The Church as Committed, Communal Life

Kirk E. Miller

The church is not an institutional network of services and programs. The church is a people, a community of which to be a member, a family.

The help and support it offers is not like that of a drive-through: come and get your “fix” when you decide you need it. The sort of help and support it offers is one that is found through committed relationships and the regular, consistent, habitual, mundane (yet exciting), ordinary (yet supernatural) means of grace — God’s people prayerfully applying God’s word to one another.

We live in an instant gratification and give-it-to-me-now sort of culture. But we should know better here. Life’s not as simple as that. Our brokenness is more entrenched and complex than that.

An Insatiable Appetite for Growth (1 Peter 2:1-3)

Kirk E. Miller

An Insatiable Appetite for Growth (1 Peter 2:1-3)
South City Church
April 9, 2017

Podcast link.

See all sermons from this series on 1 Peter.

Death as Absolute ‘Vanitizer,’ Except as Answered by Christ’s Resurrection

Kirk E. Miller

My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?

—Leo Tolstoy (A Confession), channeling his inner Qohelet, Ecclesiastes.

The answer: no, nothing, futility, or, as the book of Ecclesiastes itself puts it, a mere “striving after wind.”

Death is the ultimate “vanitizer.” Nothing escapes its finalizing, universal stamp of “pointless.”

That is apart from resurrection.

Enter Jesus. Welcome, Easter.

Fear-Filled Foreigners (1 Peter 1:17-21)

Kirk E. Miller

Fear-Filled Foreigners (1 Peter 1:17-21)
South City Church
March 26, 2017

Podcast link.

See all sermons from this series on 1 Peter.

Our Salvation – The Yearning of the Prophets; The Gawking of Angels (1 Peter 1:10-12)

Kirk E. Miller

Our Salvation — The Yearning of the Prophets; The Gawking of Angels (1 Peter 1:10-12)
South City Church
March 12, 2017

Podcast link.

See all sermons from this series on 1 Peter.