Date: 10/23/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Live By Faith
Scripture: Habakkuk
Description: Habakkuk wonderfully frames a question that runs through the Bible and human experience: if God is good and powerful, why do evil and injustice flourish? God’s unexpected answer and Habakkuk’s prayerful response show us what realistic faith looks like.
Date: 10/16/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Wrath And Refuge
Scripture: Nahum
Description: Nahum is a book of shocking images. They are images that challenge our common notions of what God is like, that challenge our tendency to flatten the character of God. They are images that show us clearly that God is against all evil, that make us ask whether God is against us. And they are images meant to send us running to Jesus.
Date: 10/09/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: He Is Our Peace
Scripture: Micah
Description: Like so many of the Minor Prophets, Micah focuses on coming judgment and promises a kingdom of peace and security on the other side of judgment. But Micah is unique in his focus on leadership. Israel’s unfaithful leaders led to the nation’s downfall. So who would lead them (and us) to peace?
Date: 10/02/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Embracing The Wideness Of God's Mercy
Scripture: Jonah
Description: Jonah is a powerful story celebrating the extent of God’s mercy that reaches even to the enemies of his people. But even more, it is an ironic and witty satire exposing the foolishness and hypocrisy of Jonah. The story contrasts, on one hand, Jonah’s experience of God’s mercy when he deserved to die for his disobedience; and, on the other hand, Jonah’s burning resentment when Ninevah receives the same mercy he enjoyed. The key question for us: how can we avoid Jonah’s hypocrisy?
Date: 09/25/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Kingdom Shall Be The Lord's
Scripture: Obadiah
Description: In the wake of their exile, and especially given their treatment at the hands of their enemy Edom, Israel had to wonder whether the promises of God would come to nothing. Obadiah prophesied against Edom, but his was a message Israel was meant to overhear. It’s a message meant to encourage them and all who have ever had cause to doubt whether God could deliver on his promises.
Date: 09/18/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Injustice, Idolatry, And Jesus
Scripture: Amos
Description: A contemporary of Hosea, Amos prophesied to dispel Israel’s mistaken assumption that sin and judgment were someone else’s problem. Amos is unique among the prophets for his emphasis on Israel’s exploitation of the weak and vulnerable. His words, full of beauty and laced with satire, help us understand why God takes injustice personally. And they help us understand why Jesus is the only hope for the unjust.
Date: 09/11/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Day Of The Lord And The Call To Repentance
Scripture: Joel
Description: Like so many of the Minor Prophets, Joel is a book of warning. He speaks especially of a coming “Day of the Lord,” a decisive and terrible day when everyone opposed to God’s rule will be destroyed. That has never been a fashionable message, perhaps never less so than now. But what if Joel is right? How could we avoid our share in that judgment?
Date: 09/04/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Spiritual Adultery and the Relentless Love of God
Scripture: Hosea
Description: Hosea offers one of the Bible’s most vivid illustrations of the nature of sin: sin boils down to spiritual adultery, rejecting God’s love in favor of other options. But Hosea offers just as vivid an illustration of redemption in the face of judgment, what one author has called “an anticipation in pageant form of Christ’s story.”
Date: 08/28/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Twelve: Introducing the Minor Prophets
Scripture: Various Texts
Description: This series introduction answers three basic questions: What are the Minor Prophets? What can we learn from the Minor Prophets? And how can we make the most of this study?
Date: 08/21/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Gospel And Evangelism
Scripture: Colossians 4:2-6
Description: The nature of the gospel—Paul’s “mystery of Christ”—controls how we communicate this message to those who don’t follow Jesus. In other words, the message should control the medium.
Date: 08/07/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Gospel-Centered Relationships
Scripture: Colossians 3:18-4:1
Description: In this text Paul drives the implications of the gospel even deeper into real life, into those relationships where our selfishness and idolatry are most likely to flourish. He calls us to gospel-centered relationships in marriage, in the family, and in the workplace.
Date: 07/31/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Be Who You Are
Scripture: Colossians 3:1-17
Description: If salvation comes only through trusting what Jesus has done for us, as Paul’s been arguing, why does it matter how we live? The answer shapes everything. Union with Jesus changes who we are in God’s eyes, offering all the security we need; so we live in response to God’s favor, not to earn it.
