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 2701 to 2725 of 4653 results

2701. ONE SHRED OF SOUL

Drama

Angela Akers

... ? I can get the pastor for you." Don: "The pastor? No, no, that''s okay. I was just looking around." Custodian: "Well, if you need anything, my office is over there. Nice to have you here." Don: "Thanks." (Custodian exits. Don speaks facetiously with a touch of bitterness.) " Nice to have you here.'' Oh, yeah, I''m sure they''d love to have me here if they knew me. I''d fit in just GREAT here." (He kneels down in front of a pew.) "I guess this is how you do ...

2702. HOW DO YOU KNOW JESUS?

Drama

Angela Akers

... get so smart about God? Did you learn that in preacher school? Or maybe you''ve actually seen Jesus yourself!" Pastor: "Yes, I have." Jean: "In your dreams!" Pastor: "No, in your face." (Jean is shocked by her words and involuntarily reaches up and touches her own face.) Pastor: "You''re a child of God, Jean, whether you realize it or not. Don''t let anyone tell you differently. Will you come with me to the church hotel?" Jean: "Maybe...I''ll give it a shot." (Jean picks up ...

2703. SOMEONE TO REMEMBER

Drama

Angela Akers

... : (indicating the bulletin) "Doesn''t seem fair. What about the rest of these people?" Mother: "I''ve never heard of them." Daughter: "I wonder if they have people here who remember them." Mother: "Some do, I''m certain. Through the years nearly every family is touched in some way by war." Daughter: "That''s so awful. At least we can do our part to see that they are remembered. We can also make sure that our land stays free so their deaths will not be in vain." Mother: "There''s one thing ...

2704. Who Is Jesus Christ?

John 14:5-14

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... list of rules for recognizing a genuine god who visits the earth. He will not sweat, no matter how hot it is; he won’t cast a shadow, however bright the sun; and if you look closely, you will see that the soles of his feet do not touch the ground. Obviously, that is a far cry from the Jesus we meet in the Gospels! Still, there arose in the early Church certain teachings which claimed that Jesus never really became a human being. He never hungered, or thirsted, grew weary, tired, or suffered. Against these ...

2705. What on Earth Is the Trinity?

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... large. Not as large as the first circle, but large. Then there is the third group, the Inner Circle. These are the people - and every congregation is blessed with some of them - for whom religion is a reality and not merely a ritual. They are in touch with the deep resources of the Christian Faith. They know what it is to have a personal relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Now that term Inner Circle sounds pretty snobbish, doesnt it? It sounds rather elitist. But do you know what? God ...

2706. What the Heck Is Sin?

Luke 15:11-32

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... in the first place. He told it because he was being criticized for receiving sinners. He told his critics that there was more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. This may well be a touch of irony, for Jesus may have intended us to understand that there are no righteous persons who do not need repentance. Remember that satellite I told you about last week which flies over the earth and beeps whenever it passes over the head of a righteous ...

2707. Through the Eyes of an Eagle (Introduction)

John 20:24-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... overly spiritual people who believed that matter was evil and that only the spiritual was good (in contrast to the Creation stories in the Bible where God says that Creation is good). The Gnostics believed that God could never have gotten His hands dirty by touching something as grubby as matter, and so they believed that God did not create this world. Instead, God sent forth a series of “emanations”...and the one farthest away from Him created this nasty old world. Now, you can see why John begins his ...

2708. Jesus: The Life of the Party

John 2:1-11

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... everything else, God says simply, "It is good." Was Jesus married? As I say, I don't really care which way you vote on the question, but we must always beware of the heresy of "Docetism" which insisted that Jesus only "seemed" to be human; He never really touched the same earth upon which you and I live. On the contrary, orthodox Christian theology has always said that He was really and truly a human being. For my own part, I have an idea that Jesus was invited to the wedding party at Cana in Galilee simply ...

