Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 3026 to 3050 of 3099 results

3026. Understanding What God Expects of Us

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Sermon

King Duncan

... of the kind of god God is. He served the law, not the Lord. And we Christians can be just as short-sighted and destructive if we don’t align our lives with the heart of Jesus. I like what Pastor Robert C. Roberts wrote on this subject. He said, “There’s something comfortable about reducing Christianity to a list of do’s and don’ts . . . you always know where you stand, and this helps reduce anxiety. (It) has the advantage that you don’t need wisdom. You don’t have to think subtly or ...

3027. The Green-Eyed Monster

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... from Shakespeare![1]In his plays, Shakespeare uses the phrase to warn of the dangers and power of envy and jealousy to ruin relationships. In the Renaissance period, artists, particularly painters, began to depict emotions and virtues of their subjects by employing various colors. For example, yellow tended to exhibit someone with an impatient temper, a volatile personality, while white represented peace or calm. Black tended toward melancholy, while red, the color of blood, was cheerful. The color blue ...

3028. Ordinary Sin

Luke 22:28-34, 54-60

Sermon

Will Willimon

... Eric Auerbach wrote, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, in which he contrasts the pictures of human beings in Roman and Greek classics with their depiction in the New Testament. In the classics, ''ordinary'' folk were almost invisible, unfit subjects for drama, ordinary people appearing in Greek tragedies only as buffoons. But in · Simon Peter, Auerbach finds a much richer depiction of what it means to be a person: [The story] takes place entirely among everyday men and women of ...

3029. Feed My Sheep

John 21:1-19

Sermon

Schuyler Rhodes

... death, but not for the things that improve and give life? Why? Why? Why? Ah. I am seeing a glimmer of recognition on faces around the room. You do know it, don’t you? It’s that cyclic sliding thing, where real issues are avoided, where talk is shifted and subjects changed. It’s a hazy twilight of untruth designed to befuddle and disempower, and we are up to our hips in it, in our personal lives, in our social lives and in our church. But wait, because there is a note of hope in all this. When I pick ...

3030. Preachers, All!

Acts 2:1-13, Acts 2:14-41, Acts 2:42-47

Sermon

Will Willimon

... of his mystery, words fail. How do we find the words to describe that being, that deep experience that is so often so indescribable? Furthermore, there are powerful forces against speaking about God. Years ago William Buckley said, ''You may be able to bring up the subject of religion at a fancy dinner party once, but if you bring it up twice during the evening, you won't be invited back." There are powerful tendencies in our culture to keep religion private, personal. We don't want to be showy, wear our ...

3031. Constant Companion

John 14:23-29

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... we need to pay more attention to our emotional, physical, and spiritual health. We don’t just need relationships. We need deep, meaningful, intimate relationships that matter, ones that make us know we matter. “Clinically, loneliness is defined as the subjective unpleasant or undesirable awareness of the lack of depth and/or quality in one’s interpersonal relationships or connections.”[2] We are grieving a lack of intimacy, a feeling of being known, truly known.[3] We need relationships that create ...

3032. Show Us the Father

John 14:8-17, 25-27

Sermon

Dave Zuchelli

... to the number of believers that day. With this newly imparted power, the fledgling church was off and running. In some miraculous way, the Holy Spirit had shown them the Father. For many reasons, the Holy Spirit of God has become a controversial subject for many in the Christian world. There are myriads of questions surrounding the advent of personal Pentecost in the lives of many believers. Ask these questions of anyone, and they’ll give you a different set of answers than the person before or after ...

3033. What's a Human Book?

Luke 13:10-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... the larger society . . . people who are the targets of prejudice or misunderstanding . . . people with disabilities . . . people from minority religions . . . people who had grown up in situations of abuse . . . people who had served time in prison. He referred to these subjects as human “books.” And he set up 30-minute question-and-answer sessions between these human “books” and members of the general public—anyone who wanted to learn about their lives. For example, in one Human Library session ...

3034. A VIP Seat

Luke 14:1-14

Sermon

King Duncan

... lit sparklers. The more attention they can draw to the VIPs, the more they can encourage them to spend. In an interview in Forbes magazine, Mears explains, “. . . the host loses a lot of wealth but gains recognition among his peers.” Some of Mears’ research subjects admitted to feelings of regret about spending so much money on parties to impress their peers. One VIP said, “It’s (crazy) . . . I mean, do you know how many people you could feed or give water to in Africa?” (1) It’s tempting to ...

3035. Overflowing Joy and Rich Generosity

2 Corinthians 8:7-15

Sermon

King Duncan

... work the other way. It should get easier to give as our wealth increases, but it does not. There is something about money that hardens us. As attractive and wonderful as money is, that is its nature. No wonder Jesus talked more about money than any other subject. No wonder he warned that we could not serve God and mammon too. So, you see, giving is a spiritual question. For some of us, our very souls are at stake. The second reason generous giving is critical to the devotional life of a Christian has to ...

3036. The Thing About Evil

Luke 8:26-39

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... s creation. And yet it is subordinate to God. Here is what we see Jesus showing us in no uncertain terms in today’s scripture. That no matter how perverse, damaging, insidious, and insistent evil may be, it cannot stand up to the power of God and will be subject to the authority of God. In the events told by Luke to us today, we see Jesus deliberately sailing across the Sea of Galilee (which is a lake of course) to the land of the Gerasenes, a non-Jewish, gentile territory. As soon as he emerged from the ...

3037. God So Loved

John 3:16-17

Sermon

Will Willimon

... , have gone astray,” cries the preacher. And the people in unison say, “You really stepped on our toes today, preacher.” What a wonderful Lenten litany. In my first little country church I did a questionnaire among the members asking them which subjects they would like to hear more about in sermons: Number One—sin; Number Two—hell; Number Three—the Last Judgment. "Why is the season of Lent bigger in American churches than the season of Easter?” asked a British professor, recently arrived in ...

3038. The Lawyer

Luke 10:25-37

Sermon

Dave Zuchelli

... The legal expert wasn’t about to let it rest at that, however. He quickly added his follow-up query about who his neighbor happened to be. This, in fact, may have been what he was getting to all along. The textbook wasn’t quite as clear on that subject. As he often did, Jesus responded by telling him a story. We know it as the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” As we all know, everyone loves a good story. The expert in question was probably a tad less thrilled than most, but he seems to have listened ...

3039. I Need

Luke 10:38-42

Sermon

Dave Zuchelli

... . I’m sure Jesus did it tactfully and lovingly. Yet, he told her in no uncertain terms that Mary was right. He reminded Martha that she was“worried and upset about many things” (Luke 10:41). That statement caused me to wonder as to whether he had taught on this subject while she was out of the room. He certainly had done it other times. In his Sermon on the Mount, he is recorded as saying, “Can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:27). I guess it pays to stay in the ...

3040. Shameless!

Luke 11:1-13

Sermon

Dave Zuchelli

... at midnight, he probably doesn’t get the bread. We cannot stop there, however. Jesus is not finished with his dissertation on prayer. The disciples haven’t heard everything he wants to say to them. There is one final piece of information he has to impart on that subject. And even though a lot of folks pass this part off as a little, extra add-on, it’s the most important bit of info he could give them as they approach their prayer life. In verses eleven and twelve, he asked them a couple of questions ...

3041. Lose the Cape

Romans 13:11-14

Sermon

Charley Reeb

... you never say that to anyone else. You will not come across in a positive manner.” She did not like that very well. She continued, “You preach on love too much. Where is the judgment? Where is the talk about sin?” I responded, “Well, I believe those subjects deserve study and attention, but last time I checked, Jesus said that the world will know we are his disciples if we have love for one another. And the Bible also says to let our let shine so we glorify our Father in heaven. He didn’t tell ...

