Knox Presbyterian Church Podcast

What Shall We Call Him?: Immanuel (God with Us)

The incarnation takes everything we think we know about God and stands it on its head. But it’s not just that. Beyond the miracle and the mystery of the incarnation itself, there’s another incredibly important thing we need to see here. It’s about that little word ‘with’: Emmanuel is God WITH us. The incarnation isn’t just about the mystery of God becoming human. It’s about God becoming human so that he can be WITH us.
Matthew 1:18-25
Isaiah 7:14

What Shall We Call Him?: Jesus (the Lord Saves)

We all have our ways we like to think of God, don’t we? We all have our own preferred pictures of what we think God is like. We form those pictures from a lot of different places. From books and movies. From Sunday School Flannel Grams- do you remember those? From our parents, our friends, and our teachers. 
We all have our ways we like to think of God, to picture God. Even people who say they don’t believe in God – if you get them talking about it, even they have a picture in their minds of what God would be like, if He in fact were to exist. Many people that you know who say they don't believe in God, they have a very clear picture in their minds of the God in whom they don't believe.
It’s been said… "In the beginning God made man in his image and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since."
We all do this, don’t we? 
Individually and collectively, all of us paint a picture of a God that looks a whole lot more like US than anything we find in the pages of Scripture. Quite unintentionally, based on our sentimentality and our own speculation, we have created a god based much more on what we think and what we wish were true (or what we fear is true!) about God than on who God really is. 
And this MATTERS a great deal. Because how we think about God has deep implications on how we think about ourselves and our world. 
Luke 1:26-38 Isaiah 53

What Shall We Call Him?: King of Kings & Lord of Lords

The word Advent means ‘arrival’ or ‘coming.’ One of the things we celebrate during Advent is Christ’s arrival in Bethlehem—that’s obviously central to the season. But even as we look backward to Christ’s birth, part of Advent is about looking forward—looking ahead to the transformation of all things. The Christian story ends with Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom. It ends with God victorious, with every knee bowing to Jesus, the king of kings and the Lord of Lords. It ends where the book of Revelation ends, with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven like a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 21.2). All that might sound strange to you, and certainly there’s been a lot of nonsense propagated over the centuries about them. But convictions about Christ’s return and final victory are woven very deeply into our Christian faith. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and say ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ we are praying for the peaceable kingdom to break into our world.  
Advent is a season in which we look back to Christ’s birth, but also look forward to Christ’s return in glory, to a radical transformation of all things. One helpful way of thinking about it is the idea of the ‘already but not yet.’ On one hand, God’s kingdom is already here in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. His kingdom is ‘at hand,’ present. We can experience it. The peaceable kingdom can and does break into our lives, in big and small moments of beauty, justice, love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. God’s kingdom is already here.
Isaiah 11:1-9Revelation 19:11-16

What Shall We Call Him?: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace

Advent gently beckons your gaze toward Bethlehem. Advent reminds us that the great event we long for at Christmas is not Santa’s drop down the chimney, but God’s coming down to us in the birth of Jesus Christ. In a season where everything around us is telling us to run, work, get-going and get-done, Advent offers us a time to wait. To hope. To make ready. To breathe.
Isaiah 9:2, 6-7 

It's All a Gift: You Can't Outgive God

The greatest gift God gives us is the opportunity to be part of his kingdom. The greatest gift God gives us is opportunity to be part of his kingdom. Here at Knox, the kingdom of God is important to us. Our mission statement at Knox echoes the words of Jesus we just heard: seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness. Our mission at Knox is to love sacrificially, serve generously, and seek Jesus together, to see God’s kingdom come in the Naperville area and beyond. Our mission is to love, serve, and seek Jesus—why? Because when we do, we will have the privilege of seeing his kingdom come. Of seeing the gospel proclaimed and those without hope coming to know Christ and his love. Of seeing the poor fed and the lowly lifted up. Of seeing kids taught to follow Jesus and elders cared for. To be part of God’s work in moments like that is the greatest gift there is.
Matthew 6:19-21,33

