Tag: Anxiety

Salvation: Vengeance and Recompense

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Biblical Text: Isaiah 35:4-7

“Say to those with an anxious heart…”. That is how the text starts. And I think that is just about everyone. We start off with a background level of anxiety. Like background radiation. It is just there. But we all have our own specific anxiety. And here is a word from God to exactly those with an anxious heart. And that word is “Be Strong! Fear Not!” The immediate response from the anxious heart might just well be “why? tell me why I should fear not?” And the text gives us one of God’s rare answers. God will come and save you. God will come and save you with vengeance and recompence. And that is what this sermon preaches. What is a salvation of vengeance and recompence.

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Anxious Hearts

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Biblical Text: John 14:1-14

What do we really want? Another way of saying that might be what are we aimed at? The fancy term here is teleology. What completes us? Such questions typically fascinated most peoples. We are strange in that we’ve ruled out thinking about ends/goals in anything other than temporal and vague ways. And it is that refusal to think seriously about such things that I think puts all kinds of anxiety on our hearts. Jesus’ words in this gospel passage are a direct balm. “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Why? Believe. The rest is in the sermon.

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One Thing is Needful

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Biblical Text: Luke 10:38-42

The text is Mary and Martha which has had an outsized influence on Christian history. It is not stretching it to think that the interpretation of this passage shaped Christianity from the 200’s to the Reformation. What I’m speaking of is the separation of the Christian Life into the Active and the Contemplative. But that division, isn’t really fair either to the historical reality or to the larger reality presented in all of Luke 10.

What this sermon attempts to do is understand Mary and Martha in the full context of Luke 10. It ponders how and why Mary represents the one thing needful, while at the same time giving Martha her place as one addressed doubly “Martha, Martha” by the LORD. (Ponder for a second the full list of those addressed this way. It is like finding yourself on a list with Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Barry Bonds.) And then it answers how we move from an anxious and troubled place, to the place of holding the one thing needful.

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