First Baptist Church Thomson, GA David Lambert

Jesus’ longest prayer is found in John 17—the High Priestly Prayer. Jesus prayed this on the night He was betrayed. This sermon focuses on Jesus’ priorities, the kinds of things Jesus prays for His followers—for us! This can give us some clues as to what we should prioritize in our prayers.

Through Luke, we see that Jesus is the perfect Son of Man, what Paul calls the new and better Adam, and how He came to serve and save by God’s transforming power. And in today’s passage, we will see how Jesus meets us at our greatest point of need, in our lowest moments, and sees us through seasons of suffering.

It's no surprise that Jesus calls Christians to have a servant attitude and to be generous with our time and resources. But we can struggle to follow Jesus’s example of selfless service. We sometimes need a refresher to sharpen our skills as servants of God. Following the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus uses the failure of the disciples to cast out a demon to illustrate the qualities and attitudes we need if we are going to follow His example and have the heart of a servant.

In this new sermon series, we will look at a snapshot of Jesus from each of the four Gospel accounts, focusing on how that Gospel writer emphasizes an aspect of Jesus's character and/or ministry. In this message, we look at King Jesus and what He preached about God's Kingdom using parables. Matthew 13 contains several parables about what the Kingdom of God is like and how we relate and connect to the Kingdom.

Easter changes everything! We serve a Living Lord and one day we will join Him in Heaven and enjoy Him for all eternity. But that’s not the whole story. We must not only look to Jesus for a ticket to Heaven. Like Mary, we have an opportunity to encounter the risen Jesus TODAY! And that encounter has the power to change everything in our lives and in our world. I want to challenge us to think about Jesus’ Resurrection and how an encounter with the Living Lord can give us new life right now—not just for eternity, but for every day!

The Garden of Gethsemane was a favorite spot for Jesus and His disciples to spend time together when they came to Jerusalem. It is a beautiful garden, a peaceful garden perfectly suited for prayer. But it is far more than that. It was a garden of pressure, prayer, and priorities. Through this message, we discover what Jesus faced that night out of love for us and submission to the Father's will, we see a pattern for our prayers, and are forced to examine our priorities.