Fear is a powerful emotion. Though some are more prone to it than others, all struggle with it. Fear can paralyze your ability to take action, and fear can cause you to forfeit what is good. However, the most destructive and dangerous reaction to fear is that it can cause you to lose your confident hope in God's promises and surrender your expectant joy in the kingdom of God.

The Thessalonians Christians were fearful that the persecutions they were enduring meant that they had missed the Second Coming of Christ and were thus experiencing the judgment of Christ on the wicked. Paul had written his first letter to the Thessalonians to assure them that Christ would rapture the church before the judgment of the wicked and to encourage them that they had not missed the rapture.

Paul writes this second letter to address this issue again. The church was enduring severe persecution. Additionally, there were false teachers who claimed that Christ had already returned. The pressures of persecution and the confusion caused by false teaching had caused the church to fear again that they had missed the rapture.

Paul writes this letter not to elaborate on all the details of the Second Coming and the particulars of the antichrist but as a pastor to his church, to encourage them to hold tightly to God's word with confident hope.

The main idea of this passage is: Do not be alarmed by false teachings or fearful of powerless threats but trust in the sovereignty, authority, and power of God.

Paul is not writing to rebuke the church or shame them for their fear but rather to warn them of the danger of being deceived and distracted by false teaching.

From both false teaching and biblical ignorance, many today struggle with fear and anxiety that steal their confident hope and joy in the Lord. So, how can you keep from being deceived and distracted by false teachings?

This passage provides three warnings to help you avoid being distracted by false teachings. Do not be alarmed by false teaching, fearful of the power of false prophets, or deceived by Satan.

Salvation is not transactional but transformative. When God calls you to salvation, it is a calling to believe and be transformed by the power of God to accomplish His will and bring glory to His name.

In the secular world, you become very accustomed to transactional relationships. Unfortunately, not only do many people approach their most intimate relationships with a transactional mindset, but many also attempt to relate to God in a similar manner. However, God does not negotiate or bargain, nor can God be manipulated or deceived. It is impossible to receive God's salvation through any form of human transaction.

When you believe in faith and are saved by God, you are transformed by the power of God for the glory of God. In 2 Thessalonians 1:11-12, Paul prays with confidence in God's will for the Thessalonian church to continue being transformed for His glory.

How does salvation transform your life? These verses illustrate two fundamental ways in which salvation transforms a Christian's life. That is, salvation transforms what you are and what you do.

Christians endure the present with confident faith in the coming of Jesus, who will rightly judge the world, rescue the saints, and reveal His full glory. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians to encourage the saints who were enduring persecution. The encouragement is that Jesus is coming again to rescue the saints and judge the wicked.

Thinking of the vengeance and judgment of God is uncomfortable for many Christians. So, how should you respond to the coming judgment of Christ?

This passage is both an encouragement to Christians and a warning to unbelievers. To believers, it encourages you to have confident faith, and to unbelievers, it serves as a warning of God's coming judgment.

This passage encourages the saints to endure the present with confident faith in who Jesus is and what he will do. To unbelievers, it is an urgent plea to repent.

When you think about helping, ministering, and serving others, you tend to think first about what you can do, give, or assist with. However, these opening words of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians remind the church that your ministry is your own testimony.

What impact should your testimony have on other Christians? This passage identifies two ways that your testimony should impact other Christians.

TXTThe desire of God is not that you would be insulated or isolated from the world but that you would be a living testimony to God’s truth in and to the world.

Every Christian experiences a tension between desiring to be separated from the world and obedience to proclaim the gospel to the world. Throughout history, there have been excesses on both sides of this tension. Sometimes, Christians have overemphasized separation from the world and sought to isolate themselves from the world and restrict contact with non-Christians. At other times, Christians have overemphasized ministry to the world and abandoned holiness and the requirements of faith and obedience in a foolish attempt to make the gospel more worldly appealing.

The Christian who attempts to isolate themselves from the world disobeys God’s command to be a gospel light and witness to the world, and the Christian who seeks at all costs to be appealing to the world disobeys God’s command to live lives of holiness.

Whether you are a recent high school graduate preparing to enter the working world or attend college, or an adult working a secular job, every Christian must wrestle with this tension that comes from living a holy life for Christ while living in an evil world.

This is the very issue that Jesus is praying about in John 17:14-19. He does not pray that God would take Christians out of the world, but while they are in the world, keep them holy and obedient to the faith.

In this sermon, pastor Ben Smith preaches from John 17:14-19 on how you can be in the world without becoming like the world by seeking godly affections, resting in God’s power, and being set apart by God.

For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is not something that is celebrated once a year but a moment that forever changes your life.

