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?

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.