This Sunday, September 12th we begin a new sermon series called A Wonderful Life: Waking Up to the Glorious Light of Restoration. It’s a sermon series about experiencing the fullness of life. This wonderful life occurs when God’s light in Christ through the Holy Spirit shines on every area of life.
Here are the ten sermons in the series:
Sept 12: Our Highest Good
Sept 19: Created with Purpose
Sept 26: Ruined by Sin
Oct 3: The Good News of Restoration
Oct 10: The Mission of Restoration
Oct 17: The Restoration of Relationships
Oct 31: The Restoration of Work (Oct 24 will be a stand-alone sermon)
Nov 7: The Restoration of Culture
Nov 14: The Restoration of Public Life
Nov 21: Grace Restores All Things
Many different voices in the Christian faith inform this sermon series. The greatest inspiration, however, is the Dutch Reformed theologian, pastor, and politician Herman Bavinck (1854-1921). The sermon graphic for the series, created by Tyson Phipps, comes from a new edition of Bavinck’s book The Wonderful Works of God. Artist Jess Hiatt designed the sun graphic on the cover “to show that it is the small, everyday life-tasks that God uses to showcase His wonderful works.”
So how do we have a wonderful life? I’ll close with Bavinck’s answer:
[In Acts 2:11] the disciples of Jesus began to proclaim the wonderful works of God in all understandable languages as soon as the Holy Spirit was poured out on them. With these wonderful works of God we certainly do not, as is sometimes the case elsewhere, have to think about a particular fact—such as, say, the resurrection of Christ—but we have in view the whole economy of salvation, which God achieved through Christ. The Spirit was poured out precisely so that the church would come to know these works of God, to glory in them, and to thank and praise God for them.
Herein lies the thought that the Christian religion does not exist merely in words, in a doctrine, but that it is a work of God, in word and fact, which was accomplished in the past, is being worked out in the present, and will be fulfilled in the future. The content of the Christian faith is not a scientific theory, nor a philosophical formula of an explanation of the world, but a recognition and confession of the wonderful works of God, which have been wrought through the ages, cover the whole world, and await their fulfillment in the new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells.