Who is like You, O LORD?  Indeed, to ask the question is to answer it.  For You alone are from everlasting to everlasting.  You alone are uncreated, One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.  You keep Your covenants eternally.  They shall endure long after heaven and earth pass away.  You alone are able to perfectly remember mercy in Your justice, to redeem Your elect, to conform them to the image and likeness of Christ, and to build the church.

Let us shout for joy and be glad, for You are unrelentingly faithful to Your people.  With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, You delivered Your people from slavery in Egypt and parted the Red Sea that they were able to cross on dry land.  You vanquished Og of Bashan and Sihon of the Amorites.  You redeemed Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.  Though their sins were like scarlet, you have made them white as snow.  You ordained the random arrow that slew Ahab from before the foundations of the earth and converted Nebuchadnezzar.  Is anything impossible with You?  Grant us faith to more continuously believe it!

Let us say continually, “Let the LORD be magnified, Who has vanquished sin and Satan, Who has bound the strong man and is now plundering his house through the foolishness of preaching to prove that it is by His hand and not by the false wisdom of man.”  Let us extol You, O LORD, for You are taking us, a ragtag bunch of misfits and outcasts, quarrelsome, petty, and bloodthirsty, and building us into a glorious and spotless bride.  You alone can accomplish this, for You raise the dead to life.  Like Jacob, we are limping toward glory against all odds because You have commissioned it.  You are building Your church and the gates of Hell shall not stand against it.  Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember Your name O LORD, our God.

And our tongues shall speak of Your righteousness and of Your praise all the day long, for these tongues belong to sheep who have been redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and nobody can snatch us out of His mighty hand.  It is in His name that we dare to approach Your throne Almighty Father, through the Holy Spirit, amen!

Today I preached my second sermon at Christ Church of North Carolina.  I preached on Proverbs 11:1 and the title of the sermon is “Weights and Measures: Just and Unjust.”  In it I deal with such issues as honest business dealings, fraud, fiat money, and a basic overview of Christian economics.

Feel free to listen to the sermon, provide feedback, and share it with anybody whom you believe may benefit from it.  Like any endeavor you need a lot of practice at this to get good at it.  I’ll probably need to preach a hundred sermons before I come into my own.

The sermon audio can be downloaded here.

The manuscript of the sermon in PDF format can be found here.

While you’re at it, check out the Christ Church sermon archives page here.

Like all things at michaelduchemin.com, you are free to distribute these under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license.

PDF of sheet music here

Piano accompaniment here

Soprano part here

Alto part here

Tenor part here

Bass part here

As with all material published on this site, you may freely copy, distribute, and even sell this hymn for a profit under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

“Yahweh plays with dragons, and growing up into the glory and wisdom of the sons of God means growing up to play with dragons: Like Father, like son.”

I wrote the whole sermon out in manuscript form and deviated from it some when I preached it.  Apparently my pages got out of order somehow and pages 3 and 4 were at the very back of the stack.  I’m very thankful for all the people who were praying for me and for the warm reception I received from everybody afterward.  Feel free to listen to the sermon, provide feedback, and share it with anybody whom you believe may benefit from it.  Like any endeavor you need a lot of practice at this to get good at it.  I’ll probably need to preach a hundred sermons before I come into my own.

The sermon audio can be downloaded here.

The manuscript of the sermon in PDF format can be found here.

While you’re at it, check out the Christ Church sermon archives page here.

Like all things at michaelduchemin.com, you are free to distribute these under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license.

-Douglas Wilson, Future Men, Canon Press, 2001, p. 100, emphasis original

-James Jordan, Creation in Six Days, Canon Press, 1999, p. 71, emphasis original

Note: Chapter 4 “Gnosticism Versus History” should be required reading for every Protestant.  Protestantism went dangerously gnostic in the nineteenth century, and we’re still trying to recover.  See my earlier comments from my review of Holiness by Ryle.

