Sermons

Three days. That is how long it took Israel to go from singing on the shore of the Red Sea to grumbling in the desert. They had walked between walls of water on dry ground. They had watched the Lord wash away the whole Egyptian army. They had sung a victory song about the nations trembling and about being planted in the land God had promised them (Exodus 15:14-17). Everything looked rosy. And then, three days into the wilderness of Shur, the water ran out.

Some requests change everything. A handful of Greeks arrive in Jerusalem for the Passover and ask quietly to be introduced to Jesus (John 12:21). It seems a small thing — curious foreigners wanting an audience. But Jesus reads it as a signal flare. The outsiders are beginning to seek him, and that can mean only one thing: the hour has come. This is the hinge on which the whole of John’s Gospel turns, the bridge from the book of signs to the book of glory. And so, with the cross now in view, Jesus does something startling. He stops and lets us listen as he thinks aloud about his own death.

There is often a painful gap between what we promise God and what we actually do. We mean every word when we say it. We would die for him, we would never deny him, we would never be the one to let him down. And then the moment of testing arrives, and we discover how little our promises were worth.

Some prayers feel hopeless before they are even spoken. The need is too large, the situation too tangled, and our own track record too poor for us to expect much in return. We pray anyway, but we pray the way we drop a coin into a wishing well, without any real hope that anything will come of it.

It is a strange little episode, tucked into the middle of John’s Gospel and easy to read past. A handful of Greeks arrive in Jerusalem for the Passover, ask quietly for Philip, and make a single request: “Sir, we would like to see Jesus” (John 12:21). Jesus does not even meet them. The Greeks disappear from the narrative as suddenly as they arrived. And yet John records this moment with deliberate care, because what looks like a footnote turns out to be a hinge on which the whole story of redemption swings.

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, two women made their way through the darkened streets of Jerusalem toward a tomb. They carried spices and perfumes — the kind you bring for a corpse. They had no expectation of what they were about to find. And yet what happened next at that tomb would change the course of human history forever.

What would it be like to discover that you had done the unthinkable — destroyed the very thing you’d been hoping for your entire life?

What does it mean to be washed? It’s a question so basic that it seems almost too simple to ask — and yet its answer reaches into the deepest truths about who we are and what God has done for us. The ancient rite of baptism, practised by Christians for two thousand years, is far more than a ceremony. It is a vivid, unforgettable picture of two realities that every human being must face.

Try to picture this: a famous, outspoken atheist steps onto a stage, a room full of supporters waiting for him to dismantle Christianity—and his first words are, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Repent and trust Him.” The shock would be almost impossible to describe.

Acts 9 gives us one of the most famous conversions in history: Saul, the violent persecutor, meets Jesus on the road to Damascus and everything changes (Acts 9:1–9). But if you look closely, the story doesn’t end with Saul hitting the ground. It continues in the quiet faithfulness of a man most people overlook: Ananias.

Most of us like to imagine spiritual growth as a steady climb—small steps, a few breakthroughs, maybe a new habit or two. But every so often, God tells a different story. Not a “self-improvement” story, but a resurrection story. That’s what we see in Saul’s conversion on the Damascus road (Acts 9:1–19): a man moving full speed in the wrong direction, and Jesus stopping him with a mercy he didn’t ask for.