Introduction

Genesis 18 cannot be understood apart from the promises God had already made to Abraham. Back in Genesis 12:2, when Abraham was seventy-five years old, God promised: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing."

In Genesis 13, God promised that Abraham's descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth. Then in Genesis 15, God made it clear that Abraham would have a son of his own. At that point Abraham was eighty-five years old. After ten years had passed without a child, Abraham began to struggle to understand how God's promise would come about. He did not stop believing God's word, but he began to reinterpret God's plan. Perhaps one of his servants would become his heir and God would fulfill His promise through him. God corrected Abraham's thinking and explicitly told him that he would have his own child. It was also in Genesis 15 that God expanded the promise and declared that Abraham's descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Fourteen more years passed. By Genesis 17 Abraham was ninety-nine years old and Sarah was eighty-nine. God said: "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her." (Gen. 17:15-16)

Abraham's response was: "Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, 'Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?'" (Gen. 17:17)

Abraham had walked with God for decades. He had seen God's faithfulness over and over again. Yet after twenty-four years of waiting, the promise now seemed impossible. His laughter reveals the astonishment of someone who can no longer see a way for God's promise to become reality. It is into this context that Genesis 18 unfolds.

Introduction

I wonder if you’ve heard of the word miser before? A miser is a person who possesses enormous wealth but lives in poverty to avoid spending any of it. One example is Hetty Green, who died in 1916 despite having an estate worth about $100 million at the time—roughly $3 billion today. Yet she was known for extreme frugality, even eating cold oatmeal to save money.

The book of Ephesians is written to people who are spiritually malnourished despite possessing immense spiritual riches in Christ. It is like standing at a buffet and saying, “I’m hungry because there is nothing to eat.”

Many believers know they are saved and forgiven, yet continue to live burdened by guilt, shame, fear, loneliness, and defeat. This is not because spiritual resources are absent, but because we are still growing in our faith and learning to rest in the riches we have in Christ.

Two Sundays ago we looked at Zephaniah 3 and found a God who rejoices over us. Last Sunday, Dr. Tan showed us from 1 John 4 that God truly loves us. Today’s passage teaches us to find spiritual nourishment in our identity in Christ by understanding how valuable we are to God.

Introduction

Do we really know that God really loves us, that God likes us? While we know that God loves us because He tells us through His Word, we struggle with the reality of life and who we are and our sins. It is hard for us to believe that God actually likes us.

Zephaniah 3:17 reveals an amazing truth that God rejoices and celebrates over us. He quiets us with His love instead of condemning us. He sings joyfully over us.

Introduction

The book of Zephaniah is one of the books of the Bible that is not usually the primary place people go to for preaching. One of the common reasons is because it deals heavily with judgement prophecy, destruction, and the wrath of God. It is also one of the “minor prophets,” not because it is less important, but simply because it is shorter in length. Yet Zephaniah does not end with wrath and destruction. For God’s people, it ends with grace, restoration, hope, and joy.

In this passage, we discover something beautiful about the heart of God. We see not only a God who saves, purifies, restores, and heals His people, but a God who rejoices over His people with gladness and sings over them with joy.

Introduction

Today, we are finishing our series in 2 Corinthians. I personally believe there were many things the Lord was saying to our church throughout this series. There were many things the Lord was speaking to me personally; convictions He was placing into my heart – not just as a pastor, but simply as Minjae. I hope you too found the Lord speaking to you through 2 Corinthians, something that convicted your heart, something that helped you grow and mature in your faith, and something that brought you closer to God.

In this last chapter of 2 Corinthians, Paul summarizes the previous chapters as he delivers the Lord’s final message of love, hope, and restoration to the Corinthian church.

Introduction

When the Spirit of God is moving and working in the life of the church, the Spirit stirs things up. Sometimes it is a gentle stirring of the waters, other times, it is a powerful splash or waves that break the surface. Both are necessary for God to create a healthy church, but how we perceive it depends on whether we’re looking through our physical eyes or our spiritual eyes. When we don’t have the spiritual eyes to see from God’s perspective, we often expect that the work of the Holy Spirit means that only good things and success should follow.

A healthy church isn’t a church that has larger facilities, larger congregations, larger ministries, larger budgets, and so forth. A healthy church is about whether or not the people believe and surrender to Jesus Christ, honour the Word of God without compromise, and live it out. God was transforming the Corinthian church into a healthy church, but they were still a church with weaknesses and problems.

This is what the Apostle Paul addressed last week in chapter 10; that we are to take captive every thought that is not of Christ and the gospel and destroy it by placing it under the feet of Jesus. When our thoughts are captured by something else other than Christ, they influence how you see God, yourself, the church, and other people—it will influence how you live and the decisions that you make before God. It will shape your heart, your faith, your feelings, and ultimately your loyalty to God.

Introduction

I’ve been saying for the past few sermons how God has been transforming the Corinthian church. God had opened their hearts, and they responded in godly grief and repentance. God was changing the church, and the Holy Spirit was certainly at work. This is cause to celebrate, right? The church is coming out of troubled times, God is on the move, things are changing—what reason is there not to celebrate? However, I wonder if the whole church felt that way.

When I read Scripture, I sometimes forget that these were real people with real pain, real burdens, and real feelings. Paul said back in 2 Corinthians 6 that his heart is wide open to them, and he asks that they open their hearts to him also. While this was God’s call for the Corinthians to respond, Paul’s words show us something deeper—there is still distance between people. There is still separation between hearts.

