Knox Presbyterian Church Podcast

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

Upside Down Kingdom: Good News for Sinners

Special Guest: Reverend Peter Park
Luke 18:9-14

Upside Down Kingdom: Good News for Ethnic and Religious Minorities

A teacher of the law wants to test Jesus. He asks him, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus turns the question back on him: well, you know the Torah. What does it say? The lawyer cites the Bible from memory: I need to love God and love your neighbor. That’s it, says Jesus! 
Then the lawyer takes a second pass. ‘But who is my neighbor?’ Luke tells us that the lawyer ‘wanted to vindicate [or justify] himself’ by asking that question. He wants to show that he is in the right—and by extension that Jesus is in the wrong. 
Jesus responds by telling a story. It’s the parable of the Good Samaritan, and may be familiar to some of us. A man on a long journey gets beaten up, robbed, and left for dead on the side of the road. Two Jewish religious leaders, a priest and a Levite, come walking by. They see him and his dire need, but do not intervene. A third man approaches, a Samaritan, a member of a religious sect at odds with the Jewish mainstream. At great personal expense and inconvenience, the Samaritan takes care of the man. Jesus asks, who was that man’s neighbor? ‘The third guy,’ says the lawyer. Well, go and do likewise, says Jesus. 
To hear this story in all its power, we need to see how stunning it would have been for Jesus’ audience, how much it reverses their expectations. To understand why, you have to learn something about Samaritans
Luke 10:25-37

Upside Down Kingdom: Good News for the Untouchable

We’re continuing our series on the Gospel of Luke, focusing on the Upside-Down nature of the Kingdom Jesus came to bring. 
In Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, the poor are blessed; those who are low are lifted up; the blind see; the oppressed are set free. And as we will see in our story today, the untouchable are touched, are healed, by the gracious touch of Jesus’ hand.
Luke 8:40-56

Upside Down Kingdom: Good News for Women

Throughout the gospel of Luke, when Jesus proclaims and demonstrates the kingdom, he often does so an eye on women. He shows compassion to this sinful woman who would be rejected by the Pharisees. He heals a woman whose issue of blood had rendered her ritually unclean for years, restoring her body as well as her place in the community (Luke 8). He heals a women physically bent into a position of inferiority (Luke 13), and he praises the generosity of a poor widow (Luke 21). Most of all, in today's remarkable passage, Jesus includes women in his ministry. Joanna, Susanna, and Mary Magdalene not only believe in Jesus, but accompany the disciples as they go from town to town proclaiming the gospel.
And let’s not forget that the entire gospel of Luke is book-ended by the faithfulness of women. Jesus is brought into this world by the courageous obedience of his mother Mary, who says yes to God when she could have said no. And on Easter morning, the disciples who discover the empty tomb are ‘the women.’ It’s simply no accident that women play such an essential role in this gospel. Luke is telling us something about how the kingdom of God works.
Luke 7:36-50