Date: 07/24/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: The Gospel And Moralism
Scripture: Colossians 2:16-23
Description: By nature, we’re all prone to moralism—to measure ourselves before God and others by our moral performance. This tendency is the enemy of the gospel. In this section of Colossians, Paul makes his case against moralism; he argues that it’s without substance, arbitrary and powerless. The implications for us are both convicting and encouraging: we don’t get to judge others, but we don’t have to fear being judged.
Date: 07/17/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Jesus Satisfies
Scripture: Colossians 2:6-15
Description: Everyone has something at the center of life that explains how to be fulfilled in life and what values are worth pursuing. According to Paul, the choice is simple. You can build your life on Christ as the only sure source of purpose and hope. Or you can fall for something that seems plausible at first but ultimately won’t satisfy, what he labels “empty deceit.” The reason Jesus satisfies where nothing else will has everything to do with the fact that he offers something nothing else can: transformation and satisfaction.
Date: 07/10/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Gospel-Centered Ministry
Scripture: Colossians 1:24-2:5
Description: Writing to a church he’d never visited in person, Paul uses this section of his letter to explain his philosophy of ministry. Not surprisingly, it begins and ends with the gospel, with what he calls “God’s mystery.” If modeled on Paul’s, our philosophy of ministry as a church and as individuals will be gospel-centered in content, in methods, and in goals.
Date: 07/03/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Christ Alone
Scripture: Colossians 1:15-23
Description: Why trust in Christ for redemption rather than some other source of hope? The burden of this question is the one Paul’s hymn to Christ is meant to carry. Knowing his readers were tempted to look elsewhere for security, or at the very least supplement what the cross offers, Paul explains why Christ’s identity as both God and man makes him the perfect mediator and only fit solution to our problem.
Date: 06/26/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Pray The Gospel
Scripture: Colossians 1:1-14
Description: In letters like Colossians, Paul gives us a model for how to pray for ourselves and others. His prayer for the Colossians reflects a basic tension of the Christian life: through Christ we are redeemed already, transferred from darkness into light, but in our experience we are not yet what we will be. So Paul prays a prayer of gospel-centered thanksgiving, for what God has done already, and gospel-centered supplication, that the gospel would continue its good work in us.
Date: 06/19/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: "God Meant It For Good"
Scripture: Genesis 37-50
Description: If God is loving and powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world? It’s a timeless question that has kept many from faith and unsettled the confidence of many an ardent believer. It’s a question the story of Joseph addresses with remarkable complexity and nuance. On one hand, the story illustrates what we know from experience: suffering comes even to those who don’t deserve it. There’s an element of mystery that neither this story nor the rest of the Bible attempts to penetrate. But on the other hand, seen from beginning to end, the story of Joseph illustrates that God governs all things, even evil and suffering, towards the fulfillment of his promises. The point for us is that, though the details of our suffering remain mostly mysterious, the gospel offers us hope that all things serve God’s purpose to redeem us.
Date: 06/12/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Grace And Faith In The Life Of Jacob
Scripture: Genesis 28:10-22
Description: Typically stories about national founders—stories designed to give a nation identity and purpose—talk up moral virtues worthy of emulation and play down embarrassing flaws. Israel’s origin stories—perhaps especially stories about Jacob, Israel himself—provide a noticeable contrast to this pattern. That’s because Israel’s national identity—and now the identity of the church—rests upon a different sort of foundation, a foundation that has everything to do with the answer to two crucial questions: What can we expect from God? And what does God expect from us? These are questions the story of Jacob is meant to answer.
Date: 06/05/11
Speaker: Matt McCullough
Title: Believing God Provides
Scripture: Genesis 21:1-7
Description: One of Christianity’s great challenges is the call to walk by faith and not by sight. It’s the call to believe God’s loving and gracious promises are true even when the circumstances of your life cast serious doubt on those promises. There is perhaps no more vivid—certainly no more mysterious—illustration of this sort of odds-defying faith than the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice his son. When joined to the account of Isaac’s birth and to God’s provision of a substitute sacrifice, this phase of the Abraham cycle offers poignant and timeless insight into what it looks like to believe God provides, and to stake your life to that truth.
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–––– Sunday ––––
Sunday School - 9:00am
Worship Service - 10:30am
Sunday Evening Service - 5:00pm (Monthly on 1st Sunday)
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Office Hours
Monday - Thursday
9:00am - 3:00pm
Phone - 615-730-7267
Email - mail@edgefieldnashville.org
Edgefield Church Nashville | 700 Russell Street, Nashville, TN 37206 | EIN 62-0550982