Well, what did my Master do?  What did His servants do during the early days of the church that are recorded in inspired history?  When Lazarus died, Jesus wept.  Jesus, who understands the Father’s glorious plan better than anybody, wept.  Jesus, who knew that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead just a few moments later, wept.  Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, wept.  What about Paul, the hero of reformed and Calvinistic churches?  Did he always preach (or write, for that matter) in a calm, cool, collected manner?  Did he lecture?  Nay, he often preached with tears.  He even provided an apologetic for them: “For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you. (2 Cor 2:4).”

Indeed, God is sovereign.  If he decrees that I shall break down in tears, no passage or illustration is safe.  He can use the leprosy passages in Leviticus to bring me to my knees.  He is sovereign over my emotions; I am not.  I am but a servant; the Lord will feed his sheep as He sees fit.  I must seek to be a faithful servant of Christ.  If I maintain my composure–if I am in my right mind–let it be for the glory of Christ and His gospel!  If I am to be a fool and choke back tears in public, let me be a fool for the sake of Christ and His gospel!  If He sends tears, let them be a drink offering and a thank offering, poured out before his throne.  Only let Him feed His sheep.  He must increase; I must decrease.  Here I am, Lord, send me.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

But I am an American evangelical.  I have seen tears abused for wicked and manipulative pretexts by peddlers of the gospel.  Ginning up crocodile tears to pad your wallet or to make a name for yourself is an abomination.  God is not mocked; He will judge, and then the tears of those hucksters will be real.  But should the counterfeit tears of the televangelist cause us to fall into the other ditch?  There is good reason to oppose the syrupy, squishy, evangellyfishy, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend treacle that we see around us, but we need to follow scripture rather than reacting against the prevailing error.  There is a certain aspect of American reformed and Calvinist culture that operates as if our bodies only exist to take our brains to and from church.  I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t been influenced in some way by this.  We are Christians, not Vulcans.  Christianity is incarnational.  Both of these ditches have latent Gnostic assumptions and both of them are inconsistent with the Incarnation.  If you think you can do theology without it erupting into doxology, your theology is wrong.  Period.  I don’t care how many fat books with small type you’ve read.

It’s still a few weeks until I preach.  I may find as I write the sermon that the illustration doesn’t fit with my overall theme, or that it distracts from it.  The Lord may take me in another direction.  That would be a valid reason to exclude it.  A fear of looking foolish is not valid.  As for now, it stays in.  I’ll just make sure to wear my glasses instead of my contact lenses when I preach.

Our Father, we thank You for wondrous love that raised us out of the very dust of death.  You did not withhold Your Son, Your only Son Jesus, whom You love, but sent our great Redeemer to rescue us and turn Your well-deserved wrath away from us .  We praise you for the obedience of our Good Shepherd Who laid down His life for us, the sheep of His pasture.  No one took it from Him, but He laid it down of His own accord.  We rejoice that the grave could not hold Him, and that in Him neither will it be able to hold us.

Let us come and behold the works that have been wrought by you!  You have made great desolations in the earth.  You make wars cease to the ends of the earth; You break the bow and cut the spear in two; You burn the chariot in the fire.  You smote Pharaoh and Sennacherib with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.  You shattered Sihon and Og with a rod of iron.  You crushed the serpentine heads of Sisera and Abimelech under Your foot, using godly women to accomplish the feat for Your glory.  You avenged the betrayals of Ahithophel and Judas.  You outwitted Ahab, and hanged Haman on his own gallows.  So shall all Your enemies perish!

You are a consuming fire.  You broke out against the sacrilege of Nadab, Abihu, and Uzzah.  You struck down Ananias and Sapphira and caused Simon Magus to perish with his money, but You did not consume the bush when you spoke to Moses, neither did you consume your servants Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when they were cast into the fiery furnace.  In your mercy, you rescued Joseph out of the miry depths of the dungeon and delivered Daniel out of the den of the lions.  Who is like you, O Lord?  You alone are worthy of our praise, which we offer to you in Jesus’ name through the power of the Holy Spirit, both now and forevermore, world without end.  Amen.