Sermon Illustrations on Knowledge Of God

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The Cave

Author

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 12:8-12, John 1:, John 17:18, Philippians 2:6-11, 1 John 1:7, Romans 8:1, Colossians 1:13-14

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

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Is God an Object?

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:1-4, Isaiah 49:1, Ephesians 1:4-5, Romans 8:29-30

We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop in...

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Understanding God as Father

Author

James I. Packer

Keywords

Scripture

John 1:12-13, Romans 8:14-16, Galatians 4:4-7, 1 John 3:1, 2 Corinthians 6:18, Isaiah 64:8

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts a...

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A Defining Grace

Author

John Blanchard

Keywords

Meekness

Scripture

Romans 8:28

Meekness is a defining grace, produced by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian, which characterizes that person’s response towards God and man. Meekness towards God is a spirit of submission t...

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Where is the Spirit?

Author

Francis Chan

Keywords

The Holy Spirit

Scripture

Galatians 5:22-23, Romans 8:26-27, Acts 10:44-46, John 14:26, John 3:5-8, John 1:29-34

My hunch is that most of you … have basic knowledge about the Holy Spirit; but when it comes to experiencing the Spirit in your life, it’s a different story. Take a moment and ask yourself this questi...

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How Our Limits Help Us

Author

Ashley Hales

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 32:1, Genesis 18:10–14, Habakkuk 2:3, Acts 1:4, Romans 8:23–25, Psalm 27:14

We must learn to see our limits as the entrance into the good life, not what bars us from it. But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re...

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St. Anthony and the Search for God Amidst Crisis

Author

Daniel Grothe

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 19:21, Philippians 3:8, Luke 9:23, Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 4:17, Hebrews 12:11, Isaiah 58:6-7

Given life’s unpredictability and the inevitability of pain and hardship, what do we do when that pain and hardship show up on our doorsteps? In roughly AD 270, there was a man in Lower Egypt named An...

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A Trinitarian Deficit Disorder

Author

James Bryan Smith

Keywords

Scripture

John 14:9, Colossians 1:15, John 10:30, 1 John 4:8-16, Romans 8:32

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

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God Believes in You

Author

Ann Voskamp

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 31:3, John 3:16, Ephesians 2:4-5, Romans 8:38-39, 1 John 4:9-19

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

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God made it. God loves it. God cares for it.

Author

Emily Hunter McGowin

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Psalm 104:24, Colossians 1:17, Isaiah 40:26, John 1:10, Romans 8:19, Hebrews 1:3

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century mystic-theologian who maybe understood the belovedness of creation and new creation better than anyone. In the fifth chapter of her book Revelations of Divin...

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The Love of God Wrapped About Him

Author

Thomas Kelly

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 4:1-3, Psalm 30:5, Romans 8:28, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Psalm 34:18, Isaiah 43:2, Psalm 23:4, Job 1:, Job 2:, Job 42:, 2 Samuel 11:, 2 Samuel 12:, Genesis 37:12-36, 1 Kings 17:8-24, Daniel 6:, Psalm 34:18

The sense of Presence! I have spoken of it as stealing on one unawares. It is recorded of John Wilhelm Rowntree that as he left a great physician’s office, where he had just been told that his advanci...

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Do You Know Where You’re Going?

Author

Matt Chandler

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 13:10, Romans 8:28

Pastor Matt Chandler describes a humorous encounter with his daughter that illustrates the absurdity of assuming we know better than God. Just as a small child couldn’t possibly know better than a par...

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The Fuel of our Identities

Author

Timothy Keller

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 22:1–14, Isaiah 43:1–2 , Exodus 14:13–14, Romans 8:15–17, Luke 15:11–32 , Psalm 46:1–2

If you think of your identity and heart as an engine, you could say there is a kind of fuel that powers it cleanly and efficiently—and a kind of fuel that is not only polluting but also destroys the e...

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Do I Have a Choice?

Author

Francis Chan

Keywords

God

Scripture

Psalm 73:25-26, Romans 8:28-30, John 6:44, Psalm 16:11, Deuteronomy 6:5

While I was speaking to some college students recently, an interesting twist on the contrast between our unresponsiveness and God’s great desire for us came up. One student asked, “Why would a loving ...

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Praying Wholeheartedly

Author

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Keywords

Scripture

Luke 11:1–4 , Romans 8:26–27, Psalm 119:171–173 , Exodus 33:11 , Deuteronomy 6:4–9 , 1 Samuel 3:1–10

When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray, and with him we also know that we shall be heard. And so we must learn ...

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Assurance: To set a Child of God Free

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Colossians 3:16, Isaiah 43:1-2, Deuteronomy 31:8, Zephaniah 3:17, Romans 8:38-39, Colossians 3:16, Psalm 18:2

Whenever you’re running your life on those fuels, Satan’s got you where he wants you. The one thing he does not want is that God’s words “You are my beloved child” become the fuel of your life and hea...

