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 326 to 350 of 513 results

326. John 5:1-9

John 5:1-15

Sweet

Leonard Sweet

... waters but from a redeeming word of authority and power. Not surprisingly this sick man whom Jesus addresses doesn’t really “get it.” He seems to take Jesus’ question as a jibe: “Do you really want to be healed, or are you just lying around here to get sympathy?” The ill man carefully explains to Jesus why he had been unable to gain access to healing. It is because he has had no one to help him, no one to put him “into the pool when the water is stirred up” (v.7). The illness that he ...

327. Can you Hear “The Voice?”

John 5:1-15

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

328. But First...

Luke 9:57-62

Sermon

King Duncan

... a few years yet to go. G. Campbell Morgan refers to a traveler in the Middle East who was trying to enlist a young Arab man as his guide. The young Arab replied that he could not go because he had to bury his father. When the traveler expressed his sympathy, he learned that the young man’s father had not died, but that this was just an expression meaning that his father was getting up in years and he felt responsible for him. (3) Some of you can identify with that. Your parents, too, are aging. You feel ...

329. Work Like the Who?

Luke 16:1-15

Sermon

King Duncan

... sit around flogging himself saying, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” He didn’t spend all his time on his knees praying, “O Lord, please get me out of this.” Jesus was praising this man for getting into immediate action. Jesus had little sympathy for persons who always expected God to do things for them that they were perfectly capable of handling themselves. Jesus said, “For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.” Those are ...

330. Suffered under (Saint) Pontius Pilate

John 18:28-40

Sermon

David O. Bales

Christians Sunday by Sunday announce our collective memory of Pontius Pilate: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate.” By repeating this creed regularly, we agree with church tradition and we don’t wonder further about Pilate. We certainly have no sympathy for him. Pilate’s Jewish contemporaries had nothing good to say about him. Christians, especially on Good Friday, don’t let anyone forget our opinion of him. However, some early church traditions decided that Pilate was a believer and two churches ...

331. Ignite: Fight Fire with Fire

Acts 4:1-22

Sermon

James Merritt

... cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.’” (Acts 4:19-20, ESV) Peter and John had stated in one half of a sentence the one principle that ought to drive everything we do, especially when we are confronted by a world that has no sympathy for Christianity and no love for Jesus Christ. Here is the question that comes right out of verse 19, “What is right in the sight of God?” (Acts 4:19, ESV) President Harry Truman once said this, “The ultimate test of any presidential decision is not whether ...

332. The Runner

Romans 9:30--10:21

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... lead into prayer as the woman looked deeply into his eyes, holding his hand, and said with intensity, "Dr. Lee, I heard you preach . . ." With those words, she stopped breathing and went gently into eternity. As Dr. Lee departed the hospital, having shared in sympathy and prayer with the husband, he thought to himself, "She heard me preach. What did she hear?" Lots of people slip in and out of our weekend services without us knowing their personal situations. People from every walk of life in all types of ...

333. Prison Theology: Bait and Bail

Philippians 1:12-30

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... capitalists was originally created to demonstrate how detrimental reigning real estate and investment practices were to the middle classes. Well, nothing fails like success. As anyone knows who has ever played Monopoly on a rainy Saturday afternoon, there is little sympathy for the poor person who lands on "Boardwalk" with three hotels perched on its perimeter. Instead, the "land owner" crows with delight and takes all the cash from whomever rolled the dice badly. Instead of educating people about the ...

334. Shall We Waddle or Fly?

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

Sermon

King Duncan

... toe, so the church needs all its different parts to be what God has called us to be. You may remember a few years ago when Snoopy, the loveable beagle in the Peanuts cartoon, had his broken left leg. Hundreds of people wrote letters to Snoopy or sent sympathy cards. Snoopy himself philosophized about his plight one day while perched on top of his doghouse and looking at the huge white cast on his leg. “My body blames my foot for not being able to go places,” he says. “My foot says it was my head’s ...

335. Break A Leg

Illustration

Michael P. Green

... on one of her daily walks. Venturing in, she saw the shepherd seated on the ground with his flock around him. Nearby, on a pile of straw lay a single sheep, which seemed to be suffering. Looking closely, the woman saw that its leg was broken. Her sympathy went out to the suffering sheep, and she looked up inquiringly to the shepherd as she asked how it happened. “I broke it myself,” said the shepherd sadly and then explained. “Of all the sheep in my flock, this was the most wayward. It would not obey ...