2709. How Do You Explain the Resurrection?

John 11:17-37

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... history of the Church over the past two thousand years is but a commentary on Jesus’ words, “I am the resurrection and the life!” (John 11:25) Let’s take a look at how these words first came to be spoken. In John 11 we have the touching story of the miraculous raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus from the dead. Many details of the story are puzzling to us, and some scholars are not even sure whether the author intends for us to take it as a literal historical event, but whatever our conclusion may be ...

2710. So Who Needs A Shepherd?

John 10:1-21

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... prostitutes to support his drug habit, wrote a poem called “The Hound of Heaven.” The poem was about God, and God’s unremitting love. Everyone else had written Francis Thompson off. Everyone but God. In the depths of his darkness and despair, God met him and touched his life. Out of that experience he wrote his famous poem about the God whose love will never let us go, the God who is out on every highway where people get themselves lost, seeking to bring them back home. God is not seeking to inhibit ...

2711. It’s Hard to Eat While Lying

John 13:18-30

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... too often like him. We lie to God with our lips and with our lives. One of the best place for doing such lying is in church. We sing, “Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee,” and then make doubly sure that He doesn’t touch our lives and leaves us alone. We lie to God in our church membership vows, our marriage vows, and in so many different ways. I imagine that Judas once said similar words to Jesus: “Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee.” But then something happened ...

2712. The Shy Member of the Trinity

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... foggy perceptions of the Holy Spirit. That’s the way it is supposed to be! There is a sense in which the Holy Spirit must always remain in hiding, must always be beyond our human understanding, must always be the mysterious hidden power through whom we touch the deepest recesses of our faith. The Fourth Gospel insists that the Holy Spirit never draws attention to Himself, but always points to Jesus Christ. “He will glorify me,” said the Lord, “because he will take what is mine and declare it to you ...

2713. The War of Malchus’ Ear

John 18:1-11

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... by the question put to Jesus “by those who were about him,” asking, “Lord, should we strike with the sword?” One of them strikes the slave of the high priest and cuts off his right ear. But Jesus says, “No more of this!” (Luke 22:51) and He touches the unfortunate man’s ear and heals it! (Remember: St. Luke was a physician, so he ought to know.) But it is only in John’s Gospel that the wielder of the sword is identified as the impulsive Simon Peter, and the slave is identified as a man named ...

2714. The Huddle Is Not the Game

John 20:19-23

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... of the time was spent in the huddle. And so it is not hard to see why the world doesn’t pay very much attention to what the Church does; for we seem to spend most of our time in the huddle. Nothing that the Church does seems to touch the real world very much. There is an old criticism of the Church which goes: “They’re praising God on Sunday, they’ll forget about it Monday; it’s just a little habit they’ve acquired!” Interestingly enough, one of the first Methodist hymnbooks had a section of ...

2715. Who Counted the Fish?

John 21:1-14, John 21:15-25

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... fellowship with the risen Lord! When the disciples finally arrived on shore, they found Jesus tending a charcoal fire, with fish on it, and bread, and He invites them to have breakfast with Him. Can you picture it? Why all these little personal touches? Well, one of the purposes of the writer of the Fourth Gospel was to refute a very popular “heresy” of those early days (“heresy” means a misunderstanding of the faith) - in this case, the heresy of “gnosticism” which asserted that Jesus never had ...

2716. On Panicking Close to Shore

John 6:16-24

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... - and especially in the Fourth Gospel - Jesus’ unique claim to divinity. He was the One who could use the Divine Name. In Him we see the divine character revealed. As E. Stanley Jones once said in a book titled Christ at the Round Table: Jesus changes everything he touches. Call him a man, and you will have to change your ideas of what a man is; call him God and you will have to change your idea of what God is. You can transfer every quality of Jesus into God without the slightest sense of blasphemy. (p ...

2717. Good Old What’s-His-Name

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... world is only one generation from paganism. If we, and others like us, do not care enough about the Gospel to tell it to those who come after us, there will soon be no gospel to teach. That’s the way God usually works: through persons whose lives touch other persons. When God wanted the Gentile world to hear the good news, he sent the apostle Paul. When God wanted a Reformation in the Church, He sent Martin Luther. When He wanted a revival in the Church of England, He sent John Wesley. Perhaps God is just ...

