Pastor Prince

Historians say that our country is more divided than it's been since the 1850s, the years preceding our Civil War.  Christ followers have the opportunity to heal this divisions.  Sadly, we've been busy adding to them! Beginning in the 1970s and '80s in our country, evangelicals turned from the proclamation of the good news of Christ to engage in political activity.  The Moral Majority was the largest and most visible manifestation of this.  The culture war was on! What did this culture war bring?  Today, our culture is more liberal than when the war began!  Worse, many people in our country associate evangelicals with partisan political activity instead of gospel proclamation.  On top of that, Democratic and Republican Christ followers are rarely members of the same church. Jesus worked amid deep political tensions.  Though people pressured him to be a political leader, he refused.  Instead, he called people to a kingdom that...

We think of the resurrection of Christ as many things, including the most important event in history!  But we don't often think of it as a sign.  Yet Jesus said it was.  John 2 records that after Jesus ran the merchants and moneychangers out of the temple, Jewish leaders demanded that he give a sign that he had the authority to do what he did.  Jesus said that his sign would be, "Destroy this temple, and after three days I will rebuild it."  At the time, no one other than Jesus understood what he meant.  But later, after his resurrection, his followers understood. So what does the sign mean?  The Jewish leaders believed their authority came from God. They authorized the merchants and moneychangers to do their business in the temple.  Jesus was claiming that his resurrection would show that his authority was greater than theirs because he was Lord.  This gave him full authority over what went on in his Father's house. The idea...

I hate death.  It seems God does too.  The Bible has nothing good to say about death. "If you had been here, my brother would not have died."  These words from Martha in John 11 reflect much of the anguish we feel about death.  Is God present when death occurs?  What has he done or what will he do about death? Martha, Mary, and Lazarus were Jesus' close friends.  He had been their guest in their home.  Yet when he got the word that Lazarus was gravely ill, he lingered where he was a couple of days.  When he finally arrived in Bethany, Martha went out to meet him, and made the statement above.  Then she said, "But I know that even now God will do what you ask."  When Jesus said that her brother would rise again, Martha said in resignation, "I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day."  But what about now?  She missed her brother! Jesus stunned her by saying, "I am the resurrection and the life."...

Truth is in the news a lot these days, particularly in politics.  This was the cover of Time magazine last week: That's a good question.  In these days of "truth hyperbole," "alternative facts," and "fake news," the truth can be hard to find.  Some people don't think the truth matters.  What matters is what we think and how we feel. We're not the only ones to wrestle with the truth.  People did in Jesus' time too.  In John 9:1:1-14, we read about Jesus healing a man born blind.  The main theme of the story is that Jesus is the light of the world.  He is truth. The Pharisees struggle with the healing because it occurred on the Sabbath.  In their interpretation of the scripture, healing was work, and work was forbidden on the Sabbath.  When some took the formerly blind man to them, they said that Jesus couldn't have healed him because he was a sinner.  Yet the man argued that Je...

What if the king we want isn't the king we need?  That's a question this week's message will explore.  John 6:1-15 tells the story of the Jesus' feeding of the five thousand.  God intended it to be a sign of one thing, but the crowd around Jesus saw it as a sign of another.  They were looking for a material Messiah, who would meet their material needs and wants.  But Jesus was a spiritual Messiah, who focused on spiritual needs.  The people wanted physical bread, so they would always have plenty of food.  Jesus offered them spiritual bread that would give them eternal life. We're a lot the same way.  Joel Osteen is much more popular than Mother Theresa!  The American Dream is more powerful than the dream of God's kingdom.  Jesus' sign of the feeding reminds us of what we need and how Jesus had provided it.  That sign points back to the exodus of Israel and looks forward to the Lord's Supper.  It showed that Jesus wa...

A father wants to save the life of his critically-ill son.  This is how the story begins about the third in our series of signs identified in the gospel of John.  John 4:46-54 tells how a desperate father heard about Jesus, and hastily made the journey from his home in Capernaum to Cana, where Jesus was staying. When the man asks Jesus for his help, Jesus replies by telling him to go home, because his son was going to recover.  On his way home, the man's slaves met him with the news that his son's fever has broken.  When he asked them what time it had happened, it was the exact time when Jesus said he would be healed. John identifies this as a sign of who Jesus was and what he came to do.  The OT scriptures teach in passages like Isaiah 25 that at the end of the age, God will bring healing across the world.  This sign Jesus performed showed that he was God's Messiah and healer, and that he was bringing healing to the world. Though we're muc...

In John 2:13-33, Jesus does things we don't expect him to do!  He makes a whip of cords, and apparently uses it to drive animals out of the temple courts.  He turns over the tables of moneychangers and cries out that they have made his Father's house a marketplace! I can't think of another story of Jesus in which he does something like this!  As his followers observe him, they remember Psalm 69:9, in which the writer speaks of a consuming zeal for God's house. The Jewish leaders were upset at what Jesus did.  They confronted him with the question, "Who gave you the authority to do this?  What miraculous sign will you give?"  Jesus responded by saying, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it again!"  Nobody understood what he meant at the time, but later, after Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples would know what he meant. This is Jesus' first public act in the gospel of John.  It's almost violently pass...