Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: touch, feel, sense of touch, tactile sense, tactility, contact, using one's hands, sensation, sense, suspicion, sneaking suspicion, notion, inkling, hunch, fancy, apprehension, presentiment, premonition, foreboding, love, care, affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth, warmness, emotion, sentiment, emotional state, compassion, sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling, understanding, concern, solicitude, solicitousness, tender-heartedness, brotherly love, sensibilities, sensitivities, self-esteem, ego, pride, opinion, belief, view, impression, intuition, instinct, estimation, guess, theory, hypothesis, thought, way of thinking, point of view, atmosphere, ambience, aura, air, mood, climate, character, overtone, undertone, tenor, spirit, quality, flavour, colour, aptitude, knack, flair, bent, talent, gift, skill, art, trick, faculty, ability, propensity, inclination, sensitive, warm, warm-hearted, tender, tender-hearted, caring, soft-hearted, sympathetic, compassionate, empathetic, responsive, receptive, intuitive, thoughtful

Antonyms: bad feeling, acrimony, animosity, animus, antagonism, antipathy, aversion, bitterness, detestation, disgust, dislike, disrelish, enmity, friction, grievances, grudges, hatred, hostility, loathing, malevolence, malice

Showing 2551 to 2575 of 3285 results

2551. The Exorcism of a Child Develops a Humble Model for Faith

Mark 9:14-32

Teach the Text

Grant R. Osborne

... with life. 3. Prayer unleashes power. It is prayer that turns faith into action. Failure in our Christian walk demands deeper and more consistent prayer lives. We cannot grow when we, like the disciples in this story, believe that we inherently possess the ability to triumph spiritually in this world. There can be no victory in self-serving pride. The message is clear: Jesus alone can accomplish great things in us, and our only proper response is to unleash his power through our prayer. In his Farewell ...

2552. The Model of Jesus for Discipleship Service, Not Self-Seeking

Mark 9:33-37, Mark 9:38-41, Mark 9:42-50

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Grant R. Osborne

... acknowledge our sin and take steps to effectively deal with it through prayer, accountability, and changes in lifestyle. Being the salt of the earth Science: In the making of ice cream with a hand-cranked ice-cream maker, salt is used because of its ability to lower the freezing temperature of water. When salt is poured on ice, it creates a mix that has a temperature nearing zero degrees Fahrenheit. Although the mixture is not solid like ice, it is actually colder and can easily freeze the ice-cream mixture ...

2553. Jesus Defines Himself as Lord in Contrast to the Leaders of Israel

Mark 12:41-44, Mark 12:35-40

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Grant R. Osborne

... all the men and women merely players,” people had compared the world to a stage and humans to actors. In a play the actors are performing for an audience, seeking to move the audience through motions and dialogue. The actors’ success depends upon the ability to meet the expectations of the audience. Imagine that all the world is a stage, but the only one in the audience is God. Rather than living for the approval of friends, neighbors, employers, spouses, parents, children, teachers, and so on, you are ...

2554. Peter Denies Jesus

Mark 14:66-72

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Grant R. Osborne

... was regarded by the common people (with the Baptist) as the “prophet like Moses” of Deuteronomy 18:15 and the Elijianic messianic forerunner of Malachi 3:1; 4:5–6. In Mark 14:72 we see a further aspect of Jesus’s prophetic work: his ability to foretell the future with detail. In fact, this episode is often used to discount the view of “open theism” that God (and Jesus) restrict their knowledge of future events to allow total human freedom to make decisions. Jesus knows and foretells not only ...

2555. Luke the Historian

Luke 1:1-4

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R.T. France

... insurrections in Acts 5:36–37 differs in sequence from Josephus’s account of the same events. Against this must be set the accuracy with which Acts reflects the changing political situations in different Roman provinces, as well as Luke’s extraordinary ability to use the right technical terms for the various local officials. On the other hand, some scholars emphasize Luke’s lack of “objectivity,” in that he writes as a Christian believer with the aim of commending the faith and its founder, and ...

2556. The Birth of God’s Son Announced

Luke 1:26-38

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R.T. France

... God the paradoxical combination of the divine and the human as a persistent feature of the Gospel stories and as the basis for the Christian doctrine of incarnation All these issues are important, both for Christians’ own doctrinal equipment and for their ability to deal with questions raised by others. They should be faced squarely and honestly. But at the same time, we must remember that Luke’s emphasis is not primarily on apologetic concerns but on the grandeur of the angel’s message. Illustrating ...

