First Baptist Church Thomson, Ga

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that he was preaching how "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” referencing how Jesus' crucifixion fulfilled Old Testament prophecy and prediction. In this sermon series we are looking at Jesus' death and resurrection through the lens of the Old Testament, beginning with how Jesus is the ultimate High Priest and sacrificial lamb, fulfilling the Day of Atonement for all who trust in Him.

We started our journey a month ago, looking at how David led Israel to prepare for the construction of God’s Temple in Jerusalem. Today, we return to that story of how David laid out the vision, led the people to commit to giving toward it, and helped prepare Solomon and a new generation of leaders to build the Temple. We are striving to follow that biblical model in our approach to renewing our campus for the Glory of God and the Study of His Word, so that what the generations before us worked so hard to provide can last for generations to come.

In today’s message, we split the difference between the events in the last two sermons, from the construction of Solomon's temple and the construction of the new temple after the Babylonian Exile. In 2 Kings 22, we find young King Josiah, a descendant of David, through whom God brings another moment of revival and renewal that began with a renovation of Solomon's Temple. But the years of neglect of the physical temple was symptomatic of a deeper problem--Judah's neglect of their relationship with God, and forgetting about His Word. In this sermon, Josiah gives us a model for growing individually and as a church family, based on how we respond to God's Holy Word.

Don’t you feel at times the need for spiritual renewal in your life? Maybe in your financial commitments and generosity, your family dynamics, your daily walk with the Lord, or a stronger burden to be a witness to the lost. Anything we do to renew our campus, any updates and renovations, have that spiritual renewal as our end goal. In this sermon, we will focus on our own needs for personal and church-wide renewal. We may use words like revive, refresh, or revitalize, but we're basically talking about spiritual renewal. Nehemiah 8-10 describes a pivotal time in Israel’s history when a national rebirth refocused the people on renewing their commitments to God.

Our capital stewardship campaign theme, “For All Generations,” includes three calls to action: Invest, Renew, and Grow. In this message, we turn our focus towards God’s call for us to INVEST in His kingdom and mission. He is calling us to invest in a vision, not just for our time, but for generations to come. This message extends beyond FBC Thomson's capital campaign. It's a message about how all believers should invest in God's Kingdom work through stewardship and generosity.

FBC Thomson has come to a pivotal moment in its life. As we read in 1 Chronicles 28, like King David lead Israel to embrace a vision for building the Temple, we believe God is leading us to commit ourselves to prepare and provide for a future where His glory and presence will guide us and bless all who seek Him, from generation to generation. David gathered all the leaders to share the vision God placed in his heart, not for David’s own glory, but for God’s glory; not for himself, but for future generations. In this message, we hear a plan for investing so that we can renew parts of our church campus for growth today and in the decades to come. We need to seek ways to better steward what previous generations so richly provided us such that tomorrow's generation can continue to use them for God's glory.

In this final message of the Better series, we look at the last "Great": the Great Commission. God doesn’t want us to just be better in ourselves—spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically; He doesn’t just want us to be better relationally with our family, friends, and fellow Christians. God wants us to be better missionally as well, in how we fulfill His purpose and will for our lives: to Make Disciples.

The Second Greatest Commandment, according to Christ, is to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus later raises the bar, calling us to love one another as He loves us. The NT gives us a great example and a practical look at that kind of Christian love. It’s found in a personal letter written by Paul to his dear friend, Philemon. From this letter, we can learn the keys to being relationally better, by loving others as ourselves and as Jesus has loved us.

We round out the Greatest Commandment in this sermon by looking at how to love God with all our strength or might. That is how God would have us become physically better and healthier people. For the Jewish people, loving God with all your might included all the resources God had entrusted to them, which makes this a matter of stewardship--of our bodies, our time, our talents, and our financial resources.

We’ve looked at how we can be spiritually better by loving God with all our heart and emotionally better by loving God with all our soul. Today, we are going to discover how to be intellectually better by loving God with all our mind. Let’s look at a few of the things the Bible tells us about our minds, our intellects, our ability to think and reason, to learn and obtain wisdom and knowledge. What do they tell us about how to love God with all our mind?

In this sermon, we look at the Fruit of the Spirit to consider how the Holy Spirit is working to heal and enhance our emotional life through these divine qualities. The Fruit of the Spirit are virtues that reveal Christ's character being developed in us. They can guide how we deal with and express our emotions in a way that honors God and builds up the people around us.

In this sermon we look at the biblical call to write or inscribe God’s Word in our hearts, as if our hearts were tablets—like those Moses brought down from the mountain. But instead of hard stone, God’s Word is engraved in our living hearts—in our very spirits, upon what makes us the unique people we are. This is the key to becoming spiritually healthier and better.

My hope is that this sermon series can help us do more than just make New Year Resolutions that we just give up on in a few weeks. God desires you to become better, to become more Christlike, to become healthier, holier, and even happier. How we plan to get there is what makes all the difference. Let’s begin 2025 the right way, by looking at some great truths from God's Word to help us truly start a great year! And in this message, we begin with one of Israel’s foundational truths, as they were preparing for their own fresh start—not entering a new year, but a new land.

God’s gifts of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love are all connected as one Gift—the Gift of Jesus. And all the things we give in response—surrendering our fears, giving God our trust and treasures—it’s all part of giving God one gift—the gift of our heart, the gift of our worship. To sum this up and connect it together, as we think about giving the Lord worship from our hearts, I want us to look back at the key people in the Christmas story and look at how they worshipped.

Dr. Matt Ward preaches a sermon about bringing God the best of our treasures. Using the story of the Wise Men (Magi) from Matthew 1, we discover how we can bring God our treasures as a response to His gift of joy.

In the last sermon, we discovered that in exchange or hope, we can give the Lord our trust. In this message, we consider what we are to give Jesus in exchange for His peace? While it's not usually a good gift-giving practice, Jesus wants us to give Him something we don’t want—We can give Jesus our fears.

This Advent season, I want to invite you on a journey to think about the gifts we can bring to Jesus, not just at Christmas, but with our whole lives? I hope these sermons can help us prepare our hearts as we reflect on how we can honor the King of Kings with the gifts we bring to Him. This first Sunday of Advent, we focus on Hope as a gift that is ours because of Jesus’ birth. But what gift can we give to Him in response? Because Hope is a gift of God available to us through Christ, we can give Jesus the gift of our trust. Isaiah 40 provides powerful reasons we can place our full trust in God.

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is only the fool who tries to get the heavens inside his head, and not unnaturally his head bursts. The wise man is content to get his head inside the heavens.” In this sermon from Jesus' Olivet Discourse in Mark 13, as we think about God’s future plans for us and the world, let’s just try to get our heads inside the heavens for some insight, perspective, and gratitude.

Last week we looked at the blessings of God’s faithfulness, His mercies that are new every morning, His fatherly love and care and even discipline on us, because God is our good, good Father, and we are His children. So another blessing we often take for granted is that we are part of God’s family—the Church! While we would say that we love, appreciate, and care for our families, what about our Spiritual Family? Are we taking our Church Family for granted?

We so easily take for granted the daily blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus. Through this short series of messages, I hope to call us to remember and give thanks for some of God's greatest gifts to us. There is no greater blessing—and none we deserve less—than the blessings of God’s faithfulness to us. He is a God who is trustworthy and true, and full of grace and mercy.