This Sunday's Worship Materials can be found in the "Featured Sermon" below. We meet in person at Harper Park Middle School, and the service is also livestreamed on our YouTube channel.

Heart Prep for Sunday, January 24th

This week, we’re continuing our January sermon series — “With Confidence: Trusting God in Winter.”   We’ve already looking at having confidence in God, confidence in the Bible, confidence in Christ, and this week we’re looking at having confidence in the gospel.  We’ll be doing a deep dive into a few verses, Romans 1:16-17, which are the theme verses for the whole Book of Romans.

These verses also explain why we can have confidence in the gospel.  These are the verses that Martin Luther, the great reformer, wrote about at the end of his life. As he thinks back over 25 some years of how God has used him, he reminds himself that it all began in this chapter and with these verses — “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Then he writes that he came to hate the righteousness of God because the righteousness of God for Martin Luther was something that condemned him.  No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, no matter what self-denial he engaged in, the righteousness of God always condemned him.  And he writes, “I began to hate the righteousness of God” — until he saw for the first time that the righteousness that God demands … is the righteousness that God provides in the Gospel.  And when he saw that he writes, “It was like the opening of the gates of paradise.”  And it changed Martin Luther’s life and led to the start of the Reformation, which changed the world.

It was the power of the gospel in this text.  And that’s something we can have confidence in … because God’s not done changing lives.  Looking forward to seeing you again this Sunday, Dr. Dave