The Simple Voice of Jesus

This week's text is from the Book of Acts, chapter eighteen, verses one through eleven.

Okay.

After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth, and he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.

And he went to see them.

And because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked, for they were tent makers by trade.

And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.

When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, Your blood be on your own heads.

I am innocent.

From now on I will go to the Gentiles.

And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God.

His house was next door to the synagogue.

Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household, and many of the Corinthians, hearing Paul, believed and were baptized.

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, Do not be afraid, but go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.

And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the Word of God among them.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

You can be seated.

My name is JP.

I'm the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Inglewood.

We're right around the University of Denver area along the southern edge of the city.

And uh this past week uh we had a larger meeting of all of our sister churches that are in what is called a presbytery, uh, which is your presbytery that your church is in consists of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

So it's really tiny, very small uh presbytery.

Uh but we met in Lander, Wyoming uh this past week.

Uh James and I and uh one of the guys that works at our church, Garrett, got to drive up together and stay with one another and drive back and spend time with each other, and it was a real uh treat and a joy.

And James and I just share um quite uh quite a similar outlook on ministry and life.

Um, and we find ourselves both in these sort of ministry contexts where we're along the edge of the city where people actually live, um, not in the not in the heart, not in the core.

So uh it was a real real treat to do that.

Um, and it's a real treat to be with you all this morning.

Uh, I bring greetings to you from your brothers and sisters at Christ Press uh in uh in Inglewood.

We uh James and I decided that we wanted to try to give each other's congregations a little bit of a snippet of what we've been doing in our churches this year.

So James is preaching on Ecclesiastes 3 this morning, and that the text that we have in front of us is Acts chapter 18.

Acts 18 · chapter mention

We've been going through uh the book of Acts together as a church this year, and we've been thinking about this one big idea through the book of Acts, and that is that Jesus is building a durable community.

That Jesus is building a durable community.

So you can kind of think of uh the book of Acts through that lens, and we can think of our passage uh today through that.

But just to get us a little bit up to speed, because we are jumping in in the middle of Acts, uh, this is a bit of a transition portion uh in the book of Acts.

It's written by a guy named Luke.

He also wrote a gospel.

The Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts are sort of like two volumes.

Uh what the Gospel of Luke is about is that is the life of Jesus and what he did in his incarnation while he was here on earth.

The book of Acts, Luke, tells us is about what Jesus continued to do after his resurrection and at his ascension, where he sits at the right hand of the Father, ruling and reigning, what we just confessed together through the Apostles' Creed.

And in this portion of Acts, it's a bit of a transition.

Um what Luke is doing now is he's with shorter passages covering longer periods of time, essentially, is what he's doing at this point.

And Paul, who we run into in Acts 18, uh is finding himself in these sort of major cities within the Roman Empire.

Uh we just read that he came from Athens.

Uh Athens uh was a city of about 10,000 people.

It was sort of after Athens' heyday, um, but that was a city of about 10,000 people.

He will move on from Corinth to go to a city called Ephesus of about 500,000 people, and then where we find him today in our text is Corinth, and that's a city, and you gotta think about this.

This is the first century.

It's a city of 750,000 people, which would have been just massive uh for a city in the first century, and that's where we find ourselves this morning.

Um so let's pray.

Let's ask God to help us understand his word, and then we will dive into Acts 18, if you would please pray with me.

Uh, gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

We pray this morning that you would write the truth of your word on our hearts, that that we would be convicted in the places where we need to be convicted of our sin, that we would be comforted in the places that we need to be comforted because of the brokenness of the world that we live in, and that above all else, Spirit, Holy Spirit, this morning, we pray that you would make Jesus more believable and more beautiful to us as we encounter the risen Christ, as we encounter the one in whom our hope in this life and in the one to come rests.

And so please make us more like Jesus this morning.

And we pray these things in Christ's name.

Amen.

Um, my wife and I, my wife's name is Carrie.

We have four kids.

Uh, three of them are teenagers, and one is in fourth grade.

They're Lucy, Judah, Luke, and Jane.

We have two dogs in our family.

We have one dog that's kind of a shaggy hunting dog named Zuma, and she's really sweet and she's really wonderful, and she's really obedient.

And then we have another dog that's a German short-haired pointer, and his name is Hagrid, and he's quite the exact opposite of Zuma.

