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Lafayette Church of Christ
A Faith That Holds, A Heart That Hears
Sunday Bible Class & Morning Sermon · July 26, 2026
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Two lessons this week worth carrying home: a Bible class walk through the family line of Jesus, and the morning sermon on what it means to really see and hear Him.
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At a Glance
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Scripture
Matthew 1:1–17 (class) & Matthew 13, Isaiah 6 (sermon)
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Speakers
This week's Bible class teacher & preacher
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Theme
A faith that acts, and a heart that actually hears.
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Part One · Sunday Bible Class
A Chain That Never Breaks
Matthew 1:1–17
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| 01 |
One Name Kept Alive So the Next Could Come |
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Most of us skim past Matthew's genealogy, but our teacher pointed out Matthew was a tax collector, an organized man who "wants to give you a trail to follow to see how we got to this point." |
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Abraham was 75, with no children, when God told him to leave his country, his kindred, and his father's house, and promised, "in you all families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). |
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Fifteen or twenty years later, God confirmed it in Genesis 15: Abraham's offspring would outnumber the stars, and "he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness." |
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Galatians 3:16 makes the target plain: not "seeds," plural, but one "seed," one offspring the whole promise had been reaching for all along. Christ. |
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Ask Yourself
Abraham left everything on a promise he couldn't see fulfilled, and waited fifteen or twenty years just to watch it begin. What is God asking you to hold onto right now without an answer yet, and are you willing to wait on His timeline instead of your own?
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| 02 |
The Chain Runs Through Crooked People |
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Rahab was a Canaanite, a prostitute, living in the wall of the very city God was about to destroy. She was grafted into the family line because she hid the spies and staked her life on there being a bigger picture. |
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Ruth, a Moabite widow, left her homeland and her gods and told Naomi, "where you go I will go... your people shall be my people, your God, I know" (Ruth 1:16). Boaz became her kinsman redeemer, a picture of what Christ would do for us. |
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David was called a man after God's own heart, and he was also an adulterer and a murderer. When he was confronted, "he owned up to it. He admitted he made a mistake." As our teacher put it, "faith is knowing where to run when you do fall." |
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Even exile couldn't break the line. Hezekiah spread the Assyrians' threatening letter before the Lord instead of raising an army. Josiah tore his clothes when the lost book of the law was finally found and read to him. Zerubbabel rebuilt the ruined temple, "not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit" (Zechariah 4:6). |
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Ask Yourself
Rahab, Ruth, and David all carried a past or a failure that looked disqualifying, and none of them got left out of the story. Where have you decided your own past or your worst day put you too far outside God's chain, and is that really a decision that's yours to make?
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Key Quotes · Bible Class
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This week's Bible class teacher · on Matthew's genealogy
“Every name in this list is a person God kept alive so that the next name could come.”
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This week's Bible class teacher · on David
“Faith is knowing where to run when you do fall.”
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Part Two · Morning Sermon
Seeing They Do Not See
Matthew 13:1–17 · Isaiah 6
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| 01 |
Looking Without Seeing |
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Our preacher opened with a story from a college psychology class: told to count how many times a basketball got passed in a video, nearly half the class missed a person in a gorilla suit who walked straight through the middle of it, beat his chest, and walked off. "Not because the gorilla wasn't there... but because we were looking for something different." |
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The same thing happened with Jesus. People watched Him heal the blind, raise the dead, calm the sea, feed thousands, and still said, "He's not the Messiah." |
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After Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum saw the miracles and still would not repent, and the Pharisees credited His healing to Satan, Jesus turned to parables. "The parables weren't merely illustrations. They were a judicial response to hearts that had persistently rejected the light that they had already received." |
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The Greek word behind "understand" is syniemi, to put the pieces together. The Pharisees had every piece of the puzzle, Isaiah, Micah, Zechariah, the Psalms, and still couldn't connect the dots, "not because they couldn't... it's because they wouldn't." |
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Hearts go hard the way hands go calloused. Not overnight. "One ignored conviction, one act of disobedience, one compromise, one rationalization, one more refusal to repent. And eventually, your conscience loses its sensitivity." |
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Ask Yourself
It's possible to sit through a sermon, sing the songs, know when to stand and sit, and still let a truth go right past you because you were watching for something else. What has God been trying to get through to you lately that you might be looking past?
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The King Isaiah Saw Was Jesus |
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Isaiah 6 opens "in the year that King Uzziah died." With the earthly throne empty, Isaiah looks up and sees the Lord "high and exalted, seated on a throne," surrounded by seraphim crying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." |
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Isaiah's response wasn't pride at the vision. It was confession: "Woe is me, for I am lost." In the Hebrew, literally, "I am ruined. I am undone. I am coming apart." |
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A coal from the altar touches his lips before he ever volunteers for anything. "Grace always comes before service." |
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When God asks, "Whom shall I send?" Isaiah answers, "Here I am, send me," not yet knowing the mission was to preach to people who would not listen. John 12:41 tells us Isaiah wrote what he wrote "because he saw His glory and spoke of Him," meaning the King on that throne was Jesus. |
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Even the warning ends in mercy: "Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them." |
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Ask Yourself
Isaiah didn't volunteer for anything until he had been confronted with God's holiness and his own need for it. When was the last time you let God's holiness make you honest about yourself, instead of jumping straight to what you can do for Him?
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Key Quotes · Sermon
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This week's preacher · on hardened hearts
“Sin never remains neutral. It always, always, always hardens.”
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This week's preacher · in closing
“There is no heart so hard that Christ cannot soften it. There is no sinner so far that Christ cannot save him. There is no life so broken that Christ cannot heal it.”
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Last week: VBS wrapped up with a call from Romans 12 to lay your whole self on the altar, and stay there.
Lafayette Church of Christ · July 26, 2026
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