Christ the King Newton Sermons CTK Newton

“1. Draw me from created good,From self, the world, and sinTo the fountain of Thy blood,And make me pure within
Chorus: If Thou hast drawn a thousand times(Oh draw me Lord again)Around me cast the Spirit’s bands(Oh draw me Lord again)”
— Benjamin Beddome




































Matthew 6:19-24

“In spite of errors and abuses, Christians in the past had sound intuitions about the centrality of fasting in the Christian life. In the early Church, fasting was not an isolated practice reserved for a day or a season. It was a clue to all Christian living, a perspective on the whole of discipleship. To be a Christian meant to participate in a great feast. It meant also to observe a great fast.”
—Peter J. Leithart




































Matthew 6:16-18

“The simple, possessive pronoun, ‘your’ on Sinai, and now the simple possessive pronoun ‘our’ on the New Testament mountain, join the people of God to God. God was not introduced to Israel, coldly and formally as ‘Yahweh, the God,’ but warmly as ‘Yahweh, your God.’ And now in the same spirit, God is given to us not only as the Father, but as ‘Our Father.’ The ‘our’ means we belong and are at home. It is a possessive pronoun, meaning that God the Father owns us yet gives himself to us so that he is ours and we are his. In the simple word ‘our’ is the joy of the whole gospel. We will never be able to calculate the honor that has been done us by being allowed to say, ‘Our Father.’’’
—F.D. Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary




































Matthew 6:9-15

“It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause.  If the creature constantly acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? … Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call ‘gnostic,’ the hope for redemption from creation rather than hope for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead…’ (1 Cor. 15:20). That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued.  The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created.”
— Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order




































Romans 6:5-11

“Nine Ascending steps of loving one’s enemy: 1.) take no evil initiative; 2.) do not avenge another’s evil; 3.) Be quiet; 4.) suffer wrongfully; 5.) surrender to the evil doer more than he demands; 6.) do not hate the evil doer; 7.) Love him; 8.) Do him good; 9.) Entreat God on his behalf.”
—John Chrysostom, 5th Century Church Father




































Matthew 5:43-48

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.”
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life




































Matthew 5:38-42