Sermon and Worship Resources

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Showing 2926 to 2950 of 4963 results

2926. Great Reasons for Great Giving

2 Corinthians 8:1-15

Sermon

Edward Inabinet

... are always recipients and never givers. Billy Graham is reported to have received the following letter: "I admire you very much. I want to help in your worldwide crusade and am enclosing my check for $100. The reason I am not signing it is because I want to remain anonymous." The sender of that unsigned check doesn''t know it, but he cheated not only Graham, not only God, but most of all he cheated himself. There is joy in giving. A FINAL REASON FOR GREAT GIVING IS TO PROVE OUR LOVE TO THE LORD. In verses ...

2927. Why Cheerful Givers are Cheerful

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

Sermon

Edward Inabinet

... others. It is like a story that comes to us out of the old west. An old prospector was thirsty for a drink, but couldn''t find water, until he came to an abandoned well. There he found a pump and proceeded to pump with all the strength he had remaining. No water came forth. Then he saw a small jug with a cork at the top and a penciled note, directing that the water in the jug be poured into the pump to prime it. At first the thirsty man questioned this. What if the writer of the note had ...

2928. FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH

Revelation 1:1-3

Eulogy

Edward Inabinet

... . The dead are lying in the background. Others are falling to the pavement amid the red hot eruptions of Vesuvius. Everyone who can is fleeing for his life. The Roman guard might have made his escape, too, but there he stands like a marble statue, preferring to remain at his post, faithful unto death. That is the kind of faithfulness that wins the believer the crown of life. It is not salvation by works. It is, rather, reward for a job well done. Christ makes this promise to those who are willing to make a ...

2929. Things That Cannot be Taken Away

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Sermon

Edward Inabinet

... flash before us out of life''s dark night, As stars shine most in deeper tints of blue: And we shall see how all God''s plans were right, And what most seemed reproof was love most true." * LIFE IS TRANSIENT, OUR KNOWLEDGE IS FINITE, BUT SOME ETERNAL THINGS REMAIN; AND THEY ARE ANCHORS FOR OUR SOUL IN THE STORMS OF LIFE. One anchor is faith. In this hour more than any other we are called to live by faith. Faith is simply trusting in Christ and his saving and keeping power. It is by putting our lives in his ...

2930. A Way Made Ready

Mark 1:1-8

Sermon

Darrick Acre

... entangles.” The second category is sin. John the Baptist’s preaching, with its call to repentance, focused more on this second emphasis. Scripture is clear here: we will never receive Christ in the fullness of His coming when we entertain sin, remaining entangled in its web. We must turn away from envy, selfishness, unforgiveness, disobedience, promiscuity, and every other act that violates the Creator’s intent that we love Him and love others with all we are. All the wondrous things the Scriptures ...

2931. Believing Isn’t Easy

Hebrews 11:1-40

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... I have a hunch that there are millions like him in our world. They would like to believe...but feel that they cannot. Another recent writer connected this with his own reflection on a Kalamazoo woman killed in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The remains of her two-month-old-baby had not yet been found. He wrote: Two months old. Had she been breast-feeding the baby? Were the grandparents waiting at the airport in Kalamazoo when word came of the disaster? Where was the baby’s father? Where was ...

2932. Father? Almighty?

John 14:5-14

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... there be silence—nothing but the boom of the waves and the whisper of the wind in the heather? He decided to risk it. “I made my cry,” he said. “Who goes there? And I got my answer. I have sometimes doubted it, have never fully understood it, but it remains. If I lost it I think I would lose my soul. I have been trying to say it ever since. One word: God. I stood that night in the presence of God.” (Ibid. p. 11-12) So do we all. So do we all. Amen.

2933. Christmas and the Condensed Bible

John 1:1-18

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... they could continue their journey, because they saw the cloud as a symbol of God leading them. But if they saw the cloud at night, it appeared as a fire, and they would not go forward because they interpreted that to mean that God wanted them to remain where they were. God met them in their special Tent of Meeting. God in very fact pitched a tent among them. The astonishing good news which caused the angels of heaven to leave their choir practice and put on a special performance that first Christmas is that ...

2934. Jesus and the Divorced Evangelist

John 4:1-26

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... and did what many conquering nations did in those days: transported many of the people and most of their leaders into foreign lands (Cf. II Kings 17:6). Then they settled other people in the area, so that Jews were in the minority. After awhile these remaining people began to intermarry with the foreign newcomers, which to the pious Jew of the day was tantamount to the unpardonable sin. It diluted the racial purity of the people, and caused many of the Jews in Judea to stop considering the people of Samaria ...

2935. To Who Can We Go?

John 6:60-71

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... where Bunyan preached when he wasn’t in jail for his nonconformist opinions. In Pilgrim’s Progress there is a scene where Christian and his friend Hopeful are within sight of the Celestial City and the end of their long and arduous journey. Just one obstacle remains. They must cross a deep and threatening river, and there is no bridge. They must swim across. Christian is filled with fear and apprehension, and tries to find another way. But there is none. If he is to get to the Celestial City, the river ...

2936. The Devil Is a Liar

John 8:42-47

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... of their marriage covenant with God. Jesus’ audience seems to have forgotten that message of their own prophets. They proudly proclaimed that they were not the children of any such adulterous union; they did not belong to a nation of idolaters, but had always remained faithful to their covenant, had always worshipped the one true God, and Him alone. That was an astounding claim to make in light of their history as it was recorded in their own sacred Scriptures! It was akin to the preposterous claim that ...