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The Father is Fond of Me

Author

Brennan Manning

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 33:12-14, Isaiah 43:1-4, Zephaniah 3:17, John 15:9-11, Romans 8:38-39, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16

Brennan Manning shares a true story about a priest from Detroit who traveled to Ireland to visit family. One morning, he walked along the shores of Lake Killarney with his uncle. As they watched the s...

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Stooping Down to Our Level

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Philippians 2:6-8, Isaiah 9:6, Matthew 1:23, Luke 2:11-12, Hebrews 2:17, Romans 8:3

One thing we often do as human beings is take for granted how our physical presence can impact those around us. Do you remember how big your parents seemed when you were a kid? They were massive! Over...

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Our Faith

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

2 Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 2:20, Romans 8:10, Ephesians 3:16-17, 1 Corinthians 15:49, Ezekiel 36:26, Philippians 2:13, 1 John 4:13, Romans 8:29

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

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It is Better to Question than Merely Accept Difficult Circumstances

Author

Phillip Yancey

Keywords

Scripture

Job 13:23–24 , Genesis 18:25, Habakkuk 1:2–3 , Mark 9:24, Romans 8:22–26, Psalm 73:2–3, 16–17

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

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Circumstances or God’s Faithfulness

Author

C. J. Mahaney

Keywords

Scripture

Lamentations 3:22-23, Philippians 4:6-7, Psalm 28:7, Isaiah 26:3-4, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Romans 8:28

On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices. We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging t...

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He’s Quite Fond of Me

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 43:1, Hosea 11:3-4, Zephaniah 3:17, John 15:9, Romans 8:38-39, Psalm 103:13-14

Brennan Manning recounts the story of an Irish priest traveling through a quiet countryside when he comes across an elderly peasant kneeling in prayer by the roadside. Struck by the man’s devotion, th...

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The Power of Divine Calling

Author

Tom Nelson

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:1-12, Isaiah 6:1-8, Matthew 4:18-22, Acts 9:1-19, Romans 8:28-30, Psalm 139:13-16

God calls people. Whether it is the calling of Abraham to leave the land of Ur and go he knew not where, or the calling of Moses, confronted with the burning bush, or the calling of Isaiah who encount...

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Did God Do This?

Author

William Paul Young

Keywords

Scripture

Habakkuk 1:, Habakkuk 2:, Habakkuk 3:, Romans 8:22, 2 Peter 3:9

I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Orlando, Florida, having a conversation with my friend K, from Germany. Her world-class young athlete friend was recently paralyzed as a result of an on-camera stunt ...

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Beloved: The Truth About Yourself

Author

Henri J. M. Nouwen

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 31:3, Psalm 139:13-14, Romans 8:38-39, Isaiah 43:1-2, Deuteronomy 31:8, 1 John 3:1, Zephaniah 3:17

Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: “These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot...

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The Glory Being Revealed To Us

Author

J. R. R. Tolkein

Keywords

Scripture

Romans 8:18, Revelation 19:16, Matthew 2:2, John 18:36-37, Revelation 17:14, Zechariah 9:9, Isaiah 9:6, Psalm 24:7-10, Colossians 1:15-20, Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-16

In Romans 8:18, Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the faith: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us....

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Experiencing the Inner Radiance of a Fellow Believer

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Scripture

Philippians 2:14-16, Romans 8:9-11, Acts 4:13, Matthew 5:14-16, 1 John 1:5-7, John 17:20-23

Have you ever met someone and known instantly, or at least guessed, that they were a fellow believer? When I was in college, I lived abroad for a year in Germany. We always had Fridays off so that we ...

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Living in Two Worlds

Author

Ruth Chou Simons

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 12:1-3, Exodus 3:7-10 , Isaiah 40:28-31, John 1:4-5, Romans 8:18-25, Philippians 3:20-21

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

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Challenge: Sum up Every Aspect of Theology & Church History

Author

Joshua Brooks

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 23:1-4, John 10:11-18, Luke 19:1-10, Luke 15:11-32, Ephesians 3:17-19, 1 John 4:10-11, Romans 8:38-39

Karl Barth arguably was the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. His twelve-volume Church Dogmatics, alone, consists of over ten thousand pages of systematic theology. Toward the end of his l...

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The Lion and Its Prey

Keywords

Scripture

Jeremiah 29:13, Ephesians 2:8-9, Matthew 18:12-14, Romans 8:38-39, Isaiah 55:6-7

It is a Masai elder who tells the story. It comes from the book, Christianity Rediscovered, in which the Roman Catholic missionary, Vincent Donovan, shares his discoveries as he worked among Masai peo...

Sermon Illustrations on knowledge of god

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