Remsen Bible Fellowship

Audio Link   (Sermon starts around 19:05) The King Thing 1 Samuel 8, Remsen Bible Fellowship, 10/25/2020 Introduction: Open by reading the text. 1 Samuel 8 has a particular place in what you might call my Scriptural imagination. When I first started taking classes through the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission, my first teacher was Jim Hunter. And this chapter was formative for Jim-so much so that he wrote a paper from which I stole this title: the King Thing. He had us read that paper in a class on hermeneutics, which at first seemed off topic. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation, we were learning how to study the Bible, whereas this paper was focused on our embrace, as individuals and churches, of a form of thinking that out-sourced responsibility and leadership to figureheads instead of understanding ourselves as personally responsible to God. But it wasn’t off topic. The longer I’ve thought about the King Thing, the more I’ve realized that how we read and respond to God’s word

 Audio Link When Death is Like Noon Remsen Bible Fellowship, 10/25/2020 Introduction: But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until the full day. Proverbs 4:18 In verses 14-19 of Proverbs 4, the Sage is giving his son warnings about the path of the wicked. The wicked, cannot sleep unless they have done wrong; they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble. Where does this path lead? The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble. The path of the wicked isn’t only wicked, it isn’t only sinful-it’s blindness, darkness, it is stumbling around in a world full of unknowing. But piercing this warning is verse 18 , which gives us a contrasting path. But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until the full day. Wickedness. Righteousness. Darkness. Light. These are familiar images, word pictures, metaphors in the Biblical text.  I wonder wh