3042. Inside Out

James 5:7-10

Sermon

Charley Reeb

... did for all of us. Your forgiving love will bring healing to you and perhaps healing to the one you are forgiving. Agape love is powerful and transforming. Leo Buscalgia was a famous writer and speaker who traveled around the world and talked about one important subject: love. When he finished speaking, there was usually a long line of people waiting to hug him. Buscalgia says that most of them were not waiting in line to talk to him, but to simply receive a hug. He said he would come across so many people ...

3043. Lesson from a Prosthetic Toe

Luke 17:5-10

Sermon

King Duncan

... to prove our faith. Instead, God plants His Spirit in our hearts and minds and grows us into a people who reflect God’s character. Pastor Duke Kwon leads Grace Meridian Hill congregation in Washington, DC. He recently wrote a meaningful reflection on this subject. He wrote, “We demand answers; God gives us wisdom. We demand ease; God gives us endurance. We demand certainty; God gives us faith. We demand a crown; God gives us a cross. We demand His gifts; God gives us Himself.” (6) The apostles don ...

3044. If It Had Been a Snake

John 1:29-42

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... missing something that is in plain view: If it had been a snake, it would have bit you. You shake your head and feel like a fool. But this experience of missing what is obvious is so common that it is even the subject of psychological studies. Alejandro Lleras is a professor of psychology who studies what he calls “inattentional blindness,” or the ability to miss something obvious. He believes that our brains have developed highly selective ways of scanning and sorting information. And this scanning and ...

3045. Finding Your Dream Job

Matthew 4:12-23

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... -candy officer?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter. 3. “20 Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Roles for the Most Bizarre Reasons” by Jesse October 6, 2020 Cracked.com https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-2125-20-actors-who-quit-iconic-roles-weirdest-reasons. 4. “The Meaning of Life is Subjective: Lessons from Intellectuals” by Thomas Oppong, Postal, June 5, 2020. 5. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2006, p. 46). 6. http://divineopportunity.com/tyler.

3046. What Power Fears Most

Matthew 2:13-23

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... brokenness of that time, the brokenness of the world that God sent his son, the Messiah into, a time when the dangerous power of the rich and politically armed could wipe out families in an instant if they didn’t do their will, a time when Israel lay subject not only to the forces of Rome but to their own cruel leaders who ate from Rome’s hands and grew drunk on its wine of prestige and power. How would God fight this perversion of power? With love. Unconditional love. The only thing that power can’t ...

3047. He's Not Dead Anymore

Matthew 28:1-10

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... was no reason to fear. As John 3:17 tells us, “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” In 2014, a woman named Therese Helker submitted an essay on the subject, “Love or fear: which motivates us more?” for a competition called The Great American Think-Off. She wrote about how her abusive father sent her and her siblings to live in separate orphanages after the death of their mother. Her childhood and teen years were painful ...

3048. The Challenge Of Simplicity

Matthew 5:1-12

Sermon

John Jamison

... find some historians who argue that Jesus did not speak the Beatitudes on a mountain or on a plain, but they were part of what Jesus said that day he sat on the boat and spoke to the crowds gathered on the shore. While these things make great subjects for seminary theology classes, it seems to me that most of the time they are just distractions. We debate back and forth about these questions and end up just glancing at what Jesus was actually saying that day. I really don’t think it matters where he said ...

3049. The Hedge

Matthew 5:21-37

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... listening to someone’s advice when we don’t like their answer to our question. We can avoid doing our chores, when we find something that we’d like to be doing more. We can avoid talking about issues we don’t want to address by changing the subject. We can create “loose” definitions of“truth” when we don’t quite want to follow what feels like a rigid or confining rule. When we don’t quite want to commit to something or to define something in or about our lives, this is what we do as ...

3050. Seeing is Believing…or Is It?

John 20:19-31

Sermon

Lori Wagner

Objectivity is the subject’s delusion that observation can be done without him. - Heinz von Foerster Seeing is believing. Or is it really? Can you be sure of what you’re seeing at any given time? Or what you have missed that was right in front of your eyes? Ever spend all morning looking ...

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