The Deadly Sin of Anger

CHRIST SANCTUARY   20 October 2024               ________________________________________________________________

If you and I were writing the book of Jonah there wouldn’t be a chapter 4. We would end the book at chapter three. And we’d end the book by saying something like: “And Jonah sailed back to his homeland rejoicing.” See, although Jonah first refused to go to preach to the Ninevites, He finally did / and His mission was a success

Nineveh is a huge sprawling city / Jonah himself tells us that it would take three days to walk across it. He sees about 600,000 people repented! / and turned to God. That’s like seeing a population three times the size of Wellington get down on their knees / in repentance 

Sinclair Ferguson in his commentary says: “I have met men who would give their right arm to see what Jonah saw in Nineveh”
 To be used by God in such a way / that an entire city is brought to its knees for God / would be “sweeter than life itself.”

What a great outcome / and you would expect to see Jonah rejoicing. But that’s not the case.

Attributes – The Sovereignty of God

 

Christ Sanctuary – 31st December 2023

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When Dr J.I. Packer was asked which teaching in the Bible
Christians are most prone to neglect / He said:
“I don’t think enough Christians believe deeply enough
in the sovereignty of God / We say we believe it / but we still live
our lives as if everything depended on us / rather than on him”

Sproul / “Most Christians salute the sovereignty of God
but believe in the sovereignty of man”

Attributes – The Wrath of God

Christ Sanctuary – 12th November 2023  – Andrew Lim
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We come now / to what must easily be the most unpopular of attributes
Christians generally shy away from talking about the wrath of God

J.I. Packer in his book Knowing God
 says:
“The subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society
and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo
and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter”

C. H. Dodd / one time professor of Divinity at Cambridge
held the view that the wrath of God is an archaic outdated idea

But why do so many Christians shy away from affirming God’s wrath?

Attributes – The Truthfulness of God

We’ve been exploring the attributes of God
And this morning / we’re looking at the truthfulness of God

In our passage we have an encounter between two men / Jesus and Pilate
We must not miss out on the sobriety / the gravity of this encounter
If you were standing there in the same room / you might feel like fainting
You could cut the tension with a knife / Pilate is powerful
and he is also ruthless / two deadly traits when combined
and our Lord stands on the very edge of His earthly existence

But / even when his own life hangs on a thread
Jesus treats Pilate as a soul who needs light and truth
He is more concerned with Pilate’s destiny / than that of His own

He tries to lead Pilate to a spiritual plane
He talks of a kingdom that is not of this world
But Pilate understands only one thing
that his political kingdom not be challenged

Attributes – The Mercy of God

Mercy! Just exactly what is mercy?
Mercy would be a meaningless idea
if you weren’t guilty of wrongdoing / and deserving punishment

You only ask for mercy / if you’re guilty / mercy presupposes guilt
If you didn’t break any law / you wouldn’t need mercy
If you did / mercy might spare you from what justice demands

Attributes – The Holiness of God

The holiness of God is one of the most neglected attributes of God
There seems to be a certain measure of hesitation / or reluctance
to delve deeper / into what the holiness of God means

But if we don’t understand the holiness of God several problems arise
* we will have a deficient view of Who God is
* we will be desensitized / to the decadence of sin
* we will have little or no motivation for repentance
* we won’t be growing Christlikeness in our life
won’t attain to spiritual maturity

It’s most vital / that we understand God’s holiness

Attributes – The Omnipresence of God

Psalm 139 expresses a number of the attributes of God
but one of the most prominent ones / is the omnipresence of God
the teaching that God is everywhere present

David / the writer of this psalm / has had numerous first-hand experiences
of the presence of God in his life 

in his many close encounters with danger and possible death

So he’s able to talk about it in a way you and I are not able to naturally

So let’s learn from him

Encourage One Another

Many many moons ago, I listened to a cassette tape recording of a message by Rev Dr W. Scott McPheat. McPheat was the minister of St David’s Presbyterian Church in Khyber Pass, Auckland from 1977 to 1988.

I don’t remember much of the message now but it was on the subject of encouragement. I remember McPheat citing an engaging story told by Ardis Whitman, the American writer. 

Whitman tells of an illuminating experience that she had as a child. A mother who lived nearby died, and the father, who was a drunk, was unable to care for the children. So another neighbour took one of the boys from this large family, and virtually reared him as her own son. She was a widow. She was poor. And she was uneducated. But she had this tremendous zest for life and abounding energy. And under her influence, this lad who was rather shy and withdrawn, began to grow and blossom

Attributes – The Eternity of God

Moses is the writer of this psalm
He was at that time well advanced in years
And by then he had became familiar with the fragility of life

In a span of 40 years he watched 605,550 people die
 that translates to about 15,000 people a year
this means that Moses was conducting 41 funerals a day
 But this figure applies to men only
 When you throw women and children into the mix
 Moses was conducting about 87 funerals a day
That’s not the exact number every single day
On some days / thousands were killed
because of their rebellion and sin / Num. 16:49; 25:9

OT scholar Daniel Block / tells us that for 38 yrs Moses lived in “a walking mortuary”
He says: “The dominant sound as the people walked in the desert
was not the sound of the bleating of the sheep or that of crying babies / It was the death wail”