Sermon Preview: Good News to All the World
This week, we are starting a new series of blog posts, which will provide previews of upcoming sermons, provided by Pastor Penno. After reading this week’s preview, we also invite you to leave your comment at the end of this blog post, letting the Pastor know that you appreciate the preview. Or after you listen to the sermon at church or online (on the church website), you can leave a comment here about the sermon.
You can also read the full text of each of Pastor Penno’s sermons on the church website here: http://hayward.adventistfaith.org/document_groups/4224
Here’s this week’s preview of the Pastor’s message, scheduled for Saturday, June 12, at our morning service, which starts at 11:00 am:
If you survive a war in which your buddies didn’t, you are forced to look at life very soberly unless you are completely hard-hearted. When these survivors sense that they are living on time “borrowed” from others who lost life, they realize that they don’t own their life. Every new day becomes an undeserved dividend. Nothing they have done has motivated them to adopt this new attitude toward life; they have simply seen something that others have never seen.
This was precisely the apostle Paul’s gut feeling he had about his own life after his Damascus road experience. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live,” he proclaims, “and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, NKJV). The reality that Paul discovered is that Christ died the death that “all” deserve, and which all would have died if He had not died their death instead. He saw himself as the survivor of the greatest Death that anyone ever died, the death of the Son of God in which death he also died corporately.