And a number of years ago, when we were living in North Carolina, where I was pastoring, we were traveling on the way home to see my folks in South Carolina, and we were traveling on Interstate 85, and we had decided to take both of our dogs uh with us.

And so we had our dogs in the back in the trunk of the car, and we had to make a stop to refuel up, uh, to get some snacks, use the bathroom, those kinds of things.

And when we got out of uh out of the car and I unlatched the um the trunk of the car, our German short hair pointer, Hagrid, bolted like it was his job.

And he went running across four lanes of traffic, uh, traveling north of 60 miles an hour, and we were literally right beside an interstate, and he was starting to head toward the interstate.

And so I'm running as fast as I can, chasing Hagrid around, trying to keep him from getting hit by a car and killed and everything.

And after about 15 minutes, I happened to pin him in the corner of a like a loading dock bay in this industrial uh area that was right there, right off of the interstate.

And I actually got to him, he hadn't been hurt.

I put his leash on him, I walked him across the four-lane highway where we were at, and I got him back to the car, got him in the car, we stopped by McDonald's and went through a drive-thru, and then we parked the car, and I had this feeling while I was there in the car, and maybe you felt this before, my heart was racing, my breathing was getting short, and it was coming to attention to me that what was happening to me is that I was having a panic attack.

That I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the events that had just happened.

And maybe you're here this morning, you've experienced having a panic attack that really, really scary because you can't get your breath, you can't catch your breath.

There's something that's so overwhelming that you you just kind of like stop functioning the way that you're supposed to function.

But here's the thing with a panic attack, the only remedy is a very simple remedy.

And that remedy is to breathe.

Is you have to just like slow down and and breathe.

Just simply breathe.

That's the only remedy when you're so overwhelmed that your body moves into a state of panic, is to slow down and to just simply breathe.

What is it this morning when you come through these doors that you think about that's overwhelming to you, that just makes you feel anxious, really nervous.

Maybe you're here and your job is really hard and you constantly feel anxious about your work.

You get geared up before you even have to go in on Monday morning.

Maybe you're here and you're in school, and that's how school feels to you.

That that school just feels really nerve-wracking.

Sometimes maybe you feel a little bit overwhelmed.

Maybe you're here and just life in general feels really, really overwhelming to you.

Maybe it's the balance that is in your life.

You feel like you're doing too much over here and not enough over here.

All of these things can lead to feeling overwhelmed, or maybe you're here and you scroll through your news feed, and that gets you really overwhelmed, really cranked up.

Or maybe you're here and you're like me, and you start thinking about AI, and it just like boggles your mind, and you're overwhelmed.

Well, what's interesting about Acts chapter 18, and this real short account that we have here in Corinth, this this short account actually hinges on this vision that Paul has in verses 9 through 10, where Jesus comes to Paul and he tells him, Don't be afraid, keep speaking the truth, keep proclaiming the good news of my life, my death, my resurrection.

Acts 18 · chapter mention

Proclaim the good news.

I am with you.

I actually have many people in this city of Corinth.

But for Paul, there was something about the city of Corinth that was so overwhelming that Jesus would actually come to him in a vision and tell him not to be afraid.

And we're gonna unpack that as we go through Acts 18.

But our big takeaway this morning, if you're a note taker, our main point is this is that the simple word of Jesus breathes life to the overwhelmed soul.

The simple word of Jesus breathes life to the overwhelmed soul.

And the way we're gonna unpack that this morning is we're gonna think a little bit about Corinth.

So we're gonna dig into the background of Corinth, then we're gonna think about Paul and Corinth, and then we're gonna think about Jesus, Paul, and Corinth.

So we're gonna build on all of that.

Now, one of the things that we do at Christ Press is uh during our sermon time is we have kids in our service.

I see a number of kids here this morning, and we're very, very thankful and very glad that you are here.

But one of the things that we like to do is give our kids words to listen out for, uh, to help them as they process through the sermon, and always communicate this too, kids.

We need you to help us understand God's word.

You are a vital part of the church, and we need you to help us understand God's word.

So I've got three words for you to listen out for this morning.

You can mark down how many times I say it.

Uh, you can you can draw a picture, you can do whatever will help you process through and think through how these three words are connected together.

Okay, so the first word's a big one.

If you're sitting by your parents, you might need some help spelling this one.

