Sermon of the Month

This Month's Sermon

On the Road

Josh Stahley
Luke 24:1–35

Christ Community Church – Fredonia NY

In this sermon, Pastor Josh Stahley takes his church and others attending their service out to join the conversation Jesus has with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In their Easter Sunday service, he shows from this text what it means to encounter the risen Jesus—God in the flesh, who died in our place and rose to life so that we could share in his resurrection. He takes them through the passage, commenting on the intentionality of Luke in his presentation of the material, and shows them what God reveals concerning Jesus within Luke’s account.

One thing to point out is that the LDS church or Jehovah’s Witnesses would not be able to affirm this sermon: it’s a distinctly Christian sermon about the divine Jesus of historical Christian orthodoxy. This is something that should be true of every sermon we preach in any context. We should fight to preserve clarity, precision, definition in how we speak of God when we preach, because the water is so muddy in the corrupted new-age spiritual language “out there,” outside of our confessional heritage. And related, so powerful about this sermon is how Stahley shows that Scripture refuses to allow hope to be seen in any other source but Jesus Christ—God Himself come to redeem sinful man. As he says, “No other cure goes deep enough. Religion doesn’t go deep enough, morality doesn’t go deep enough, politics doesn’t go deep enough, self-help doesn’t go deep enough. The only thing that goes deep enough, the only thing that can meet our real need, the only thing that can give us real hope is death and resurrection.”

Then within the bones of the sermon, Stahley threads real application to his people throughout the sermon. It’s not an afterthought or a last-minute obligation: he makes this sermon matter for his people because the text itself has such significance for his people. He draws his people to think about whether they might be expecting God to do make some grand dramatic gesture for them to believe—or believe again—when He so often walks alongside them and works through ordinary means. Through a consistent use of the “burning hearts” metaphor, Stahley magnifies Christ and calls on his people to respond to the glory and majesty of the risen Jesus with faith awakened to action.

-Jordan Wilbanks