This sermon review looks at a recent sermon on Genesis 4–5 and argues that Christ is affirmed but also avoidable. The review shows how preaching that preserves alternative “standing places” renders Christ functionally optional, allowing Baal logic to take root not by denying Christ, but by making Him unnecessary.

Genesis 4 presents us with an uncomfortable reality. God looked with favour upon Abel, and then upon his offering. How could God accept Abel after the Fall? Abel is not presented as morally superior to Cain, yet God’s prior regard makes possible a form of worship that is also pleasing to Him. Divine acceptance does not arise from the offering; the offering arises in response to acceptance.

This essay argues that the Genesis 4 sermon preached at Woori Yallock Presbyterian Church displaced the text’s theological centre by elevating secondary themes of anger, motive, and forgiveness over covenantal acceptance. In doing so, it formed hearers to manage emotions rather than repent of their own possible unacceptable worship, presenting Christ as a moral healer instead of the mediator whose blood alone secures acceptance before a holy Judge.

This review examines a sermon on 2 Corinthians 5 by allowing the preacher’s own words to reveal how judgment is softened, sin minimised, and the atonement reduced to therapeutic sentiment. By imagining how John Knox might have responded, the critique highlights the sharp contrast between the apostolic gospel of divine holiness and new creation, and the considerably gentler message actually preached in the 21st century.

A recent sermon on Psalm 15 reframed a holiness psalm into a message about personal stability and integrity, omitting the biblical category of sin. This shift altered the entire theological landscape of the passage, turning Christ from Mediator into helper and reducing the gospel to moral uplift.

How do you cope with a preacher who consistently denies the revelation of God? This sermon by Rev Tony Archer ignores the revelation of Gen 3. Original sin, the cause of the wrath of God against natural Man is ignored. The offence to a Holy God caused by a created being rebelling against God, the Creator, is ignored. Instead we get an under qualified junior psychoanalyst's explanation of what we need to do to be happy.

Either set Christ before the people, or have a semblance of honesty and say you don’t know Him.

The Rev Dr Michael Jensen, achieved something rare: a eulogy that honoured the deceased without mythologising him, and a homily that gently introduced listeners to the person of Jesus Christ without tripping cultural alarms or alienating mourners.

This essay argues that a sermon which diminishes the gravity of sin inevitably diminishes the glory of Christ, replacing Paul’s God-centred hamartiology with therapeutic moralism. By tracing Romans 7 through its exegetical, historical, rhetorical, and doctrinal contours, the study demonstrates that only a sin-serious reading can restore the holiness of God, the necessity of substitution, and the eschatological cry of the redeemed.

Any sermon that ignores confessional or covenantal theology must begin and end with anthropology. It will inevitably drift into moralism or therapeutic religion. In short, we have here another prime example of Pastor Ruthless for the Gospel’s semi-Pelagian theology on display from a foundational text to the whole Bible.

Last week, Woori Yallock Presbyterian Church heard a sermon from its minister on Genesis 1. Creation in six days was declared, and that is where the theological content began and finished. A lot can be said about the deficiencies of this sermon, but let us look at something below most disturbing.