It is overwhelmed.

Okay, we've already said that.

Overwhelmed is the first word.

The second word is life, life, and then the third word is Jesus.

Okay?

So you got overwhelmed, life, and Jesus.

And you can talk to your parents about how are these words connected.

How do these words connect together?

And you can help us understand God's word.

But let's dive in.

Let's dive into Corinth and let's think a little bit about Corinth.

As I already said, Corinth is a city of about 750,000 people, which is really large for the ancient Near East.

It was a port city, meaning that ships were able to come into Corinth, but it was also not just a seaport city, it was actually a land port too.

So it would cross over by land, paths by land for trading, also by sea.

So in every direction, you had commerce coming into the city of Corinth.

The city of Corinth were proud Roman citizens, very proud Roman citizens.

As a matter of fact, a number of years before this event where Paul comes into Corinth, the city of Corinth had actually been destroyed.

And then Caesar himself, the Emperor of Rome, rebuilt the city of Corinth in 46 BC.

So, roughly in a time of about a hundred-ish years, it has become this massive expanse of a city of 750,000 people.

So they saw themselves as kind of the pride of the Roman Empire.

And because they were a port city, that meant they were a commercial anchor, for sure, within the Roman Empire, but they were also a cultural anchor as well.

There's a market in the city of London, if you've ever been to London, and London's a very like people from all over the world kind of city.

It's called Borough Market.

And in Borough Market, what you get is you get an intersection of people from literally all over the world, and they make their food.

And it's like this massive outdoor food court.

And you can experience culture from all around the world inside of Borough Market because it's this massive intersection of people from all over the world.

Corinth is a little bit like that.

It's a little bit like that.

There are people from all over the world that are coming in there.

One of the things that is heavily valued in the city of Corinth was public speaking, was public oration.

They valued that.

That was a thing that went on inside of the city of Corinth.

So they valued people who sounded smart, people who used big and confusing words.

And above Corinth, 2,000 feet above the city of Corinth, was a place called Acrocorinth.

And in Acrocorinth, there was a temple there for the goddess Aphrodite.

And Aphrodite was a fertility goddess.

And there were a thousand women who worked at this temple.

And they would actually go down into the streets in the city of Corinth each night, and I will let you imagine what that meant.

And so there was a thriving industry on that front that existed inside of Corinth, combined with, because it was a religious commitment, a zealous religious commitment.

So you have all of these things that are coming together.

Paul had just come from Athens, and you can kind of think of Athens as like, Athens was like a combination of Hollywood, Harvard, and TikTok all rolled into one.

The city of Corinth, you could kind of think of as the New York Stock Exchange, the Aspen Institute, the Vegas Strip, and a worship temple.

It combined all in one place.

So here's the deal.

You can imagine yourself, you can put yourself there, and you can imagine it's pretty sensory overload.

It's pretty overwhelming to come into the city of Corinth and take in everything that Corinth has to offer.

And so Paul rolls up into Corinth from Athens.

And Paul has this thing that he does when he comes to a new place.

Paul comes to a new place and he always likes to watch, to listen, to learn, to observe, to look at what it is that's going on around him.

Paul is a very curious person.

He asks a lot of questions.

He wants to know what it is that makes people tick.

And in verse 2, we run into a couple of people that Paul becomes friends with, Aquila and Priscilla.

And they are from, respectively, Pontius and Italy.

And to sort of like, to kind of strip everything away, here's what that means.

That means that they were well traveled.

They were well-traveled people and they were mobile.

They could really move around to a lot of different places.

They had actually been in Rome, and Luke tells us that Claudius had kicked them out of Rome.

The reason they are in Corinth is because they've been in Rome and Claudius, the emperor, had kicked all of the Jewish people out of Rome.

We know from reading other historians writing around the time of Acts that there was this conflict that existed in Rome among the Jewish people.

And this conflict centered around a claim that the Messiah had actually come to earth.

And so it's highly probable that in Rome at this point, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus was already being proclaimed.

It had actually already made it to Rome, which would actually make sense, because if we were to jump back to the beginning of the book of Acts in Acts chapter 2, this guy named Peter preaches the first sermon at Pentecost after Jesus ascends into heaven.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And there are people from all over that are there to hear that.

And so they would have taken that message and they would have exported it to wherever they went.