2557. The Boy Jesus in the Temple

Luke 2:41-52

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R.T. France

... . 2:47 amazed at his understanding and his answers. Jesus seems to have attracted attention, partly no doubt because of his age, but also because he knew what he was talking about. Luke’s words do not necessarily suggest supernatural knowledge, but rather an ability to contribute to debate in a way that belied his years. He is not portrayed as offering his own teaching, as he would do some twenty years later, but as asking questions and joining in discussion. Perhaps he was already trying out some of ...

2558. Sabbath in Capernaum

Luke 4:38-44, Luke 4:31-37

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R.T. France

... with the idea of demonic possession and sometimes tries to dismiss it as a primitive explanation for mental illness, but in the society in which Jesus lived, as in most of the non-Western world today, the reality of malign spirits and their ability to take possession of people was not doubted, and exorcism was a valued ministry of deliverance, practiced also by Jews outside the Christian movement (Matt. 12:27; Acts 19:13–16) and by some pagans. Among all the surviving records, however, there is ...

2559. Two Memorable Healings

Luke 5:17-26, Luke 5:12-16

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R.T. France

... the healer, a theme that was alluded to in 4:23 and spelled out in 4:40, and that will remain a prominent feature of his ministry throughout the time in Galilee and on the road to Jerusalem. In 4:40 we learned of Jesus’s ability to heal “various kinds of sickness,” and here that bald statement is filled out by a focus on two specific physical complaints. The first is particularly striking because of the deep-seated fear of “leprosy” and the belief that it was humanly incurable. In this section ...

2560. Hearing and Responding

Luke 8:19-21, Luke 8:16-18, Luke 8:1-15

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R.T. France

... So everyone is responsible for the way he or she responds to God’s message with faith and by living it out. But 8:10 raises the difficult question of whether some are in fact unable to respond; not everyone “has ears to hear” (8:8). If the ability to grasp “the secrets of the kingdom of God” is given only to some, can the others be blamed for their failure to grasp it? Does Jesus’s teaching in parables then merely confirm some in their unbelief, since they do not have the capacity to understand ...

2561. A Sick Woman and a Dead Girl

Luke 8:40-56

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R.T. France

... There are two main angles from which to approach these passages in a sermon or lesson, one focused on Jesus’s healing power (Christology) and the other focused on the faith of those seeking help. When dealing with the first, be sure to emphasize both (a) Jesus’s ability to heal and (b) his willingness to do so. Our God is both all-powerful and all-compassionate. If he were only the former, he would not care about our human needs. If he were only the latter, he would not be able to deliver us. Since he ...

2562. “Who Is This?”

Luke 9:10-17, Luke 9:1-9

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R.T. France

... concealed, or only a token amount was received) find no basis in the wording of the Gospel accounts. Here, as in the amazing catch of fish, the calming of the storm, and the resuscitation of the dead, is another striking example of Jesus’s ability to go beyond natural possibility in providing needed help. As the calming of the storm evoked echoes of the power of the creator God over the sea, so this incident recalls God’s supernatural provision of food in the wilderness. Another significant brick is ...

2563. Rejecting or Responding to Jesus

Luke 10:1-24

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R.T. France

... . This recalls the contrasts of the Magnificat (1:51–53). Paul develops this theme in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31. Spiritual perception does not depend on intellectual capacity or education; indeed, these are more likely to prove a hindrance to the ability to “receive the kingdom of God like a little child” (18:17). As in 8:10, insight comes from special revelation by God, not from natural cleverness. “These things” is left unspecified; the reference is presumably to spiritual truth, especially the ...

2564. “Love Your Neighbor”

Luke 10:25-37

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R.T. France

... We have to ask what a contemporization, what a modern equivalent to this passage might look like. He goes on to say that the first thing that comes to mind is helping someone whose car has broken down on the road. However, he also notes that he has no mechanical ability. Then he tells about the time when he and a friend were driving on a snow-packed road in Yellowstone Park, and their car spun off the road into a ditch. A man with a truck came along and hauled them back onto the road. “The road that Jesus ...

2565. The Risen Jesus Revealed

Luke 24:13-35

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R.T. France

... whole sequence up to and including the dramatic announcement by the women. 24:15 Jesus himself came up and walked along with them. While there are features of the risen Jesus in the Gospel accounts that differ from normal human experience (notably the ability to appear and disappear suddenly, even through closed doors), the principal impression is of a human body sufficiently unchanged (though restored after the horror of crucifixion) to be perceived as a normal human being (cf. John 20:15; 21:4). 24:16 ...

2566. The Story of Abraham versus the Story of Israel

Romans 4:1-25

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C. Marvin Pate

... get caricatured or treated too lightly. In fact, college students have had look-alike contests in which an award is given for the best Dark Knight costume. It would be good to arouse thoughtfulness about the reality of human evil and Christ’s ability to forgive. The Abrahamic Covenant versus the Mosaic Covenant Big Idea: Paul’s historical argument: Abraham was reckoned righteous before his circumcision (which in Judaism became the sign of the Mosaic law), so he is the father of all believers, apart from ...