It's All a Gift: The Genius of Generosity

In his teachings on ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle coined the phrase “the good life” – it’s a term that stands for the life one would like the live and the happiness one would derive from that life. So, what IS the good life, would you say? What is the kind of life that will make you HAPPY? That will lead us to feel CONTENT? 
Seems to me, there are two very different ways of answering that question. Two different paths toward the good life, toward the happiness we seek. One way toward the good life, some would say, is to GET MORE. Get more money, get more stuff, get more happiness. This is the GET MORE plan. Find happiness, achieve contentedness by making as much as you can and keeping as much as you make. Don’t give any of it away, because the more you give, the less you have. The less you give, the more you have. And then you will be happy.  You’ll be living the good life. That’s the message most of us are buying. That’s the life that most of us in America are living. 
But there’s another way to get the good life. A more counterintuitive way toward contentment. One way is to GET more. But the other is to GIVE MORE.
2 Corinthians 8:1-9
1. Smith, Christian The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose

Worth Sharing: The Continuing Conversion of the Church

We’re wrapping up a sermon series today called ‘Worth Sharing.’ It’s a series about evangelism, and one of the main ideas we’ve been emphasizing these last few weeks is that evangelism is good news. Evangelism is GOOD NEWS. Evangelism is ‘sharing the God you love with the people you love.’ 
Evangelism is about sharing, not forcing. We all share things that we love in life all the time: movies and music, hobbies and friends. Evangelism is just sharing Jesus, the person who’s changed our life. It’s just as natural and normal as that. 
Evangelism is about sharing with friends, not strangers. Evangelism is all about relationships, and the primary audience for Christian evangelism is not strangers, but people you already know: friends, co-workers, neighbors. 
Evangelism is sharing good news, not bad news. To evangelize someone means ‘to good news them,’ and we call it that for a reason. Sharing Jesus with someone is sharing that the good news that Jesus is risen, love and mercy are victorious, and that God will get his way in the end. It’s a hopeful, joyful message. 
For all those reasons, evangelism is good news. Today we want to add one more reason: when we share our faith with others, we discover more about the faith we thought we knew.
Luke 24:13-35 

Worth Sharing: God's Story & Their Story

Evangelism is GOOD NEWS. To engage in evangelism is simply to share the faith we love, the Jesus we love, this church that we love with the people that we love and to invite them to love our faith, our Jesus, and our church too. 
And as we’ve been talking about evangelism this month, we encouraged everyone to pick their “one” – one person in your life who is far from faith, who doesn’t know Jesus, who is not a part of a church. And for thirty days, we’ve been praying for our One, serving our One and seeking ways to share Jesus with our One. 
But, of course, that begs the question – “how? If and when the opportunity arises to share my faith with someone, what do I say??
Acts 17:22-32

Worth Sharing: God's Story & Your Story

God has a story. The church has a story. And you have a story too. We were all born someplace, had a family, grew up, maybe got married or maybe didn’t, and so and so on. Even if we never sit down to write our autobiography, we all have a narrative we keep in our head about who we are and where we came from: a story about significant events, crucial decisions, values and commitments that shaped us. 
And here’s the thing: God’s story has interesting ways of intersecting with our own story. Christians are people who can look at their own life story and trace God’s handiwork. Christians are people who look at their own life and speak not only of their own activity, but God’s. They don’t just look at their story and say ‘I decided to do this,’ but ‘God did that.’ They can say, ‘God taught me, God empowered me, God rescued me,’ or whatever it may be.
We have a story. And somewhere in that story, God is at work. Somewhere, your story intersects with God’s story about the redemption of the world. Now, what that looks like will be different for everyone. Some of you have a story that’s a u-turn like Paul’s. Some of you have a story that’s a straight line: you’ve been following Jesus for as long as you can recall. All our stories are different, but in each of our stories, God is at work somewhere. Part of sharing the gospel with others is being able to spell out the difference Jesus has made for you, in your life.
1 Corinthians 15:3-10

Worth Sharing: Evangelism is Good News (Seriously!)

We are, by nature, evangelistic people. When we love something, we can’t help but want to share it. We’ve just kind of forgotten that Jesus is worth sharing too. So we want see if we can change our thinking around evangelism. Evangelism is not telling people that they’re going to hell, that they’re bad people or really anything bad at all. Evangelism, when it’s done right is simply…
Sharing the faith we love with people we love. 
Sharing the Jesus we love with the people we love.
Sharing this church that we love with the people we love. 
And, as the Holy Spirit empowers us, it’s inviting the people we love to love our faith, to love our Jesus, and to love our church too. Over the course of the next four weeks, we are going to talk about our faith that is WORTH SHARING! And we’re going to talk about who to share it with, what you might share, how you share and why.
Matthew 28:16-20
Acts 1:8