And so the gospel has already made it to Rome.

And much like what we will see here in Rome, in Corinth, it also created a disturbance amongst the Jewish people that were there.

From Rome's point of view, this is something that they want to manage and that they want to handle.

So, Aquila and Priscilla, they come to Corinth and they are already believers.

They are already what Luke often refers to as followers of the way.

That is, they have believed that Jesus is the Messiah, that he is the promised one to God's people in the Old Testament.

They have connected the dots of the entirety of the Old Testament with Jesus and who he is and what he has done in his life and his death and in his resurrection.

And it just so happens that they have the same vocation as Paul.

They are tent makers, we find out in verse 3.

So Paul becomes fast friends with Aquila and Priscilla.

And then Luke tells us in verse 4 that Paul went into the synagogue, which was his common practice.

And as he went into the synagogue, what he did is he connected the entirety of the Old Testament with Jesus, with who he is and what he has done, that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament was pointing to.

In verses five and six, Timothy and Silas make it from Athens and they join.

And we find that there's opposition to this message, opposition to the gospel message.

And Paul sort of responds to the people there in the synagogue, and he essentially says, This I've told you what is true.

I've proclaimed the truth of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to you.

Rejecting that is on you.

That is not my responsibility.

That is your responsibility to receive that and to believe that.

I've told you what's true, and so to reject it.

That's on you.

And so he decides, as he does in every other place that he goes to, to go to the Gentiles.

For a replication of Acts 18, you could go back to Acts 13.

There's very similar things that happen there in Poseidon Antioch.

Proclaiming the gospel goes from the synagogue into a home in verse 7.

That is the home of Titius Justus, who is someone who is not Jewish, but was a Gentile who had taken on the God of Israel and believed in the God of Israel, and then he received Jesus as the Messiah that was promised.

And as a matter of fact, the ruler of the synagogue, Crispus and his whole family, also received that Jesus was the Messiah who had been promised.

And so, from Titius Justice's home, many Corinthians, Luke tells us, believed.

And then, almost out of nowhere, it feels like, in verses 9 and 10, Paul has this vision.

Paul has this vision where Jesus comes to him and tells him, Paul, don't be afraid.

Proclaim the good news.

Proclaim my life, my death, my resurrection.

Don't be silent about that.

It means everything.

I'm with you.

And I actually have many people here in Corinth.

And then Luke tells us in verse 11 that Paul stayed for a year and a half in Corinth.

And up to this point, that's the longest that Paul actually stayed in one place was that year and a half that he would spend there in Corinth.

So we got a little bit of background about Corinth and the city of Corinth, a little bit about Paul and his interactions and his relationship that's beginning to bud here.

City of Corinth.

Now I want us to think together about Jesus, Paul, and Corinth.

Verses 9 and 10, this vision where Jesus comes to Paul, it's clear that there was something about Corinth that was pretty overwhelming to Paul.

Such to the point that he wanted to leave.

He wanted to get out of there.

The last time that Jesus came to Paul and spoke to him was on a road to Damascus, where Paul was actually going to Damascus to have Christians arrested and brought back so that they might be imprisoned and might be stoned.

That's the last time that Jesus has come to Paul and spoken to him.

And so what was it that was so overwhelming to Paul about Corinth?

Up to this point, Paul's been beaten within an inch of his life.

He's been stoned.

He's been imprisoned.

He's been run out of numerous towns.

So what could possibly be overwhelming to Paul?

What could be so fear-inducing to Paul?

Well, in order for us to begin to kind of understand that, I think it's helpful for us to look a little bit at Paul's letters to this church at Corinth that would get planted here.

Paul actually wrote two letters that we have in the scriptures to the church there at Corinth.

We actually know from these letters there were four letters.

Two of them have made it into our Bible.

As a matter of fact, Paul spilt more ink on messages and letters to the church that was there at Corinth than any other church that he wrote to.

And so I just want to go through with you here just a little bit of what Paul writes to the church at Corinth about from his first letter to the church at Corinth to get us into an idea of what it might be that was so overwhelming to Paul.

So here's some of the content that gets covered in 1 Corinthians.

There are divisions in the church over who's a better preacher.

Paul or Apollos, or even some say they follow Cephas, and some that they follow Jesus.

There's divisions that are there, there's jealousy that exists, there's strife over who it is that knows more and has more knowledge.

