This brief essay outlines the reason and goals of analysing sermons preached on Good Friday, 3rd April, 2026. Has the necessity of being born again been driven home to the hearers, and if not, how and why has this happened?

The essay argues that, although the sermon affirms Christ’s death for sinners and divine judgment against sin, it largely repeats John 19’s details rather than expounding their redemptive meaning and therefore requires a clearer account of substitution, justification, faith, and the gospel’s personal application.

In the ongoing Series, this analysis commends the sermon’s text-governed portrayal of Christ’s mocked yet true kingship. However, its treatment of the cross requires fuller explanation of sin, guilt, imputation, substitution, justification, regeneration, and the hearer’s eternal standing before God, instead of a call to consider the crown of thorns.

Although this sermon affirms Christ’s sacrificial death and resists a crossless Christianity, its disconnected use of Scripture and insufficiently developed account of justification, resurrection, and regeneration leave its confrontational appeal functionally closer to moral exhortation than Easter gospel proclamation.

This essay examines how a Good Friday sermon on Hebrews 10:1–18 affirmed the finality of Christ’s sacrifice while failing to expound its theological foundations, the particular efficacy of the atonement, and the new-covenant necessity of inward renewal by the Holy Spirit.

This doctrinally rich sermon upholds atonement and penal substitution, along with many other essential doctrines to Christianity and yet it withers at the point where it needed to be the strongest.

Working on The New Birth in Exile series has been an eye-opener into the preaching that is taking place in the Presbyterian Church of Victoria. However, this sermon reaches a new low.

This is a sympathetic but critical examination of a Good Friday sermon whose genuine faith in Christ is weakened by a shallow account of His sacrificial death, the gravity of sin, and the sinner’s need for repentance, justification, and new birth.

Although this sermon contains strong elements of penal substitution and propitiation, its redefined view of humanity ultimately undermines the urgency and necessity of being born again. The call to faithful living is to imitate the bold manner Joseph of Arimathea when he asked Pilate for the body of Jesus.

The essay argues that human will and repentance are entirely dependent on God’s sovereign grace and Spirit-empowered regeneration. Despite the Tinitarian framework of the sermon, an impotent god was preached here who waits for us to choose a better life.

The horror of this friendly chat lies in its reduction of the atonement to a vague, moralistic notion that neglects the full biblical and Reformed doctrine of Christ’s finished work—failing to exegete “It is finished” as the fulfillment of God’s righteous law and the propitiation of His wrath, and reducing sin to "spiritual and moral brokenness".

This sermon is theologically sound in its basic presentation of substitutionary atonement and the call to faith but is experientially and doctrinally incomplete due to its insufficient application of the consequences of the imputation of Adam’s sin, the reality of divine wrath and eternal judgment, and the subsequent necessity of the new birth for true conversion.

The analysis of this sermon includes a brief account of how the subtle removing of the offence of the cross in preaching is perpetrated and some of the reasons for doing so.

This sermon commendably presents a theologically rich and pastorally sensitive exposition of Christ’s forsakenness, vividly portraying the weight of divine wrath borne by the sinless Son and offering believers profound assurance of God’s faithfulness; however, it falls short in urgently confronting hearers with the dire consequences of unbelief and the necessity of the new birth

This sermon unapologetically proclaims that just as the Israelites were physically healed by looking in faith to the bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness, so sinners are spiritually saved and restored to life by looking in faith to Christ crucified, who bore the punishment for sin on the cross, thereby offering eternal life to all who trust in Him.

This sermon focused upon discipleship, setting it apart from most of the other sermons in this series. Yet, it continues in the same vein of falling short of challenging listeners and failing to press the necessity of discipleship.

This essay critically analyzes a Good Friday sermon from East Bendigo Presbyterian Church, commending its emphasis on Christ as the Passover Lamb and victorious King, while highlighting its significant theological deficiency in failing to adequately articulate the doctrine of sin from a God-ward perspective, thereby undermining the gospel's power and the urgency of the call to repentance.

The sermon Ballarat West Good Friday sermon suffers from confused theology of what the gospel is and fails to convey the necessity of the new birth, the forensic nature of Christ’s atonement, and the urgent summons to repentance and faith grounded in sovereign grace. The sermon closes with a decisionistic prayer instead.

This sermon powerfully proclaims Christ crucified, yet by diagnosing humanity's problem primarily as discontentment rather than covenantal rebellion and by underdeveloping the judgment that rests on unbelief, it unintentionally weakens the biblical urgency and necessity of the new birth.

Rev Gary Wentworth’s Good Friday sermon is formally orthodox, but its repeated use of undefined terms such as sin, ransom, life, death, belief, darkness, and Saviour demonstrates how vague evangelical language can blunt the experiential force of Scripture and obscure the sinner’s urgent need to be born again in Christ.

The sermon’s failure to read John 19 as a mock coronation exposing Adamic hatred of the true King leaves the necessity of the new birth functionally obscured.

This sermon is polished and emotionally effective, but theologically thin: it frames Good Friday as a slick rescue appeal while leaving out Genesis, Adam, covenant breach, the Father’s judgment, the Spirit’s regeneration, and how the dead can choose life.

This Good Friday sermon is doctrinally sound and warmly evangelistic, but it weakens its experiential force by failing to press the dreadful contrast between reconciliation in Christ and remaining spiritually dead, under wrath, and condemned apart from him.

Because this sermon is strong, clear, and genuinely Christ-centred, it rewards deeper theological reflection; its central refrain, “Jesus didn’t save himself to save us,” opens the way to consider Good Friday more fully as the decisive act of God in which sin is judged, righteousness vindicated, Christ’s obedience displayed, and the need for new birth exposed by the dawn of resurrection life.

This sermon’s greatest strength is that it reverently presents the torn curtain as blood-bought access to God, showing that sinners may call God Father only because the Son of God entered the darkness of judgment for them.

Despite strong doctrinal language about wrath, substitution, and forgiveness, the sermon structurally replaces Paul’s doctrine of humanity dead in Adam with the language of endangered sinners needing rescue, thereby undermining the absolute necessity of the new birth through union with Christ.

This Good Friday sermon approaches the judicial urgency of Luke 12–13 more closely than many Easter sermons, yet ultimately softens the passage’s apocalyptic warning of judgment, wrath, and the necessity of the new birth through the controlling framework of “sweet and sour” alienation and relational reconciliation.

While verbally affirming substitutionary atonement, the Surry Hills Good Friday sermon progressively weakens the necessity of the new birth through flattened hermeneutics, therapeutic homiletics, and a diminished theological anthropology that comforts sinners before bringing them beneath the terrifying holiness of God.

Though this Good Friday sermon retains a rare and commendable forensic doctrine of the cross, its measured and contemplative tone ultimately weakens the experiential force of sin, judgment, eternal consequence, and the necessity of the new birth.

Though this Good Friday sermon demonstrates unusual doctrinal awareness by connecting the slain Lamb of Book of Revelation to God’s glory in the Cross, it ultimately undermines the absolute necessity of the new birth through a semi-Pelagian doctrine of sin.

Using the imagery of the Old Testament burnt offering from Leviticus 1 and interpreted through Hebrews 10, the sermon presents Christ’s death on the Cross as the substitutionary sacrifice that bears God’s wrath and secures forgiveness for guilty sinners.

Though reverent and textually attentive, this sermon remains so event-centred and therapeutically framed that it subtly softens the covenant curse borne by Christ. Spiritual death in Adam, and the consequent necessity of the new birth remains obscured.