The book of Hebrews is a very challenging book to preach from, if not the most challenging of the New Testament, with the possible exception of Revelation.  Part of the difficulty in preaching it is that it is itself presented as a sermon, and so to bite off a passage and try to present it as a stand alone message is difficult.   The passages are designed to build upon the previous passage, and the whole book is series of arguments built one upon another, which reaches it’s grand summation in chapter 12.   But if there is a constant

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I presume that if I were to ask you why you came to church today, you would answer something along the lines that you are here to worship God.  The next question though I would ask is, what is worship?  And to that I suppose I might get a great variety of answers.  Worship seems to have a rather loose description today in ecumenical circles.  I had a friend that recently passed away, and she had never been to our church, but she had heard of it.  She lived outside of DC, but never came to this area to the

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  In ancient times, there was a type of warfare that was often employed, which is illustrated in the familiar story of David and Goliath.  Everyone here I am sure is familiar with this story.  But what I want to emphasize from the story is the manner in which the battle was fought between the Philistines and the Israelites.  Goliath was the dread champion of the Philistines.  And everyday he would come out and taunt the army of God and challenge them to put up a man who would fight him.  And if you remember, he offered the Philistines to

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Today I just want to examine these first four verses of chapter 2.  I don’t want to rush over this very important application and the question that Hebrews provides here in this section.  And so we are going to go word by word and line for line, to make sure that we get the full import of this message which was written to the early church, because it is applicable to the modern church as well, if not even more so. Chapter 2 starts with the phrase “for this reason” or depending on your translation, it may say “therefore,” which

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A noted theologian said that Hebrews is one of the three New Testament commentaries on a single Old Testament verse: “The just shall live by his faith,” found in Hab. 2:4 The book of Romans talks about what it means to be considered as just; to be justified is one who has been declared righteous by faith in Jesus Christ. The just shall live by faith. The book of Ephesians expounds on the words “shall live,” and it tells us about life as a justified person — the new life in the Spirit. Finally, the book of Hebrews takes up

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Today we are beginning a new study in the book of Hebrews.  Hebrews is one of my favorite books of the Bible.  I preached through it years ago, I’m not sure how long ago now.  In fact, I can’t find my old notes.  So I’m approaching it this time with a completely fresh perspective, hopefully one that has been enriched after preaching through the whole New Testament which we just finished with the book of Mark last week. Many, many years ago, I used to have a part time job on the beach right over there every morning for a

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  It has been our policy to preach through the Bible verse by verse, chapter by chapter, for many, many years now, even long before we officially became The Beach Fellowship. I started preaching through the New Testament way back in the day when we were Christian Surfers meeting at Salt Pond. And so today is a special day, because today is the day when I finish preaching through the entire New Testament. I haven’t figured out exactly how many years it has taken me, but it’s about 15 or 16 years. Along the way we also preached through Genesis,

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  Today we are looking at the last chapter of Mark, particularly the section of scripture in which he records the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  The chapter begins early Sunday morning.  We ended our message last Sunday speaking of the burial that happened after the crucifixion which was on Friday afternoon.  You will remember that Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus were in a hurry to bury Jesus’s body because the Sabbath was quickly approaching.  The Sabbath was counted by the Jews from sundown on Friday, to sundown on Saturday.  We count our days from midnight to midnight. 

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Death is something that is inevitable, it comes to us all.  And yet I suppose, for something that is so universally common, considering it on a personal level is studiously  avoided.  At the risk of sounding overly morbid, the reality is that all of us are dying.  When we are young, death seemed like such a distant, otherworldly concept, that scarcely concerned us.  We live like we will live forever.  But as we get older, as we see more and more of death, and as we see considerably more of the sands of time in the bottom of the glass

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I believe, without question, that the greatest pivotal event in history is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament saints looked forward to it, and the New Testament church looks back to it.  But not only is it central to Christians, the cross is the monumental centerpiece of the history of the whole world.  Even our calendar reflects the fact of Jesus’s life and death.  I know, AD does not mean “after death.” It means “anno domini”, which means “in the year of our Lord.”  However, even though historians now use BCE or CE, meaning “before common era,” and

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