Luke 5:1–11. Jesus embodies and exemplifies purposeful, personal, relational, and intentional redemptive strategy. He was a recruiter of sorts. He was recruiting men and women from their old lives, their old ways, their old jobs and occupations, and old purposes to a new way, life, purpose, and identity. This world-wide strategy was kicked off with two words: “Follow Me.”  What was Jesus up to? Who was he about? Simply and clearly, Jesus was about disciples! Jesus started discipling the unregenerate; he discipled men and women to faith, so they could be discipled for evangelism. So, we take our cues from Him and when we do, He promises to do something in us. When disciples are discipled in following Jesus, they will inevitably disciple others.

Mark 9:33–37 No Christian gets to say, “Children, that's not my thing. I’ll let the others take care of the kids.” Jesus’s response to that is to say, “If you can’t receive children, you cannot receive me.” Far from being a guilt trip to move us to receive children, Jesus promises here is that when we do receive these little ones, we will get more of God. But we must take time to think and pray about what it really means to receive children in Jesus’s name.

Job 42:7–16 In our section of Job this morning God has been so sweet to us. Not only has he pulled back the curtain and shown us his conversations with Satan, showed us his love for Job, given us understanding of his very nature through his conversation with Job, but he has shown us a picture of the very good ending that awaits us. You and I, we can find joy in the midst of our suffering in God because we have a final hope—it will not always be this way!

Job 40:3–5; 42:1–6 Today we look at the flip side of this incomprehensible God: we know God in Jesus Christ who has revealed the Father to us. Amazingly, our God speaks and we can know him! Whereas Pastor Luke spoke last week of the God who holds cosmos in his hand and cares for sparrows and even you, think about what it means that this God has spoken to us? It means you can actually know him!

Job 36:24–33; Job 37:21–24. The experience of being confronted by something so vast and spectacular and awe inducing is similar to what Job experiences in the last few chapters of the book of Job. As we’ve studied over the past few weeks, he has had the life he knew and loved stripped from him, and we’ve seen how he and his friends respond to these circumstances. In these final chapters, Job is corrected by Elihu and then God enters the dialogue by speaking directly. In our passage today, we are confronted with the incomprehensible nature of God—he holds a very different place than mankind! God is completely other, and because he’s all powerful, all knowing, and all present, he is unsearchable by men—too vast, too brilliant, too magnificent, too deep, too other for men to ever plumb his depths. Yet, we do not have to despair because he is knowable through Jesus as our savior and lord!

Job 33:14–30. When we suffer or others around us suffer, the pain can seem random, even meaningless. We may begin to feel like Job felt when he declared that God must be his enemy. But this is not how God works. God uses suffering for a purpose. Suffering is never random. God uses it for our good and his glory.

Here in Job 28:12–28 Job makes a statement that we ourselves have to engage with as we read through this account. He claims man—you and me—that we don’t value wisdom rightly, nor can we find it anywhere accessible to us. Do you believe that? Do you believe that you value wisdom? Do you believe you can find it on your own? Or do you see that you might need to look to a wisdom that might seem foolish to the world, but is in fact the very wisdom of God revealed to us!

In God’s wisdom, some people die in vigor while at ease and secure, another dies in bitterness and poverty—regardless of their righteousness or wickedness. Christ came and offers you and me mercy, grace, and eternal life through his righteous life on the cross. But Christ brought more than that! For the unbeliever, Christ has bought patience as God leads us to repentance.

Job 19:23–27. It is often in our lowest, scariest, or most helpless points in life that we see each other’s faith most clearly. This is because we are forced more than ever to look outside of ourselves for answers and to unearth our deepest convictions about where our hope really lies. This sermon has two main objectives: to get reacquainted with Job’s despair by revisiting where we’ve been the past four weeks, and then to catch a glimpse of the hope that Job still has beneath his despair, illustrated in the text for today.