While some in the church have hearts that are on fire as they experience transformation, for others, things may hit them differently. They may feel like they’re falling through the cracks. Instead of being of one body and spirit with the church, they feel alone, isolated, and disconnected—from the church, from other brothers and sisters, and maybe even from God.

The Corinthian church has been hurt for a long time. The people have been hurt for a long time. Some hurts don’t go away overnight. Sometimes, things change so fast that you don’t even have time to process your hurt. You may feel like you’ve been left behind. Church hurt is heavy enough, but then you have your own personal hurt, your own struggles and sufferings—things you have been desperately praying for, and prayers that have gone unanswered. So, you keep silent.

The church has enough issues of its own. Everyone is busy. Even if they weren’t, you feel like you have no one to talk to. The new pastor seems like a nice guy, but you’re not sure he’s reliable or qualified. The sermons talk about what God calls you to do, but that’s not what you need right now. You need to be loved right now more than loving others.

As this continues, you begin to feel unseen and unheard, maybe even unwelcome—like there’s no place for you here. Among all the troubles in the Corinthian church, I’m sure many left—fed up with leaders, fed up with the church, tired of not being fed and provided for. You see people leaving and become discouraged and disappointed. But then that discouragement turns inward. Your heart begins to drift—and when your heart drifts, your life follows. This is the heart that Paul addresses.

Introduction

We’re now in the latter half of 2 Corinthians. Chapter 6 was about God calling us to widen and open our hearts, and chapter 7 showed how, when we respond to that calling, God produces spiritual fruit in us—overflowing joy through godly grief and repentance. That flow continues into chapter 8, where Paul speaks about generosity. Everything is connected. Paul is not jumping from topic to topic; he is showing us what a transformed heart looks like when grace truly takes hold.

When we hear the word “generosity,” many things come to mind—and we cannot avoid talking about money. Money is often something Christians hesitate to talk about in the church, especially because Scripture also warns us about the dangers of greed and the love of money. Sadly, we’ve seen how money has led to the downfall of many. Because of this, some try to soften passages like this and say, “This isn’t really about money.” But if we are going to be grounded in Scripture, we must be honest—Paul is talking about money.

Yet Paul is not merely talking about money as an end in itself. He is using money as the most tangible expression of something deeper. Money reveals the heart. It becomes the clearest and most relatable way to show that a life transformed by God’s grace—opened, broken through repentance, and restored—will naturally overflow that grace onto others.

Introduction

Last week, we looked at chapter 6 of 2 Corinthians, and the message centered on opening the heart to God. A heart that is closed to God is also a heart that is closed to other people, because there is no room in a closed heart for God, His Word, or others. The things contained within a closed heart are all about yourself—your ego, your self-righteousness, your cares, your comforts—it becomes centered on you. There was something spiritually wrong with the Corinthian church that caused their hearts to shrink and close, leaving them unable to receive the downpour of God’s grace. This is why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7:2, “Make room in your hearts for us.” He is not introducing something new, but repeating what he already said in chapter 6. If chapter 6 was the call to open your heart, then chapter 7 shows us what happens when you respond to that call.

Introduction

We took a short intermission from 2 Corinthians over the last two Sundays, but now we return. I don’t know how many times I’ve read through Scripture, but I know I haven’t read it enough. There are still passages I forget, details I miss, but every time I read it, it feels new. It’s not because the Word of God has changed, but because I have changed. I’m not the same person I was a year ago, or three years ago, and even how I read and understand Scripture has been shaped and transformed by the Holy Spirit. In the past, I saw 1 and 2 Corinthians as Paul’s angry letters to the Corinthian church, scolding them for their lack of faith, criticizing their conduct and their sins. I saw it as “look at this messy church—don’t be like them.” But now, I see it differently. Yes, it is a messy church, and yes, it is going through pain and suffering, but it is a church that God loves. God’s message through Paul is not just correction, but a message of love and hope in Jesus Christ. And the reality is, God wasn’t talking about some other people or some other church; God was saying, “this is you.” This is not just the story of the Corinthian church—it is our story too.

Introduction

The book of Romans is one of the clearest and most powerful explanations of the gospel in all of Scripture. But it is not just giving us doctrines to understand or truths to believe—it is telling us a story, a story that we are all part of. It is the story of what went wrong in the beginning and how God has been working to make it right.

We are people who love stories. There is something about stories that draws us in because they reflect something true about our lives. Many of us, at some point, have wished that we could go back in time. We think about moments we regret, decisions we wish we could undo, words we wish we could take back, and we imagine what it would be like if we could just go back and fix it. But we all know that we cannot do that. Time moves forward, and the past cannot be changed.

But the gospel tells us something greater. God does not go back to undo the past, but He steps into history to redeem it. He does not erase what has happened, but He brings it to its proper end. He takes what was broken and makes it new. And in doing so, He tells the greatest story ever told—the story of how what was broken in the beginning is restored through Jesus Christ.

Introduction

What is baptism? How do we live a baptized life as God’s people? There is a rich reality that we usually don’t realize regarding baptism. A big part of that reality is your identity. Your Identity is identified in baptism, and the church is a group of baptized people.

Baptism is the illustration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus’ baptism is an illustration (and foreshadow) of his death and resurrection. Jesus was baptized before the start of his ministry and it is the picture of Jesus will eventually do in his death and resurrection. This is a simple yet profound truth that warrants exploring.