2718. The Thirteenth Apostle

Acts 9:1-19a

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Now, about sexuality. Here we really have a can of worms. Sometimes Paul sounds like a “misogynist,” which my dictionary defines as “a person who hates women.” He even seems to suggest that men ought not to touch women as they might become soiled by such contact. But a careful reading indicates that he prefers celibacy, not because women are dirty, but because he believed (at first) that the end of the world was just around the corner, and why should anyone become ...

2719. Secretary to Saint Peter

Mark 1:1-8

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... the other Gospels miss. Both Matthew and Mark tell of Jesus taking a little child and setting him in the midst. But Mark tells us that Jesus took the child up into his arms. (Mark 10:13-16) All the tenderness of Jesus comes through in these little touches. When Mark is telling about the feeding of the Five Thousand, he alone tells us that they sat down in rows of hundreds and fifties, and how they looked like vegetable beds in a garden. (6:4) When the disciples were on that last journey to Jerusalem, only ...

2720. Wining and Dining with Jesus

Mark 2:18-22

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... sign of breaking down barriers, offering forgiveness and love. II. When criticized for His dinner companions, Jesus said, “THOSE WHO ARE WELL HAVE NO NEED OF A PHYSICIAN, BUT THOSE WHO ARE SICK.” (Mark 2:17) I’ve always wondered whether there was not a touch of sarcasm in Jesus’ words. Perhaps the sickest of all are the people who imagine that they are well. In Jesus’ day in the Holy Land a clear distinction was made between people who were called “the People of the Land” and the “People of ...

2721. Afraid of Sanity

Mark 5:1-20

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... , p. 6) This is sanity? In one of the earliest Laurel and Hardy films, Big Business (1927), Stan and Ollie are Christmas-tree salesmen in California, going from house to house in a Model T truck loaded with trees. The story begins innocently enough, with a touch of Christmas spirit and good cheer. Before long, however, they come to the door of a homeowner with a somewhat salty disposition who had just settled down in his easy chair with pipe, paper, and slippers. he is not interested in a tree. Fair enough ...

2722. On Getting the Gospel Out

Mark 6:7-13

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... Gospel. Jesus called us the “salt of the earth.” The proverbial child in Sunday School was asked if she knew what that meant. She replied: “All I know is that salt makes me thirsty.” Just so; we are supposed to be persons whose lives have been touched by Christ in such a way that people, seeing us, will be thirsty to know our Saviour. Martin Luther suggested that we, as Christians, are called to “be Christ to our neighbors.” As the poem puts it, “You (may be) the only Bible the careless world ...

2723. When Tradition Gets in the Way

Mark 7:1-23

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... .” We have cut ourselves off from our roots in so many ways, that there is a real danger that we become a rootless and fruitless generation. Novelist John O’Hara once defined America as “a country that has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.” That’s not a bad description of us. We have been able to put a man on the moon, but have not made significant progress toward ensuring that mankind will remain here on the earth without burning or blowing itself up. Cut off ...

2724. On Being the Greatest

Mark 9:33-37

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... be the greatest theological thinker of our age, Barth disclaimed any such honorific title, asserting that, in God’s scheme of things, the little lady who came to clean up his office when he left for home at the end of the day may well be closer in touch with the eternal reality of God than he was, for all of his massive volumes of writing. He said that when he approached the Pearly Gates, St. Peter would say of him: “Here comes old Karl with his pushcart full of books...” But they would not gain him ...

2725. Knight of the Woeful Countenance

Mark 10:17-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... . And Jesus doesn’t denounce him for being wealthy. Wealth, by itself is neutral. It is neither good or bad; it all depends upon the use to which it is put. Jesus does not frown upon him and his riches, but rather, says Mark, in a touching sentence Jesus LOVES him. He loves the man whose primary love is for his possessions. (That’s a fascinating twist!) This fellow was a fine, decent, upstanding individual. (Just ask him). No wonder he was amazed when Jesus told him that there was one thing that ...

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