Date: 07/31/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Be Who You Are
Scripture: Colossians 3:1-17
Description: If salvation comes only through trusting what Jesus has done for us, as Paul’s been arguing, why does it matter how we live? The answer shapes everything. Union with Jesus changes who we are in God’s eyes, offering all the security we need; so we live in response to God’s favor, not to earn it.
Date: 07/24/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Gospel And Moralism
Scripture: Colossians 2:16-23
Description: By nature, we’re all prone to moralism—to measure ourselves before God and others by our moral performance. This tendency is the enemy of the gospel. In this section of Colossians, Paul makes his case against moralism; he argues that it’s without substance, arbitrary and powerless. The implications for us are both convicting and encouraging: we don’t get to judge others, but we don’t have to fear being judged.
Date: 07/17/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Satisfies
Scripture: Colossians 2:6-15
Description: Everyone has something at the center of life that explains how to be fulfilled in life and what values are worth pursuing. According to Paul, the choice is simple. You can build your life on Christ as the only sure source of purpose and hope. Or you can fall for something that seems plausible at first but ultimately won’t satisfy, what he labels “empty deceit.” The reason Jesus satisfies where nothing else will has everything to do with the fact that he offers something nothing else can: transformation and satisfaction.
Date: 07/10/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Gospel-Centered Ministry
Scripture: Colossians 1:24-2:5
Description: Writing to a church he’d never visited in person, Paul uses this section of his letter to explain his philosophy of ministry. Not surprisingly, it begins and ends with the gospel, with what he calls “God’s mystery.” If modeled on Paul’s, our philosophy of ministry as a church and as individuals will be gospel-centered in content, in methods, and in goals.
Date: 07/03/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Christ Alone
Scripture: Colossians 1:15-23
Description: Why trust in Christ for redemption rather than some other source of hope? The burden of this question is the one Paul’s hymn to Christ is meant to carry. Knowing his readers were tempted to look elsewhere for security, or at the very least supplement what the cross offers, Paul explains why Christ’s identity as both God and man makes him the perfect mediator and only fit solution to our problem.
Date: 06/26/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Pray The Gospel
Scripture: Colossians 1:1-14
Description: In letters like Colossians, Paul gives us a model for how to pray for ourselves and others. His prayer for the Colossians reflects a basic tension of the Christian life: through Christ we are redeemed already, transferred from darkness into light, but in our experience we are not yet what we will be. So Paul prays a prayer of gospel-centered thanksgiving, for what God has done already, and gospel-centered supplication, that the gospel would continue its good work in us.
Date: 06/19/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: "God Meant It For Good"
Scripture: Genesis 37-50
Description: If God is loving and powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world? It’s a timeless question that has kept many from faith and unsettled the confidence of many an ardent believer. It’s a question the story of Joseph addresses with remarkable complexity and nuance. On one hand, the story illustrates what we know from experience: suffering comes even to those who don’t deserve it. There’s an element of mystery that neither this story nor the rest of the Bible attempts to penetrate. But on the other hand, seen from beginning to end, the story of Joseph illustrates that God governs all things, even evil and suffering, towards the fulfillment of his promises. The point for us is that, though the details of our suffering remain mostly mysterious, the gospel offers us hope that all things serve God’s purpose to redeem us.
Date: 06/12/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Grace And Faith In The Life Of Jacob
Scripture: Genesis 28:10-22
Description: Typically stories about national founders—stories designed to give a nation identity and purpose—talk up moral virtues worthy of emulation and play down embarrassing flaws. Israel’s origin stories—perhaps especially stories about Jacob, Israel himself—provide a noticeable contrast to this pattern. That’s because Israel’s national identity—and now the identity of the church—rests upon a different sort of foundation, a foundation that has everything to do with the answer to two crucial questions: What can we expect from God? And what does God expect from us? These are questions the story of Jacob is meant to answer.
Date: 06/05/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Believing God Provides
Scripture: Genesis 21:1-7
Description: One of Christianity’s great challenges is the call to walk by faith and not by sight. It’s the call to believe God’s loving and gracious promises are true even when the circumstances of your life cast serious doubt on those promises. There is perhaps no more vivid—certainly no more mysterious—illustration of this sort of odds-defying faith than the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice his son. When joined to the account of Isaac’s birth and to God’s provision of a substitute sacrifice, this phase of the Abraham cycle offers poignant and timeless insight into what it looks like to believe God provides, and to stake your life to that truth.
Date: 05/29/11
Speaker: Bill Heerman
Title: God Is Faithful To His Promises
Scripture: Genesis 15:1-8
Description: God is faithful to the promises He makes in the Bible. Since we are grafted in as Abraham’s descendants through faith in Christ, we have confidence that he is working for our good despite our circumstances.