There's incest happening in the church there.

There's pride, there's greed, there's idolatry, there's swindling, there's excess, there's pettiness, there is sexual promiscuity, there is marriage issues, lots of marriage issues.

There is worship that is happening that is not centered on Jesus, on his life, his death, and his resurrection.

There are those who are coming to the Lord's Supper table who are saying that they follow Jesus and that their faith and their hope is in Christ alone, but their life in no way reflects that, whether that's in private or that's in public.

That's just a smattering of things that are going on in the church at Corinth.

And Jesus says, I have many people in this place.

I often tell my congregation, read through the letters that Paul writes to the churches in the New Testament.

So read through those, and then you tell me which one you want to join.

You tell me which church sounds like, yeah, that's the place where I want to go.

And there's a pastor from many hundreds of years ago said this.

The church is not a hall for saints, it is a hospital for sinners.

And that was very true for the church there in Corinth.

There was something that was overwhelming for Paul.

And what we see in the church that's going on that Paul writes about would reflect what was going on in the broader culture that was there in Corinth that was pervasive.

And it's this word that the Bible uses called immorality.

Immorality was pervasive in the city of Corinth.

Economic immorality, social immorality, sexual immorality, intellectual immorality was rampant.

And now I recognize the language of immorality is not exactly very popular in 2025 in the United States of America.

We don't really like anything dictating to us how we're supposed to live our lives.

We kind of like our rugged individualism, especially out here in the West.

There is a reason that Colorado is the pioneer state.

We like the idea of choosing our own path and choosing our own way.

We live in a world increasingly that is more intrigued with and even convinced of this idea that scholars have sort of coined of moral relativism.

That is, is that I choose my own morality.

What suits me, what I want, how I want it.

And here's what we've got to know, Redemption Church Denver, and I say this to my own church too.

If we're going to take the Bible seriously, which we're committed to do, you're a church in a denomination that is committed to taking the Bible seriously, then we have to take seriously that God, through his word, is very, very comfortable with the language and the idea of immorality.

Very comfortable with it.

And you can think of immorality like this.

Have any of you, this is going to sound really off the wall, but I'm curious.

Any of you ever had experience with beavers?

I know.

I know.

Well, I grew up in the South, and beavers are fairly pervasive on a lot of land in the South.

And what beavers do is they come into a portion of land, and that land has to have water on it because they have to live in water.

And what they do is they create these dams and they they dam up the water on a piece of property and it floods the property, and then it actually destroys everything that is growing and flourishing on the property because what it does is it disrupts the flow of the water that is coming through there to bring life, to bring flourishing to that property.

So when the Bible talks about immorality, what that is, is it's kind of like a beaver dam.

It's anything that is stopping up or going against the flow of God's design for his creation and for his creatures, particularly for those who bear his image in his world, humanity, us.

And so immorality is anything that stops up that flow of God's design or messes it up.

It goes against it.

And so, from a biblical perspective, then morality, which is the opposite of immorality, is aligning ourselves with God's design.

Aligning ourselves with how God has designed his creation and his creatures to flow.

And so, from the Bible's vantage point, there is no such thing as moral relativism.

It doesn't exist.

We don't get to choose our own morality.

God is the one who decides what is good, what is life, what is flourishing, and what is bad and destructive, and what is what the Bible calls sin.

And honestly, if you just take a look at your newsfeed over the course of the events of the last week or the last few weeks, it should be pretty obvious to us that tossing moral relativism in the trash heap is exactly where it belongs.

Because if moral relativism is true, then we are all without hope.

But the Bible's very, very clear.

Morality is something that is defined by God, to align ourselves with the way that God has designed for us to live.

And so from the biblical perspective, there are things which are moral and immoral in every single part of our life.

Paul would actually say this to the church at Corinth in 1 Corinthians 10 when he would say to them, do everything, whether you eat or whether you drink, whatever it is you do, due to the glory of God.

That is to say, all of your life is to be in alignment with God's design.

And Corinth is a city so far away from God's design in every sense of the word, that Paul comes to it and he is overwhelmed.

And then Jesus comes to Paul and he says, Don't be afraid.

Keep preaching the gospel.

I'm with you, and I have many people here.

And so that tells us something about Jesus, and it tells us this that there is no level of immorality that Jesus turns up his nose at.

