Sermons by Steve Ebsen (Page 3)
Sabbath School May 16th
More than 6,000 languages are spoken among the world’s billions. The complete Bible has been translated into more than 600 languages, with the New Testament or some portions translated into more than 2500 other languages, as well. That’s a lot of languages, for sure. But at the same time, it is still less than half of the known languages of the world. An estimated 1.5 billion people do not have the full Bible translated into their first language. While there…
Sabbath School May 9th
To read the Bible also means to interpret the Bible. But how do we do that? What principles do we use? How, for instance, do we deal with the different kinds of writing we find there? For example, is the passage we’re reading a parable, a prophetic-symbolic dream, or a historical narrative? The decision of such an important question of the context of Scripture involves an act of interpretation itself. At times, some people use the Bible as a divine…
Has Anything Been Done Like This Great Thing?
We’ve been following the covenant promises of God from their inception in Genesis 3:15 through the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 12:1-3. Many Christians today believe that the Abrahamic covenant was a covenant of grace while the Sinaitic covenant is a covenant of law. Is that understanding correct? Did God change His mind after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and make a covenant that moved from promise to works? Or was obedience to God a call to a much more intimate life…
Sabbath School April 25th
There is no Christian church that does not use Scripture to support its beliefs. Yet the role and authority of Scripture in theology is not the same in all churches. In fact, the role of Scripture can vary greatly from church to church. This is an important but complex subject that we will explore by studying five different influential sources that impact our interpretation of Scripture: tradition, experience, culture, reason, and the Bible itself. These sources play a significant role…
Sabbath School April 18th
Unfortunately, in this post-modern age, the Bible has been largely reinterpreted through the lens of a philosophy that questions both its inspiration and its authority. In fact, the Bible is seen as merely the ideas of human beings living in a relatively primitive culture who couldn’t possibly understand the world as we do today. At the same time, the supernatural element has been either downplayed or even removed from the picture, turning the Bible into a document that, instead of…
Daniel’s Walk with God
When we think about the book of Daniel, we usually think about prophecy and more specifically, apocalyptic prophecy. There is another aspect of Daniel’s book that is often overlooked, that being Daniel’s walk with God. Daniel’s book was written during a time of significant troubles for God’s people. Yet Daniel remained faithful and experienced an increasingly intimate walk with his Lord. Is there something that God’s people might learn from Daniel about walking with God during these troubles times? Scripture:…
The Covenant – Father Abraham
This is 3rd in the series on the Covenant. In this session, we will see how the covenant, the plan of salvation, moves forward through a man named Abraham. The covenant gets additional clarification as Abraham is promised a land, a seed, a blessing and to be a blessing to all nations. Abraham is put to a test in order to see if he indeed has secured the faith necessary to move forward. Those who have faith in Jesus’s sacrifice…
The Covenant Beginnings
The notion of a covenant is unfamiliar to many today. But, the practice of a covenantal life was an integral part of the ancient cultures in the Near East. Tens of thousands of documents unearthed in the last decades show a wide range of legal agreements between individuals and between nations. Already in the eighteenth-century B.C., such international covenants attached religious sanctions that involved the slaughter and cutting up of sacrificial beasts for the making of a covenants. The contracting…
Restoring Fellowship with God
We’ve heard that Jesus loves us and has called us friend (Jn 15:15a). In this message I explore the idea further. Why did God originally create man? What is the end goal of man’s salvation? Is the plan to take us back to the original relationship that was in the Garden of Eden? The Apostle Paul speaks of reconciliation between God and man. In 2 Corinthians 5:20 Paul says, “God has reconciled Himself to man, now man must reconcile himself…
The Word Became Flesh
One of the most endearing stories during the Christmas season is the visit by the 3 kings who were bearing gifts. (Mt. 2). However, the more powerful story is the one about the gifts that Jesus brought to man. Those gifts included the forgiveness of our sins and setting man right with God (justification), God sending His Holy Spirit to change us from our current sinful condition to the condition that man was in before his fall (sanctification), and finally…