In a few weeks, many will celebrate the completion of their high school or college studies. To recognize these achievements, schools will host graduation ceremonies, called commencement exercises. Because these ceremonies celebrate the completion of a course of study, most people think of a commencement service as a ceremony to mark the conclusion of something.

However, to commence means to start. Commencement exercises are intended to mark the beginning of something. For high school graduates, that is the beginning of their life as adults and entering the workforce, and for college graduates, that is the beginning of the career they trained for.

This is similar to how many think about Resurrection Sunday. In many ways, Resurrection Sunday can feel like the conclusion – the big event. And thus, the Sunday after is more about getting back to normal. The family pictures have been taken and posted to social media. The new clothes are now just another piece in your wardrobe. All of the candy has been eaten. And now things are back to a regular routine and norm.

For those who have confessed Jesus as Lord and believed that God raised him from the dead, the resurrection is not the conclusion but the beginning. For Christians, Resurrection Sunday is not an event that comes and goes; it is a celebration of a moment that forever changes their lives.

Luke 24:13-35 recounts the experience of two men who seemed very familiar with Jesus and what He taught. They seemed to have had high hopes that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah. Yet they are perplexed because of the events that led to Jesus’s crucifixion and death. They have heard reports that His body is no longer in the grave and that He is, in fact, alive.

These are amazing and perplexing things to these men, but at the point that we meet them in Luke 24, these events have had no impact on their lives. They are walking home and getting back to their regular lives. But as they walk home, they meet Jesus, and everything about their lives changes.

The resurrection forever transforms your understanding and your life.

The resurrection of Jesus is more than a historical event. The resurrection of Jesus is a confrontation of faith. Do you believe that He is the resurrection and life?

This interaction between Martha and Jesus is dripping with emotion. Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, had a close and affectionate relationship with Jesus. Verses 33-36 tell us that when Mary met him, accompanied by many mourners, he was deeply moved, and when he came to the tomb, he wept. The sisters are grieved by the loss of their brother and disappointed that Jesus had not arrived in time to heal him from his sickness.

There is a tendency to read this passage and focus primarily on the emotions. However, God is doing more than ministering to emotions in this passage. In God’s providence, he was providing an opportunity to demonstrate His glory and call his disciples to a deeper faith and belief.

Martha acknowledged that she believed in the resurrection on the last day, but this belief was academic and did not influence how she experienced the grief of the moment. Jesus called her to personally believe that he alone is the source and power of resurrection and eternal life. Many people, like Martha, acknowledge Jesus's resurrection, but what does it mean to have faith and belief that Jesus is the resurrection and the life? This passage exposes the insufficiency of knowledge alone and the requirement of faith and confession.

Having faith and belief that Jesus is the resurrection and the life is:

• More than an acknowledgment of fact.

• Believing that in Jesus alone is salvation.

• Confessing Jesus as Christ and Lord.

In these last verses of Romans 13, Paul encourages Christians to recognize that it is time to be ready for Jesus' return and put away the things of darkness. Like how we respond to the dawn of a new day by getting ready for the day, Paul instructs that Christians should get prepared, welcome the light of truth, and put on Jesus.

Proverbs 22:6 is a testimony to the goodness of parents, the blessing of godly parents, and the hope by which parents labor. Presently our culture has become very hostile to the God-ordained role of family and, in particular, parents. It seems that in recent years the efforts of secular forces to diminish the importance and influence of parents in the lives of their children have grown more intense. From a biblical worldview, children's primary and first teachers are their parents. Parents are recognized as the ones with both the primary authority and responsibility for their children. There are many resources that parents can make use of to help them raise their children. Certainly, one of the most important institutions God uses to help parents raise their children is the church. However, no one and no institution can take the place of parents.

Proverbs 22:6 is not a guarantee of outcome. Instead, it recognizes the important role of parents in the spiritual development of children and the grace of God that flows from His truth.

Many of the disciples were fishermen by trade before Jesus called them to follow him. After the dramatic events of the death and resurrection recorded in John 20, we find these men out on the water fishing again in chapter 21. They have returned what they knew before following Jesus. It almost seems like they are trying to return to normal. However, their routine was interrupted by the miraculous.

I think the real question the disciples were struggling with was what do we do now and how do we do it? Jesus had some lessons still to teach these fishermen. He wanted them and us to know by what power the purposes of God would be accomplished.

Jesus proclaimed, “It is finished,” as His final word from the cross. With His death, scripture was fulfilled, and the work of redemption was complete. We can do nothing to earn our salvation. Jesus finished the work of atonement on the cross. You cannot add more to what Jesus has done. You must either receive the gift or reject it.

