My plan for this fall—and I want to stress it is a plan, not a promise—is a 7-part series on historically significant sins. It will be entitled “Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Christ.” The first message, on August 12, will be an overview of where we are going and why, as it relates to our life as a church and our witness in the city and the world.

Here are some goals for this series:

• To show that the Christian faith is not like Hinduism or Buddhism or vague New Age Spiritualism but is rooted in and made up of objective historical reality outside ourselves: God, Satan, creation, human beings, sin, fallenness, providence, and divine puposefulness in all things.
• To show that evil is real, horrible, and inescapable in this life, but not ultimate and not out of God’s control.
• To show God as totally and always sovereign over all things including evil as a wise, holy, good God worthy of everyone’s trust and worship.
• To drive home that evil is not an accident and that all the evil God permits is by design for the greater glory of his Son, Jesus Christ.
• To sustain Christians for whom life will get harder in the years to come by showing that God will always be in control and will be with us forever to help us.
• To show there is hope in the greatest evil, because evil has always been under God’s control and has never escaped his wise governance.
• To show that Christ, crucified and risen, is the centerpiece of all reality and that everything flows toward him and from him. All evil exists so that his saving work will have the fullest glory and his person the most manifest worth.
• To show that knowing and embracing all this truth is like ballast in the belly of our boats which gives us stability and strength to plow the waves of adversity without capsizing and without turning from the true north of God’s will.

Here are the sermon titles for the next 7 messages as I currently anticipate them:

• “All Things Were Created Through Him and for Him.” - Colossians 1:9-20
• “The Fall of Satan and the Victory of Christ” - Genesis 3:1-15
• “The Fatal Disobedience of Adam and the Triumphant Obedience of Christ” - Romans 5:12-21
• “The Pride of Babel and the Praise of Christ” - Genesis 11:1-9
• “The Sale of Joseph and the Son of God” - Genesis 37:1-36
• “The Sinful Origin of the Son of David” - 1 Samuel 12:1-25
• “Judas Iscariot, the Suicide of Satan, and the Salvation of the World” - Luke 22:1-6

(You can subscribe to our sermon podcast to get these messages automatically in iTunes.)