Date: 05/22/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Abraham And The Promise Of Salvation
Scripture: Genesis 12:1-9
Description: Sin is inseparable from these ancient promises. They speak of the content of salvation, the vehicle of salvation, and the scope of salvation.
Date: 05/15/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Babel
Scripture: Genesis 11:1-9
Description: The strange little story of the Tower of Babel explains the origins of Israel’s neighbors as the result of a clash between the unfettered pride of humankind and the unmatched sovereignty of God. Rich in irony, it juxtaposes the united human drive for security and significance with God’s effortless sway over the best of human ingenuity. But more than that, like all of Genesis 1-11, the story of Babel has timeless relevance as an explanation of our sinful condition and a precursor to God’s specific goals in salvation.
Date: 05/08/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: God Remembers
Scripture: Genesis 6:9-9:17
Description: The story of Noah and the flood is far from a nursery rhyme. It’s a story of cataclysmic judgment mixed with mysterious divine grace. Like everything else in the opening chapters of Genesis, this story is meant to introduce key themes that continue to play out in the storyline of the Bible, and it raises crucial questions. How should this story of terrible and intentional judgment affect our view of God? Why did God choose to preserve Noah and his family? Why should we expect he’ll preserve us?
Date: 04/17/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Paradise Lost
Scripture: Genesis 3:1-24
Description: Genesis, as a story of beginnings, explains the roots of a reality we can’t reasonably deny: this world is not what it ought to be. Genesis 3 explains something of the nature of sin, that it replaces God’s authority with ours; the results of sin, that it destroys relationships, separates us from God, and ultimately brings death; and the solution for sin, that one we now know to be Jesus would come to perfectly solve the problem of sin.
Date: 04/10/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Made In God's Image
Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31
Description: The conclusion to Genesis 1 claims that humans are unique among God’s creatures because they’re made in the image of God. That was a counter-cultural claim when first written and, in some ways, remains so today. But unique how? This text suggests the image of God gives us unique dignity, unique responsibility, and unique accountability.
Date: 04/03/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: In The Beginning
Scripture: Genesis 1:1-27
Description: The story of Genesis—a book of beginnings—opens with a poem that answers questions as old as time: Where did we come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? And who is in charge?
Date: 03/20/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Is Alive
Scripture: Mark 15:40-16:8
Description: Mark concludes his story with an earth-shattering claim that launches the life of the church: Jesus was really dead, but now he’s alive. He leaves us to ask two questions. Is it true? And if it is true, if Jesus really is alive, what are the implications?
Date: 03/13/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Why Did Jesus Die?
Scripture: Mark 14:53-65
Description: Why must Jesus die? Mark’s telling of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion removes a couple possible explanations. Jesus didn’t die because he was guilty: the trial of Jesus shows no one found any legitimate, legal reason to kill him. And Jesus didn’t die because he was powerless: Mark’s readers know Jesus is innocent and has power to overcome his captors, but he doesn’t defend himself. So why then? Jesus died to establish a kingdom you could live in. Mark’s chief irony and his central message is that Jesus comes to power and invites us into his kingdom through his death.
Date: 03/06/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus, Our Substitute
Scripture: Mark 14:1-52
Description: Describing the events leading to Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, Mark tells us a great deal about what Jesus came here to do: He came to be abandoned so we won’t have to be. Jesus was abandoned by everyone—Judas, Peter, his disciples, even his Father—and, remarkably, he chose to have it that way. Why did he choose this path of excruciating isolation? Because through his death, the ultimate abandonment, he established a covenant relationship that will never break.
Date: 02/27/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus On The Future
Scripture: Mark 13:1-37
Description: In the longest section of teaching recorded in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus turns to questions asked by the religious and the philosophical since the beginning of time. What does the future hold, and how should we live now in light of that future? The details of Jesus’s predictions (about the destruction of the Temple in the near future and about his final return in power and glory) have always baffled interpreters. But the bottom line couldn’t be more clear: because Jesus is coming back in victory and judgment, and because we don’t know when, our responsibility is to trust Jesus and stay ready.
–––– Map ––––
–––– Sunday ––––
Sunday School - 9:00 am
Worship Service - 10:30am
Sunday Evening Service - 5:00pm (Monthly on 1st Sunday)
–––– Contact ––––
Office Hours
Monday - Thursday
9:00am - 3:00pm
Phone - 615-730-7267
Email - mail@edgefieldnashville.org
Edgefield Church Nashville | 700 Russell Street, Nashville, TN 37206 | EIN 62-0550982