2567. The Christian’s New Dominion: Dedicated to Righteousness

Romans 6:15-23

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C. Marvin Pate

... Martin Luther’s trenchant treatise against Erasmus, On the Bondage of the Will (1525), rejected Erasmus’s attempt to steer a middle way between Augustine’s emphasis on total depravity and Pelagius’s on free will—that is, that humans have the ability to turn toward or away from salvation. Luther wrote, “We neither accept nor approve that middle way. . . . We must therefore go all out and completely deny free choice, referring everything to God.”10 It does seem that Paul’s sentiments lie with ...

2568. Freedom from the Law through Christ, Enslavement to the Law through Adam

Romans 7:7-25, Romans 7:1-6

Teach the Text

C. Marvin Pate

... nature a slave to the law of sin,” a poignant description of Paul’s contemporary experience. The second interpretation is also contradicted by the sustained usage of the present tense in 7:14–25, not to mention Paul’s positive assessment elsewhere of his preconversion ability to keep the law (Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:6b). That leaves us with the first view. The only substantial disagreement that can be voiced against this understanding of the passage is that it seems to paint too negative a picture of the ...

2569. Wisdom and Foolishness

1 Corinthians 1:18--2:5

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Preben Vang

... People does not become a good Christian discipleship manual just because we add a scriptural proverb to each of the habits. The problem with the Corinthians was not that they did not “sound Christian” in their speech or lacked the ability to reinterpret their desires and find “spiritual” application. Rather, the problem was that in spite of eloquence and spiritual emphasis their behavior proved that their thinking was no more than a Christianized version of secular wisdom. The ground rules for ...

2570. Christian Maturity

1 Corinthians 3:1-23

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Preben Vang

... -empowered community where the presence of God’s wisdom is evident. Teaching the Text Christian maturity is often measured against criteria that have little or nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ. As a result, wealth and human leadership ability can place even infantile Christians in church leadership positions where they gain a personal following. The result can be an organization that, while called church, is devoid of a genuine testimony to the cross of Jesus Christ. 1. Infantile faith. To ...

2571. Separation of Faith and Life

1 Corinthians 5:1-13

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Preben Vang

... In Western societies especially, Bible-guided church discipline has all but disappeared. Many reasons for this can be given, some of which are rather obvious. The extreme focus on individualism and personal rights has seriously hampered a community’s ability to exercise spiritual authority. Misguided efforts from years gone by, where church discipline looked more like a pursuit of self-righteousness by the few than the pursuit of Christlikeness by the many, have made the very concept of church discipline ...

2572. Being Wronged versus Claiming One’s Right

1 Corinthians 6:1-11

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Preben Vang

... a court, the less fortunate would have no chance of a fair hearing. If two patrons of similar wealth (leaders of two different Christian house groups, for example) faced off in such a court, they would need to rely on their ability to publicly discredit their opponent in an attempt to bring dishonor to their paterfamilias (and church group). To Paul, this looked like the feud between two political ecclesiae, where friends, clients, and followers, regardless of the issue, became actively involved in shaming ...

2573. Personal Rights and Christian Testimony

1 Corinthians 9:1-27

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Preben Vang

... Corinthians boast of their rights; if Paul has any boast, it is in the disclaimer of his rights. Put differently, Paul’s boast is a nonboast. In a society where the right relationships and associations determined social and financial progress, the ability to claim (boast about) rights was a double-edged sword, a privilege that came with strings. The rights that free and wealthier Corinthians could claim were secured by a patron (ultimately Caesar in Rome), who in turn could demand loyalty (see “Grace ...

2574. Trust versus Self-Reliance

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

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Preben Vang

... From the earliest pages of Scripture, faith in God is described as a relational experience. It follows that Christian maturity expresses itself as eagerness to strengthen the relationship to God and as awareness of dependence on him—not as reliance on personal ability to accomplish God’s purpose. Teaching the Text 1. Paul’s proverbial statement, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!” (10:12), comes as both warning and encouragement. Self-reliance in faith can visit ...

2575. Imitation and Role Modeling

1 Corinthians 10:23--11:1, 1 Corinthians 10:14-22

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Preben Vang

... . The parallel structure of the command to “flee idolatry” with “flee from sexual immorality” in 6:18 brings a comprehensive quality to this text. I speak to sensible people. What Paul says should be obvious, and he relies on their ability to recognize it. Calling them phronimos (“discerning,” “thoughtful”; NIV: “sensible”) is a simple request for them to use their common sense. 10:16–17 The defining covenantal meal of the Christ community is the Lord’s Supper (11:23–26 ...

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