No level.

And maybe, just maybe, embedded in Jesus' simple voice to Paul, his simple life-giving voice is this.

You know, Paul, the last time that I came and talked to you, you were on a road, on your way to go and to have people arrested, imprisoned, and their lives taken away.

Paul, you wanted people murdered for what it was that they believed.

And so here's what's true.

There is not a single person in this room today, nor Paul himself, that has not rebelled and exercised immorality against God.

Every single one of us has.

Every single one of us has lived our lives in such a way that it does not align with God's design and the way that God has designed us to be.

We are guilty.

Paul was guilty.

The church at Corinth was guilty.

And so every single one of us, like Corinth, at least, at the very least, in our hearts, have lived lives of immorality.

And yet, and yet, Jesus has many people in that city.

And yet, Paul would write to the church at Corinth that you are the ones who are sanctified in Jesus.

Grace and peace be to you, church, at Corinth.

You see, this is the scandal of the gospel.

The scandal of the gospel is this is that the perfectly moral never strayed, never rebelled against God in any decisions, thoughts, words, actions that he made, Jesus, who always lived as he was meant to live, became all of our immorality.

Every single bit of it.

All of our sin.

He gave his full moral life to us as our own, that would be ours by grace alone.

That we don't bring anything to the table but our immorality, but our sin.

And what we get in exchange is Jesus' perfect, righteous life for us.

If we don't have Jesus, then we don't really have any hope.

Not in this life or in the one to come.

We don't have any hope that our own lives or the world that we live in will be made right in every conceivable way.

But if we do, if we do, if we do have Jesus, then we are a people of hope.

Hope for the forgiveness of our own sin.

Hope for the rampant immorality that we see all around us and that exists in our own hearts.

Hope that sin will one day be ripped out fully and finally from God's good creation, pulled up and tossed into the trash heap, and the resurrection to come in Jesus, which is exactly what Paul tells the church at Corinth in 1 Corinthians 15.

Death, where is your sting?

You have no victory, because our Christ is alive.

The witness of Jesus and who he is and what he has done is our only hope in this life and in the one to come.

And guess what?

It's also the best resource that we have living in the world that we're in today.

Jesus is the best resource that we could have for living in a world that is often overwhelming to us, to know that we have a Savior who lived a perfectly moral life on our behalf, but that we also have a Savior who knows what it's like to be overwhelmed by the sin that's coming your way.

Because our Savior prayed in a garden.

And his tears that he prayed when he prayed were drops of blood.

Because he knew what it is that he was going to have to go and do.

And that was to become all of our sin for us.

And that was an overwhelming prospect, such that he said to his father, if there's any other way, please, but not my will, your will, perfect alignment with the Father for you and for me.

And he endured the cross for us.

And not only that, he's with us.

He never leaves us.

We walk the road of enduring overwhelming brokenness, brokenness in our own heart and in the world around us, and with Jesus with us as our resource as we do that.

Jesus invites us not to get jaded, not to be apathetic, but to trust him.

To trust that he is interested in people, and we too should be.

And so we move towards others in confidence that all things will be made new because our Christ is alive.

And we live with that day of the resurrection to come in mind.

And so, in the meantime, in the world that we live in now, guess what?

Jesus still has many people, just as he did in the city of Corinth.

And that includes you and me.

Jesus is the only one who is the real and true answer to all of our overwhelming world, not the way that it's supposed to be, and our own hearts.

His life, his death, his resurrection is the only answer.

And it's the simple word of Jesus.

Don't be afraid.

Keep preaching the good news.

I am with you, that breathes life to our overwhelmed souls.

Would you pray with me?

Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you that you love us so much that you desire to commune with us, to commune with us through your word.

That is, to communicate your very word to us.

That we would know who you are and who we are and how we relate to you, that we would, that we would know that we have hope in this life and in the one to come, in and through your one and only Son, Jesus.

And Jesus, you loved us so much that for the joy that was set before you, you would endure the cross for us.

And that we, by grace alone, as a free gift to us, would receive your perfect, righteous moral life, and that you would absorb our sin.

And you would invite us into a new life with you.

With you, that we need not fear, that we live by grace and by the good news of your life, death, and resurrection.

And so, Holy Spirit, we pray this morning that you would make us more like Christ.

And it's in his name that we pray.