In an attempt to demonstrate His weakness and powerlessness, Jesus is ridiculed as a false king. But even in His suffering and mistreatment, His kingdom is unshaken. His authority as King of all kings is not threatened.

Death on the cross was intended to be humiliating and shameful. But on the cross, Jesus confronts the guilt and shame of our sin and overcomes it with His own blood.

It has been a difficult week. Due to a family tragedy, I did not preach this pastor Sunday, and we have been out of town this week for the funeral.

For the podcast this week, I have chosen a sermon I preached in 2020 from the book of James. In this passage, James takes on the cause of conflict in the church and the resulting broken relationship with God and gives a clear solution – draw near to God through repentance. I hope it will be a blessing to you.

This week has had its challenges. Due to a major water leak in our sanctuary, no recording was made of last Sunday’s sermon. And as the week unfolded my time was consumed with the logistics of dealing with the cleanup and moving our services to another building. Unfortunately, I do not have a sermon podcast for this week and was not able to finish writing my blog post. Today’s episode is a quick update on the events of this past week and what I hope will be in the days to come.

Church leadership can be a complicated subject. Tradition and customs often have more weight on how we structure church leadership than the biblical witness. And there is always the human concern of who has more power than who.

The word elder is almost exclusively used in the New Testament in the plural form. The only references to a singular elder are greetings and instructions on how the church should respond to accusations against an elder. The point is simple: the church is to have a plurality of elders.

The office of elder is sometimes referred to as overseer or pastor. Every reference to elders recognizes the elders as the ones who have authority over and responsibility for the church.

I am confident that the more faithful we obey God’s word, the more the church will be effective and blessed. Thus, in this sermon, I hope to be as biblically faithful as possible, knowing that we do not perfectly reflect this teaching in our church and may find this uncomfortable. I do so that we might constantly examine our faithfulness to God’s word and continually move toward more faithful obedience.

When someone goes to school to learn a trade, the ultimate goal is to become proficient in the skill well enough to employ it to earn a living. When students choose their degree program in college, the intended purpose is to prepare for a career in a specific field.

Training for a job or studying for a future career are worthy endeavors and have a sense of anticipation for what is to come after the training is complete. However, if your goal were only to train but never to employ your skill, it would become a purposeless endeavor.

A ministry is something that serves as an agency, instrument, or means. The church's ministry is to equip and mature the saints for faithful service to the Lord. Ephesians 4:11-16 points to the role that church leaders have in equipping the saints and the command on all the members of the church to mature and grow.

The book of 2 Timothy was written by Paul to Timothy as a letter of instruction as to how he was to pastor and lead the church. This passage (4:1-5), is often used when giving a charge to a newly ordained pastor – and rightly so.

Yet we should not see this passage as only speaking to or applying to pastors. The books of our New Testament were mostly letters written to encourage individuals and specific churches in their living out of the gospel. Being inspired by the Holy Spirit, the church recognized that these letters were instructive for the whole church and thus passed them around to others for their edification. Thus with a passage like this one, we can appreciate how it speaks to a particular group, but we must not lose sight that all of scripture is instructive and beneficial to the whole church.

2 Timothy 4:1-5 commands us to preach the word, minister the word both for God's glory and man's blessing.

This past weekend my family and I were in Athens, GA, because our son, Micah, performed with the Georgia All State Chorus on Saturday. The concert was wonderful, and we enjoyed worshiping with Watkinsville First Baptist on Sunday. I am very thankful for Greg Benfield, who is the Associational Missions Strategist for the Piedmont-Okefenokee Baptist Association. Greg filled the pulpit for me here at Central in Waycross so that I could be away.

Since I did not preach this past Sunday, the sermon this week is one out of the archives. In 2019 I preached a sermon series on families and began with a sermon from Colossians 3:18-19 titled Marriages that testify to Christ. I preached this on March 3, 2019. I hope that it will bless you today.

Presently there is great confusion about the church’s ministry of worship. Today, many think of the worship ministry of the church as a product of consumption. Thus the main determining factor of attendance for many is founded on personal preferences of music style, preaching style, and formality or informality of the church’s liturgy. Attendance is not understood as an integral part of one’s spiritual life but rather an option equal to all other calendared events.

In this passage, Paul is writing to the church as to how they are to live and interact with other believers in the church. Verses 19 and 20, reference the public worship of the church and the whole passage is instructive for our understanding of worship.

Church discipline is a subject that makes many uncomfortable. This may be because the church has not been faithful or consistent, some have used the cover of church discipline to abuse, or so little is understood about it, that there is much misunderstanding. Regardless of how uncomfortable it may cause us to be, we must reckon with the fact that this is the teaching of Jesus. May our heart's desire be to faithfully obey the word of God - even the parts that make us uncomfortable.