Outline Available Here

Outline Available Here

1Timothy 1:18-20
Paul charges Timothy in the text, meaning he lays the responsibility upon him, according to the prophecies that came beforehand concerning him. The Spirit of God revealed things through the prophets of the early church that were to be both educational and an exhortation to help Timothy in the spiritual battles he would face. Paul’s charge was concerning two points to avoid a shipwreck of faith. He said, “holding faith, and a good conscience, which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck”. Then he uses two examples, Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom we find out later had gone in the ditch doctrinally, saying that the resurrection had passed already. Their blasphemies had overthrown the faith of other saints, not in the Lord, but in the resurrection. Paul said he had delivered them to Satan, meaning that he had excommunicated them from the local church.

Outline Available Here

Outline Available Here

The nature of God is holiness – God is love, light, life, merciful, gracious, just, jealous, righteous, and a God of wrath and judgment but all these attributes are controlled by His holiness. Habakkuk 1:13 says that He cannot look upon iniquity so God cannot nor will not tolerate sin.
Perfection is His standard – That’s what He requires. Adam and Eve only had to sin once for death to pass upon them and to get displaced from the garden of God. Lucifer only had to want his will instead of submitting to God’s one time and he fell like lightning from heaven. That is the kind of God we will all face someday.

Hebrews 11:8-16
Abraham was, Saved, Sojourner, Stranger, and a Searcher.

In the text we just read, Jesus likens himself and his followers to a vineyard. He called himself the “true vine” or we would say root. He is the life source for all of the saved. He called his followers “branches” because of our connection and dependence on him. Just after he says that he is the true vine, he says “and my Father is the husbandman”. That’s not a term we use today; we would call him the farmer or the gardener. The husbandman owns the land on which he labors, it all belongs to him

Outline Available Here

Immediately after the birth of Christ in scripture, the scene shifts to a group of shepherds that were in the same region doing what shepherds do…watching over sheep. The angel of the Lord appears to them and reveals that the greatest event in all of history has just taken place. The angel says the most gracious statement ever heard “for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord”. And over two thousand years later, we comprehend that these are tidings of great joy and they have been to all people. For the crowd that says that the birth of Christ shouldn’t be celebrated…heaven celebrated it!