selected passages
November 9, 2025
preached by Pastor Ryan Bouton
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Time of Reflection Quotations

Christ Causes Us to Value and Care for People
We value the primacy of people over programs. At CRC we believe that Christ causes us to value and care for people. In our evangelistic outreach, as well as in our life as a church, we are committed to being more concerned about our “neighbor” and “brother” than the success of our programs. We do not measure success merely by “numbers, nickels and noise” but by people adoring the grace of God and obeying the revealed will of God. In addition, everything that is done in the church will be critiqued by this question: Does this move people toward maturity in Christ (Colossians 1:28) or does this merely foster an unhealthy dependence on leaders and programs? We desire that people neither become independent nor dependent. Rather, we desire a community of mature, interdependent disciples. We desire people who can be responsible for themselves and their own family’s spiritual needs, while at the same time recognizing the biblical necessity of contributing to the building up of the whole body of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16).”

~ Pastor Don Willeman in CRC Core Values

“For we were the purpose of [Christ’s] embodiment, and for our salvation he so loved human beings as to come to be and appear in a human body.”

“He became what we are so that he might make us what he is.”

~Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296-373), On the Incarnation

“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of – a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car… At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”

~ C.S. Lewis (1893-1963), The Abolition of Man

“‘What does it mean to be human?’ The answer seems to be: ‘We don’t know whether it means anything at all. Man is a directionless clump of animated cells, drifting through time and space.’ …The sexual revolution, that progressive watershed, has arguably done more than anything to turn people into things. And pornography, the most consistent iteration of the logic of the revolution, makes sex into a commodity, turning the actors on the screen into objects for consumers.

Then there is the transformation of abortion from an evil into a regrettable necessity and then into a right to be celebrated. Society’s moral imagination has been shaped by the logic of the sexual revolution, in which children are deemed accidental to sex; the humanity of the child in the womb has thus been stripped of its mysterious personhood.”

~ “Toward a New Humanism” by Carl Trueman, English Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian

“If lust and hate is the candy,
If blood and love taste so sweet,
Then we give ‘em what they want.”

~ 10,000 Maniacs, “Candy Everybody Wants”

Sermon Passage

selected passages (ESV)

Genesis 1

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Matthew 22

¹⁵ Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. ¹⁶ And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. ¹⁷ Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” ¹⁸ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? ¹⁹ Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. ²⁰ And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” ²¹ They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” ²² When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away….

³⁴ But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. ³⁵ And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

1 Corinthians 6

¹⁸ Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. ¹⁹ Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, ^{20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.}

Hebrews 2

¹⁴ Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵ and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. ¹⁶ For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. ¹⁷ Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.