Sermons by Matt Heerema

Sermons by Matt Heerema

Matt serves as lead pastor, and focuses on teaching, leadership, and theological development. He and his wife Nancy have four daughters. He is a musician and led in Stonebrook’s music ministry for 15 years before putting the guitar down. Matt is an avid reader and massive sci-fi geek.

Hebrews 8 – A Better Covenant with Better Promises

Please find a Bible and turn with me to Hebrews chapter 8.  When we are trying to understand what the Bible says to us, our primary task is to try to figure out what the original author was trying to communicate to the original audience. What point was he trying to get across to them? Once we know that, our next task is to try to figure out what relevance that message has for us today.  Sometimes it is a…

Hebrews 4:14-5:10 – He Gets Us

Please turn with me to Hebrews chapter 4.  Two weeks ago during the Superbowl, a Christian organization aired two commercials with the tagline “He Gets Us”—attempting to convey a message that Jesus understands everyone, and has a message for everyone. This is the second year in a row this organization aired commercials during the Superbowl, and they have racked up close to a million views on YouTube in the past two weeks.  The commercials have generated no end of controversy—liberals…

Hebrews 3:1-4:1 – Fix Your Mind on Jesus

Please turn with me to Hebrews chapter 3.  In today’s passage, we come across the first of several warning passages in the book of Hebrews. The passage warns us to “watch out, in case any of us has an evil and unbelieving heart”, and to not “harden our hearts” when God commands us. It seems to warn us that if we don’t hang on to the end we will not be considered part of God’s house, and that there may…

Hebrews 1:4-2:5 – Better than the angels

Please turn with me to Hebrews chapter 1. We get very curious about angels, don’t we? They make their appearances throughout the Bible at very important times, bringing messages (in fact “angel” just means “messenger”), we see them interacting with humans, sometimes fighting battles, which means they are capable of interacting with the physical world, including fighting (and protecting!).  There are even hints in the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah that some of the angels followed satan in a rebellion against…

Commands of Jesus: “Do this in remembrance…”

Please turn with me in your Bible to 1 Corinthians 11. These past few weeks we have been looking at a few of the most foundational commands of Christ. We looked at his call to follow him, we looked at his command to be baptized, and today we are going to take a look at his command to remember him, specifically with a ritual meal he gave his followers to observe, which goes by a few names, typically communion, or…

Commands of Jesus: “Baptize them.”

Please open your Bibles to Matthew, chapter 28.  Baptism is one of the most important events and concepts in the Christian faith. Christians have understood baptism in several different ways throughout the centuries. At Stonebrook, we practice “believer’s baptism” as an expression and testimony of our salvation through faith in Christ.   We would say that baptism is a command from Jesus, to be done by all who believe, as soon as possible after they believe. One key scripture on…

Exodus: Immanuel, God With Us

Please find a Bible and open with me to Matthew chapter 1. Today is the last day of Advent, and the hinge point between Advent and Christmas. So I thought we’d base this morning’s sermon on the first Christmas passage. Let’s read the great story. 18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy…

Exodus 40: God dwells with his people

Please turn with me in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 40. This morning we finally come to the end of our 20 week walk through of the book of Exodus. The theme couldn’t be more fitting for this time of year, the season of advent. Advent is from a latin word that means “arrival” – and as we said at the beginning of the service, it is a time where we remember and reflect on what it must have been…

Exodus 31: The Sabbath

Please turn in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 31. As a pastor one of the more frequent questions I am asked, especially by young believers trying to figure out how to live out their faith in Jesus in obedience to His scriptures, and maybe especially by busy college students trying to figure out how to best manage their time (and by the way the Venn diagram of those two groups overlaps quite a bit) – is something like “Pastor Matt,…

Exodus 25-28, 35-39 pt 2: Offerings for Worship

Please open your Bibles to Exodus chapter 35. This morning we are on part 15 of 20 of our walk through of the book of Exodus. If you’ve been following along in the series so far, it is important to note that this morning we’re doing sort of a time-shift in the narrative. We’re skipping ahead a little bit from last week’s passage. Last week God gave Moses the plans for the tabernacle and the tools Israel would need for…

Exodus 25-28: Details and Shadows

Please turn with me to Exodus chapter 25.  Have you ever heard the phrase “the devil is in the details?” It means something like things are always more complicated than they seem, and those complications are going to cause you problems if you find out about them too late.  I learned this week that that phrase is a spin on an earlier more popular phrase: God is in the details. And that is what our passage teaches us this week.…

Exodus 19-20: The Ten Commandments

Please open your Bible to Exodus chapter 19. As we pick up our series today we find Israel now three months into their journey out of Egypt, through the wilderness of the Sinai penninsula, headed toward their new home in the promised land. In our passage today we find them having arrived at Mount Sinai for their most crucial encounter with the Living God yet: the receiving of The Law. Today we are going to study, The Ten Commandments. The…

