On Sunday, I was given the privilege of presenting the sermon at my home church, West Hills Community in Saint Louis. It was, in a sense, my farewell (at least for the time being) to the believers with whom my wife and I have been in fellowship for the past five years. In fact, we joined the community at West Hills shortly before my first appointment at Handong as a visiting professor during the summer of 2004.
In the first few minutes of the message, I give a bit of information about Handong and my teaching experiences there five years ago. The sermon focuses on a brief passage from the Apostle Paul's letter to the believers in Christ at Philippi, a Greek city where he had helped to establish a gathering of Christians several years before writing his letter. At the time he wrote them, he was in prison for preaching the Gospel. If you are interested, you may listen by clicking the link below. Here's a brief introduction to the message:
Life is about changes. And, in many cases, those changes disrupt us; they disturb us; they unsettle us. As hard as we may try to stop them, changes still keep coming. So what's a person to do? Is there a constancy that can sustain us through the on-going changes of life? The Apostle Paul possessed a certainty that provided his life with such a constancy even in the midst of drastic changes – from freedom to imprisonment, from abundance to poverty, and even from life to death. The same certainty experienced by Paul is available to us today when we take God at His Word.