2937. Lazarus Laughed

John 11:17-37

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... at all, then the raising of Lazarus occurred forty days before Jesus’ own crucifixion, and from that time forward Jesus was a marked man. This would explain a couple of puzzling things in the Gospel record. For one thing, scholars have wondered why Jesus chose to remain in Perea two days after He had heard the news of Lazarus’ illness. Certainly it was not, as some have suggested, to heighten the miraculous quality of what He was about to do, or to test the faith of His dearest friends. I cannot believe ...

2938. The Shy Member of the Trinity

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... words, does not focus on the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit focuses on Christ. That is why we have such 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 ...

2939. The War of Malchus’ Ear

John 18:1-11

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... History of the English-speaking Peoples, Sir Winston Churchill wrote of this event: “Jenkins’ ear caught the popular imagination and became the symbol of agitation. Whether it was in fact his own ear or whether he had lost it in a seaport brawl remains uncertain, but the power of this shriveled object was immense.” (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1957, Vol III, p. 121.) People began to talk about the honor of England and the great traditions of Elizabeth and Cromwell, and before long Sir Robert Walpole ...

2940. Slippery Rock

Matthew 16:21-28

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... to do. There was sickness and sorrow and sin down there in the marketplace, and so Jesus called His students down from the mountain to meet it. One day Jesus told His students, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt doesn’t do anybody much good if it remains in the salt shaker. It has got to get out and get sprinkled around a bit. Someone fond of football analogies once described what we do in church on Sunday morning as being akin to the “huddle” in a football game. My reaction was to say that isn ...

2941. It Costs to Belong

Mark 10:35-45

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... and, passing through the straits, came to Iria Flavia (today, Padron) in the province of Galicia. There a heathen queen, Lupa, was converted by the miracles attending the arrival of the apostle’s body and subsequently built a magnificent church over his remains. Much later, after the body was supposedly stolen, then recovered, then lost, it was found in the ninth century and taken by King Alphonso to Compostella, where, it is said, it still lies. Indeed, the name Compostella is a corruption of either ...

2942. The Thirteenth Apostle

Acts 9:1-19a

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

At the end of the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, there is a curious story of how the eleven remaining apostles filled the vacancy in the band of the Twelve left by Judas’ suicide. The record says that the choice came down to two: a man named “Joseph, called Barsabas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias. And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he ...

2943. Secretary to Saint Peter

Mark 1:1-8

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... Gospel cannot have been meant to stop there—for they were afraid. That is no place to stop. What happened? It may be that Mark died, perhaps as a martyr, before he could complete the Gospel. More likely, at one time only one copy of the Gospel remained and the ending got torn off mid-sentence.There was a time when the church did not use Mark very much. It may be that they preferred the other Gospels which are fuller and more complete, and they looked with disdain on this incomplete scroll with the torn ...

2944. Family Reunion

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... I saw a few years back. It showed two little ladies; one sitting in a rocking chair, the other standing behind the chair. Both were dressed in black with little lace collars around their necks. Their distinction was this: They are the only two remaining members of a religious group called the “Shakers.” Shakers do not believe in marriage and families, and groups which do not marry and have families (like the first-century Essenes) tend to die out! When these two little ladies die, the group will no ...

2945. Only a Carpenter

Mark 6:1-6

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... church where the pastor listed the hymns and after each one noted whether they were to be sung standing or seated. One of his hymns came out one Sunday: “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me,” seated. Most of us are quite content to let Jesus pilot us...providing we can remains seated. As long as it doesn’t cost us too much, inconvenience us too much, then we are quite willing to be His followers, His family. But the minute a cross rears its ugly head, and we are asked to make a sacrifice for our faith, like Jesus ...

2946. When Tradition Gets in the Way

Mark 7:1-23

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... 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 from our roots, we keep having to re-invent the wheel. George Santayana’s oft-quoted words seem to be true: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it ...

2947. Dealing with Our Doubts

Mark 9:14-32

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... anything we can avoid believing, granting we have given it entire freedom to convince us.” Those are very important words. We have no right believing anything we can avoid believing! William Lyon Phelps of Yale wrote in his autobiography: “My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.” Some of us have been through that battle, also. We have come to faith only after a long struggle with doubt. Harry Emerson Fosdick once preached a ...

2948. The Lord Has Need

Mark 11:1-11

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... . Why, I wonder? Here is this big, burly Carpenter who had walked on foot all the way from Galilee in the north, down along the east bank of the Jordan through Perea, who now stops within sight of the Holy City to borrow a donkey for the remaining two-mile journey. Why? Because riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was a Messianic statement. Nowhere does Jesus say out and out, “I am the Messiah.” He did not use the title because people had so many different notions - most of them wrong - of what the Messiah ...

2949. Jesus and the IRS

Mark 12:13-17

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... , WE MUST UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION AT THE TIME OF JESUS. When Herod the “Great” died in 4 B.C., he was ruler of all of Palestine, albeit a puppet ruler under the domination of Rome. When he died he gave his kingdom to his three (remaining) sons: To Herod Antipas he gave Galilee and Perea. To Herod Philip he gave the wild northeast district around Caesarea Philippi. To Archelaus he gave southern Palestine, including Judea and Samaria. But Archelaus was a total washout as a king. The result was that in ...

2950. Opposite the Treasury

Mark 12:41-44

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... ’T HE? He Himself was the greatest Giver of them all! The event which Mark describes in such graphic detail is one of the last in Jesus’ public ministry; only the Temple discourse in Chapter 13 and the passion narrative in Chapters 14-15 remain. What difference does that make? It means that Jesus’ words on this occasion were uttered in the shadow of the cross. They are actually an overture to His passion and death. The woman’s action is praiseworthy because out of her poverty and without reservation ...

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