In English, the word Immanuel has only eight letters. Yet I tell you it is heavier than the heavens and the earth. In that one word, Immanuel, you have the most offensive and the most comforting, the most repulsive and the most attractive message the...
Jesus Christ was not just born. He had an existence before he was born; and therefore, Jesus was not just born—he was given to us. Jesus is the one gift that, if you have it, you have all the other gifts. Jesus is the one gift that, if you reject it,...
The context of Psalm 2 is that the king has been installed in Jerusalem, but all the foreign kings are hostile and conspiring against this king. If you read it carefully, you’ll see that no earthly king can completely justify the fury of the threats,...
In Psalm 69, we have the prayer diary of Jesus and an expression of his anguish and his sufferings for us. This psalm, of course, is written by David, and it’s about King David and his immediate problems. But it actually doesn’t refer only to David—i...
At the end of the end of the last of Moses’ sermons, he says something so simple that it’s difficult. Moses starts saying, “I’m offering you this personal relationship with God.” He’s saying, “It’s not too difficult. It’s near you. You don’t have to...
When you’re about to die, there are no tangents; you get right to the point. You only say the things that are the most important that you’ve ever learned in your whole life. Here, at the very end of the end of his sermons, at the very end of the book...
If the last thing, practically, that Moses said before he died was, “You need to be in a covenant relationship with God,” then it would behoove us to figure out what that is. What is a covenant relationship with God? In Deuteronomy, we have a series...
If we look at Jesus Christ, at the case for Jesus being who he said he is, there are five things to see. First, there was a man who claimed to be God. Second, he apparently did miracles. Third, he got the people closest to him to believe he was God....
In John 5, Jesus heals a lame man, and then he begins to teach about himself. He makes some astounding claims, and the people challenge him. “Why should we believe you?” In the context of Jewish jurisprudence, if a claim was made, you had to have tw...
You can’t talk publicly about Christianity unless at some point you get down to say, “Well, what is it?” There’s great consensus that 1 Corinthians was written just 20 years after the death of Jesus Christ. So when Paul says he’s summarizing the mes...
