sermon notes

Walking With Giants Posted on by

We ensure that our cars, our central heating boilers, and our teeth are in a healthy condition.

But what about your faith?  Is your faith in good working order?

What do we mean by ‘faith’?

  • The sceptical view. Dawkins: ‘Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’
  • The popular view. In the movie Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus says: “Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.”
…

Confessional faith in the Pastoral Epistles

Walking With Giants Posted on by

‘The later letters in the New Testament to Timothy and Titus, in addition to their continuing use of these dynamic definitions of faith, distinguish true faith from false faith by making the content of faith confessional (2 Tim. 4:3; Titus 1:9). Sound doctrine becomes the basis for right teaching (Titus 2:1) and right living (2 Tim. 3:15). Paul’s words to Timothy when faced with the prospect of death—“I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7)—can be a witness to both the dynamic quality of his life in Christ and the correctness of his understanding.’…

Hab 2:2-20 – The righteous will live by faith – sermon notes

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Summary so far

Ch. 1 (questioning, listening, disputing)

We left him (Hab 2:1) watching and waiting.

1. God speaks again

V2 – Then the LORD replied: “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.”

This word is to be preserved, published and proclaimed

God reveals his word progressively – within Habakkuk; the OT, from OT to NT.

Bud/flower, shadow/substance, foundation/building, promise/fulfilment.

The later revelation completes the earlier.…

‘Go by faith, not by sight’

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Lauren Becker, contributor to Point of Enquiry radio programme and podcast, reflects on her experience of driving by a church billboard which proclaimed the words, “Go by faith, not by sight.”  She says that she worried that all the drivers around her would take the message to heart and close their eyes.  She quickly prepared herself for extreme defensive driving maneuvres.  She calls the slogan ‘dangerously stupid’, and explains that this is one of the reasons ‘we reasonable people’ get so annoyed by people of faith. …

Boghossian vs McGrew: faith and evidence

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Peter Boghossian is a teacher of philosophy, an atheist, and author of a recent book, A Manual For Creating Atheists.  Tim McGrew is also a philosophy professor, and a Christian.  They met up recently on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable show.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t particular appreciate the tone of Christian writer and apologist Randal Rauser’s response to this debate.  There’s not much point in (rightly) commending McGrew for not resorting to ‘low blows or rhetorical cheap shots’ and then Rauser littering his own impression of Boghossian’s performance with expressions such as ‘ridiculous…complete buffoon…nonsense…nauseating’ and so on.…

John 20:1-18 – Little faith, great God – sermon notes

Walking With Giants Posted on by

There is no evidence that she had ever been a prostitute. The idea that she was married to Jesus and carrying his baby at the time of his death is fantasy, pure and simple. What we do know of Mary Magdalene is that she was a Galilean woman from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons. Along with several other women, she accompanied Jesus and his disciples on their travels, and contributed towards their support. She may well have been a woman of some substance and standing, and she is always listed first in groups of named female disciples.…