Job 9:33. Suffering, like none other, can make us question, doubt, and distrust the very character of God. We often wonder whether God is punishing or somehow paying us back for something we have done or not done. We fear he might be angry and that his smile has been replaced by a scowl. The Bible tells us that God is pleased with us in Jesus Christ. In Job’s own suffering season, we see him alluding to and even appealing for such an arbiter who might be the go between on his behalf between him and God. He appeals and even says, “There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both.” Here we see a clear reference to the coming mediation and arbitration that God has for all of his children who trust in His Son. May we have hope and assurance that if we are in God’s son, Jesus Christ, we have his smiling and soothing look upon us! It is unchanging and constant.

Job 2:11–13 and Job 13:4–12. In this section of Job, we are focusing on “wrestling with suffering”. Last week Ryan focused on encountering God in our suffering, and this week we are going to focus on encountering people in suffering. As we look at the text, I think you will see that we can comfort with silence and a few timely words. Because God is God, we don't have to be. So my sermon is broken down into two sections—

1. First, we're going to look at the significance of silence.

2. Second, we are going to see the wisdom in watching your words.

As counselors, we don't want to be speculating. So what should we say? God’s words. Stick to what you know, and make your words few.  

Job 3:1–26. Walled up, hedged in, a dark path. Job doesn’t see any way forward in life—he doesn’t see any purpose or path leading on. Job feels abandoned. Suffering does that to us: when we can’t see the path we are on, when all we see is darkness, we feel very alone. Worse of all, we feel as though even God might not be there.

Job 1:1–22; 2:1–10. Suffering. It is impossible to avoid in this life, though many of us will try very hard. It doesn’t matter your ethnicity, age, gender, social or economic status—all people can and often do experience suffering. This morning we start a new series in Job. Job is not necessarily one of the books of the Bible that makes many people’s favorite list, but it makes mine precisely because of its topic—suffering. I don’t have a morbid fascination with suffering, but an awareness that suffering afflicts us all, and we—Christians—we have the best worldview and answer to suffering in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Acts 28:17–31. This is the beautiful cycle that is our life. We come back, again and again, to who we are in Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit in our life for the sake of the gospel of Jesus and our mission to all people. It never gets old because it is both our mission and our identity. We have been called to live for God!

Acts 24:24—25:12. Change and wait brings us face-to-face with a sovereign God who is in control of our lives in ways we don’t always understand. We should take courage that God cares so much about us that he has a plan for each one of us. He knows us so well that he knows what we will do even before we do it and what would be the best path to encourage us to know him and to walk in righteousness. But when we struggle to believe that, to see that, to accept it, our best choice is to remind ourselves and others—in the midst change and in the waiting—of what God has done.

Acts 18:24–28; 20:17–38 As we look at Acts 18 and Acts 20, I pray that you will see that God has called us to be Fervent Partners for the Gospel of Jesus. Fervent in our pursuit of him and others, and partners in that endeavor with one another.

Acts 15:36–41, 16:6–10. You probably know the experience well: You begin to live out what you thought God’s will was and you realize, “I don't think I had this all right.” As we look at this passage, we will see that even when we don’t get all the details of God’s will correct, he is still working. This text’s main point is that God is always working whether we feel he is far away or near at bay. God is always working.

Acts 15:1–21. The main point of our text this morning comes from verse 11: Christians are “saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus”. There are three main parts to this—1) The Debate (vv. 1–6): Does circumcision save?; 2) Peter’s Argument (vv. 7–12): Salvation by Grace; and 3) James’s Resolution (vv. 13–21): A Way Forward for Jew and Gentile Harmony.

Acts 13:1–12; 13:43–52. The events in this text are incredibly important in the history of the church. But though there are sweet successes in the stories that we're studying, don't miss that both are preceded by opposition. As we look at this first missionary journey, we're going to have two significant meetings, and we are going to see this main point: opposition is an opportunity for boldness, not bashfulness, because God is working. 

Acts 10:1–48. As we have been studying through the book of Acts, we’ve been saying: the book of Acts is about the Holy Spirit empowering his people to proclaim the gospel to all people with all boldness and without hindrance. Today, we're talking about all people. I would summarize where we are going with this one sentence: No one is excluded from the gospel, for all are included if they come to Christ.