Exodus 15-16: Proving, Testing, Resting

Please open your Bibles to Exodus 15. The last few weeks we have been studying God’s powerful deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt. Last week we looked at how God miraculously defeated the Egyptian army, and led them to safety through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and they celebrated their rescue mightly and created a magnifient song that they sang! When we left off, these were the words ringing in the air. Miriam sang to them:…

Exodus 14-15: God’s Guidance

Please open you Bibles or turn into your scripture journal to Exodus chapter 14. We are on week 8 of 20 our walk through of the book of Exodus, and today we’re finally getting out of Egypt! This “scene” in the story is extremely dramatic, it almost feels like a Lord of the Rings sci-fi fantasy story. It’s more accurate to say that The Lord of the Rings feels a lot like the book of Exodus. You know what they…

Exodus 12-13: The Passover

This morning we are in week 7 of our walk through of Exodus. Last week we looked at one of the most well known and powerful stories in Exodus: God’s judgment on Egypt through the ten plagues. In these plagues God judged Egypt’s idolatry, worship of false gods, proving them to be powerless.  Perhaps there were real spiritual forces at work, but they were no match for The Most High God. Also through these plagues, God revealed to Pharaoh and…

Exodus 5-6: God’s Faithfulness in our Faithlessness

Today’s passage sits at a transition between two famous “scenes” in the Exodus narrative: The Burning Bush, and the Plagues. It sets the stage for one of the most important and encouraging messages God sends his people by his actions in delivering them from their bondage. Paul puts it this way to his young protege Timothy: 13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. 2 Timothy 2:13 (CSB) Let’s back up into our passage from…

Learning to see the invisible

In today’s passage, we see a story of trying to carry out God’s work in our own timing and in our own strength and with our own wisdom, and how this always brings about disaster. Last week, we studied the narrative of Moses’s birth and God’s amazing protection and providence in his being saved from genocide, and being adopted by a princess of Egypt. In today’s passage, the narrative fast forwards through all of Moses’s upbringing and early adult life,…

Every Member a Minister

Last week we took a look at one of the points of our ministry emphasis at Stonebrook: “every member a minister.” We have four points to this emphasis that is directing our ministry programs this year.  They are:  Last week we looked at the second point: “every believer a member”, how the scriptures call each believers to commit themselves to a local fellowship, a local congregation, and how we work that out here at Stonebrook through a membership process.  This…

Members of One Another

I have a question to start us off this morning.  How many memberships do you have? Think about it for a second. Costco, Amazon Prime, Sam’s Club, The ISU Alumni Association, Maybe a golf club, a gym membership, Rotary, Toastmasters, Kiwanis, maybe you are a member of a professional association related to your vocation. You can be a member of a coffee shop rewards program, or if you’re like me, you can be a chick-fil-a signature status rewards member because…

What Does Jesus Say About Human Sexuality?

Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 19. When I talk with my non-Christian friends about my job as a Bible teacher, I often describe my task as something like that of a historian. My job is to understand and to teach what the church has taught about this book since the beginning of the church and for the last 2000 years. My job is not to find some exciting new understanding that has been hidden throughout the ages,…

Revelation 22 – The Time is Near!

Please open your Bible with me to Revelation chapter 22. Today our Revelation series comes to a close. What a great Spring it has been walking through this book with you all. I’ve appreciated the feedback, the questions, the conversations, the encouragement, the little bit of debate, and you know, even the tiny bit of criticism here and there. I trust that as we’ve walked through and made this book more clear over the past 16 weeks that its been…

Revelation 20: The Final Judgment

Revelation 19:17–21 (CSB) 17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he called out in a loud voice, saying to all the birds flying high overhead, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18 so that you may eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of military commanders, the flesh of the mighty, the flesh of horses and of their riders, and the flesh of everyone, both free and slave, small and great.”  19 Then…

Revelation 19: The Victory of the Lamb over the Beasts

Please turn with me to Revelation chapter 19. Today is Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, and it might seem a little strange that our text for the morning is Revelation 19. But we made the decision not to take time out of this important series for this week, but rather, we worked to schedule the series so that chapter 19 fell on this morning, because in our chapter today, we get to see a powerful image of the risen Jesus, and…

Revelation 17 & 18: Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!

Please open your Bibles to Revelation chapter 17.  We are now down the home stretch of this great book. We’re on week 12 of 16 of this series. And it has been a wild ride! Last week we Brad taught through chapters 15 and 16—the seven bowls of judgement, which depict the final pouring out of God’s wrath on an unbelieving world on judgement day. Where John goes next in this book is sort of a zoom-out, with a series…