Sermons / Talks

Recent Sermons

• Sunday, 16 November 2025

  Take God's Grace Seriously

  from Bernard Gabbott

  God’s people are exactly where God planned. God himself knows, and has committed to dealing with, their God-issue. God has commissioned Moses for the job at hand, because of God’s own character. And then we get these three strange, seemingly disconnected episodes, before all the fireworks begin. What are we to make of them? I think they emphasise the seriousness with which God, and his commitment, and his work, and his nature, are to be taken. God is holy and glorious. To meet God face-to-face is to be struck with fear. To truly understand the revelation of God is to be confronted with our own sinfulness. This means that we must take God himself, God’s commitment to his people, and what God deserves seriously. In a culture where being serious and sensible is not a sought-after character trait, in a world where relationships are measured in seconds, news is communicated in tweets, and self dominates everything, these three strange episodes remind God’s mob of the seriousness of God.

• Sunday, 9 November 2025

  Moses Meets God

  from Bernard Gabbott

  We come, today, to the moment of Moses’ commissioning and motivation for the work of God. It is a moment in Exodus which is awe-inspiring, confronting, humorous – and much discussed. And at the heart of it is the commissioning and moving of Moses to be the instrument of God’s commitment to his people. There is much we could say here, but I think this much is crucial: it is God’s holiness and glory that is both the foundation, and fount, of Moses’ work. In this sense, we have a pattern for ministry throughout God’s word: it is the nature and reputation of God himself that is the foundation, the wellspring, the motivation, the equipping, of all forms of ministry by God’s mob. Anything else will be counterfeit, will be broken, and will be driven (ultimately) by a concern for our reputation and significance, and not God’s.

• Sunday, 2 November 2025

  What Kind of Deliverer?

  from Bernard Gabbott

  What kind of ‘saviour’, what kind of ‘deliverer’, do God’s people need? The need for their deliverance is not in doubt – by the end of Exodus 1, God’s people are oppressed by the profoundly anti-life forces of those arrayed against God (who is fundamentally pro-life and good). In slavery, with the lives of their children threatened, God’s people need a deliverer. And the implication is that they need a deliverer who is mighty and magnificent. We meet Moses – a baby, threatened, remarkably saved, taken into Pharaoh’s household. And we are meant to notice his uniqueness, but his confused cultural heritage is problematic. As he reaches mature adulthood, our hopes are raised… but then he moved progressively away from his people, to the margins of society, and rejected by his own. What kind of deliverer is this? But it is the parallel ‘seeing’ of God that returns our hopes to the right place. Moses has potential but it is God who is powerful, because of his promises. In this way, Moses is both a tie to what God has already done (a people created by him) and the shadowy template for the Saviour still to come.