Pastor Prince

God's Big Story has a climax.  This climax is Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.  Everything that happened before these prepared the way for them.  Everything that happened after was built on them.  What was happening when Jesus was crucified?  That's a question theologians have pondered for thousands of years?  None of us can comprehend all that was going on in those hours.  Jesus' followers didn't understand at the time.  They would begin to understand only after the resurrection. Two key words the New Testament uses to tell about what was going on when Jesus died on the cross are "redemption" and "reconciliation." In Romans 3:22b-26, the apostle Paul says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by the redemption that came by his grace in Christ.  "Justified" means to be declared "not guilty."  "Redemption" is to be freed of a debt.   In the ancient

How do you sum up the things Jesus did during his earthly ministry?  Sounds impossible to do!  But Matthew did it in Matthew 4:23-25.  He said Jesus preached the good news of the kingdom, taught people how to be kingdom citizens, and showed the kingdom had come by healing diseases. He preached the good news of the kingdom.  The kingdom was the kingdom of God.  Jesus talked about it all the time.  The Bible teaches that at the end of the world, God will bring his kingdom to earth.  He will establish his kingdom through his Anointed One, his Messiah.  In this kingdom, he will right all wrongs, and establish his peace and love.   The good news Jesus proclaimed about the kingdom was that it was entering the world through him.  In Luke 17:20-21, he said that the kingdom wasn't coming by careful observation.  It wasn't in a geographical location.  Instead, it was in human hearts.  People entered God's kingdom when they put their faith in Christ. Citizens of God's

One of the prominent themes of the gospel of Luke is that Jesus came to bless the poor and marginalized.  The Virgin Mary is a poor, unknown woman in Nazareth.  God announces Jesus' birth to a group of shepherds out in the field.   Luke continues that theme in his account of Jesus' sermon at Nazareth in 4:14-30.  It's Jesus' first sermon in the gospel, giving it prominence.  It sets the theme of Jesus' public ministry.  The fact that it takes place in Jesus' hometown of Nazareth gives it particular importance. Jesus is in a synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath.  They hand the scroll of Isaiah to him, and he turns to what we know as 61:1-2.  This is one of the "Servant Songs" of Isaiah, which tell about a special servant of the Lord.  Many in Jesus' time connected them to the Messiah, the Anointed One, who would establish God's kingdom on earth.   Jesus reads the passage, in which the servant says that he came to proclaim good n

Following his baptism, the Holy Spirit fell on Jesus, giving him the power to fulfill the mission God gave him.  In the power of the Spirit, Jesus went into the desert, where he defined the kind of Messiah he would be.  This definition came through the devil's temptations. Luke's account of these temptations are in 4:1-13.  In the first, the devil said to Jesus, "If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread."  Jesus was starving, so this temptation had to be particularly compelling!   Jesus responded by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3.  People don't live by bread alone, but by God's words!   Here, Satan was tempting Jesus to be a material Messiah.  This is the kind of Messiah people want!  John 6:14-15 records that following the feeding of the 5000, the crowd wanted to make Jesus king by force.  And why not?  If he could produce food like that, they would never again need to struggle to get food! We like material Messiahs today.  Many peo

It would be easy to pass over Jesus' baptism in the Bible's Big Story of God's mission to save the world.  It seems so simple and small-scale.  Yet it was a key moment in Jesus' life and therefore a key moment in the Big Story. One day, John the Baptist is shocked to see Jesus in the line for baptism.  John protests, saying that their roles should be reversed.  Jesus should be baptizing him!  But Jesus said they needed to do this to "fulfill all righteousness."  We don't know all that means, but it appears to mean that submitting to John's baptism was important for Jesus to do.  By receiving his baptism, he connected himself to John and his ministry, and by extension, to God's Big Story. This was a pivotal moment in that it marked the beginning of Jesus' public ministry.  We don't know much about what Jesus did before this point.  That's probably because he led an unremarkable life.  The comments of people from his hometown