Childlike faith, Warnings against sin, The lost sheep, Church discipline, and Forgiveness
Bible Book: Matthew
Tonight’s topics include Jesus’ casting out of a demon, predicting His death once again, and a fish with a coin in its mouth.
Our Matthew study takes us through a discussion on the transfiguration.
Tonight, we look at Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, the first time Jesus predicts His coming death and resurrection, and Jesus’ powerful teaching about denying self.
God’s Word tells us that peacemakers are blessed. He also promises that He will give His peace that surpasses human understanding to those who live our lives for Christ. But we must always remember that His peace, and our abilities and opportunities to share that peace are gifts from God – not anything we should take our own pride in. Instead, we should rejoice that He has called us, and that He has rescued us out of death to write our names in His book of life.
The wise men from the east give us the example of how we can find renewed joy and encouragement at Christmas time – by seeking and worshiping Jesus with all our heart.
As Christ followers we must honestly examine our motivations for our service to the Gospel. If we find we are not following the Lord for the right reasons, we must confess this sin before God, and seek His strength and guidance to bring us back into truly godly fellowship.
We continue our verse-by-verse study through Matthew with Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ at Caesarea Philippi
Some of the Sadducees and Pharisees demanded a sign from Jesus to demonstrate the He is the Hebrew Messiah, but He refused to give them a sign and departed from them. Later He warned His disciples to beware the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. They thought that He was speaking about the leaven of earthly bread, but He chastised them saying to remember His provision of bread in the feeding of the 5,000 and later the 4,000. Then they realized that He wasn’t speaking of actual leaven, but the spiritual leaven that is symbolic of the sinful false teaching of Israel’s religious leaders. Of course, the same warning is applicable to the false teaching in the Church today.
Matthew 15 records some miracles performed by Jesus – casting a demon out of the daughter of a gentile woman of Tyre, and feeding 4000 in the region of Decapolis.
