Noah and the Ark
On August 10, Pastor Dave marked his fortieth sermon at Providence Church by beginning a new message series titled Retold: The Sunday School Stories You Thought You Knew and the Gospel You Didn’t See Coming. The series invites the church to look deeper into familiar Old Testament stories—Noah and the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, David and Goliath, the fiery furnace, and Daniel in the lions’ den—not as isolated moral tales, but as scenes in one unfolding story pointing to Jesus. “When you care about someone,” he said, “you bring them a book, but when you love someone, you bring them the Author.” His prayer was that the congregation would not just hear a story but see Christ in it.
Opening with a story from his own high-school years, Pastor Dave described himself as “the king of last-minute homework management”—someone who did just enough to get by but never changed the underlying habits. It was a humorous confession that turned serious as he compared it to the way many of us live: managing problems instead of addressing them. We often carry stress, control issues, anger, or insecurity that we learn to contain rather than confront. The problem, he said, is that “you can’t manage it forever… eventually it leaks.” The heart of the sermon emerged in a single contrast: we try to manage our struggles; God wants to transform our story.
That truth framed how the congregation approached Genesis 6. Reading the account of the flood, Pastor Dave explained that the corruption and violence of the earth was not a small mistake but a “cosmic crisis,” a total breakdown of creation under the weight of sin. God’s decision to send the flood was not arbitrary or cruel; it was an act of both justice and love. “God takes sin seriously,” he emphasized. Divine judgment was not for destruction’s sake but to clear the way for redemption. God’s justice and mercy always work together, “aiming to save, restore, and bring life.”
To illustrate, he described the command to Noah to build an ark as a lifeline, not a punishment. Even within judgment, God provided a way of rescue. But Pastor Dave pointed out that the flood could not erase the problem. “Sin still lived inside the ark with Noah and his family.” The moment Noah planted a vineyard and became drunk after the flood, Scripture reminded us that the human heart was still broken. The flood cleaned the earth, but it couldn’t cleanse the heart. “The flood came,” he said, “but sin still floated.”
That insight led to the gospel connection at the center of the message. No number of “arks”—our routines, coping mechanisms, or attempts at control—can fix what is wrong inside us. Only Jesus can. The flood, he said, was a comma in the story of redemption, not the period. It pointed forward to another storm—the storm of God’s wrath that Jesus bore on the cross. When Christ declared “It is finished,” He became the true and final Ark. Pastor Dave explained how the Greek word tetelestai carried meanings from business, law, and warfare: the debt paid in full, the sentence served in full, the battle fully won. “That’s the real ark,” he said, “not wood and pitch on a stormy sea, but Jesus, God’s own Son, who came to carry us through the flood of sin and death once and for all.”
The sermon’s close turned tender and invitational. Some, he said, had been “standing in the rain for a long time,” pretending it was just a drizzle while shame and anxiety kept rising around them. “Noah didn’t survive because he was a great swimmer,” he reminded them. “He survived because he stepped into what God had already built. And here’s the thing—Jesus has already built your ark.” To step into that ark meant trusting the finished work of Christ: laying down self-reliance and stepping into grace.
He ended by calling the congregation to that step—to stop merely managing sin and start surrendering it—to let the cross be the final word over guilt and fear. His prayer summed up the message’s heart: thanksgiving for Jesus as “our Ark, our Rescue, our Refuge,” and a plea for God to keep His people in grace “until the day we stand on new ground with You forever.”