336. Self-pity: The Devil's Comfort

Illustration

Michael P. Green

Self-pity weeps on the devil’s shoulder, turning to Satan for comfort. His invitation is: “Come unto me all you that are grieved, peeved, misused, and disgruntled, and I will spread on the sympathy. You will find me a never-failing source of the meanest attitudes and the most selfish sort of misery. At my altar you may feel free to fail and fall, and there to sigh and fret. There I will feed your soul on fears, and indulge your ego with envy ...

337. Peter Addresses the Crowd

Acts 2:14-41

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... we can never see (cf., e.g., 1 Cor. 12:14ff.; 1 Pet. 4:10). Wonders in the heaven above … blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood (vv. 19, 20): Nature is often represented in Scripture as expressing sympathy with the acts of God (e.g., Isa. 13:10, 13; 34:4, 5), and it is difficult to know in every case how literally such statements should be taken, though for the most part they are simply a means of drawing attention to God’s dealings with human ...

338. The Church Persecuted and Scattered

Acts 8:1b-3

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... pious Jews (e.g., 2:5), and such these men may have been. But on the whole, it seems more likely that they were Christians whose piety, like that of their Jewish counterparts, was expressed in terms of the law (cf. 22:12). Thus, they may have had little sympathy with Stephen’s views, but he was still their brother in Christ. It was a mark of the devout that they paid great attention to the proper burial of the dead, and of those who had died by execution no less than others. But though criminals should be ...

339. The Council at Jerusalem

Acts 15:1-21

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... in both Antioch and the cities of southern Galatia had raised again the whole question of Gentile admission or, more precisely, the terms on which they should be admitted. It was one thing to accept the occasional God-fearer into the church, someone already in sympathy with Jewish ways; it was quite another to welcome larger numbers of Gentiles who had no regard for the law and no intention of keeping it. The point of view of the Jewish Christians deserves our understanding. As far as most of them could ...

340. In Athens

Acts 17:16-34

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... appears from 18:5, did not arrive from Berea until Paul had gone to Corinth. He and Timothy arrived together, Timothy returning from this second visit to Macedonia. 17:17 Meanwhile, Paul’s first recourse was to the synagogue, where at least he would find some sympathy for the horror that he felt at the idolatry of these people and at the same time could share the gospel with his countrymen. The Jews were probably not numerous in Athens, but as usual their community provided him with a base from which to ...

341. Paul’s Arrival at Jerusalem

Acts 21:17-26

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... but their leisurely progress as their journey drew to an end and the presence of many visitors in the city (cf. v. 20), including a number of Jews from Asia, suggests that they did. On their arrival, they were welcomed by some of the brothers—perhaps those most in sympathy with Paul’s work. 21:18 The next day a more formal meeting was held with James, now clearly at the head of the church in Jerusalem, which he governed with the support of the elders (see note on 11:30 and 12:17). Paul had been worried ...

342. Before the Sanhedrin

Acts 22:30--23:11

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... The president of the council at this time was the high priest Ananias, not to be confused with the Annas of 4:6, but the son of Nebedeus, appointed to this office by Herod Agrippa II in A.D. 47 and dismissed in A.D. 58 or 59. His Roman sympathies kept him in office longer than most but made him an object of hatred to the Jewish nationalists. At the outbreak of the Jewish war against Rome in A.D. 66, he was murdered by the sicarii. By all accounts Ananias was a violent and unscrupulous man (he had not ...

343. The God of All Comfort

2 Corinthians 1:1-11

Understanding Series

James M. Scott

... his sufferings” and “the power of his resurrection” (Phil. 3:10). By comparing his own sufferings to those of Christ, Paul is able both to begin deflecting criticism of his apostleship, which his sufferings drew from his opponents, and to regain the sympathies of the Corinthians. When Paul characterizes the comfort (= deliverance) he has received from God as a comfort that overflows through Christ, this is based on the idea that God reveals himself in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the “God who ...

344. Melchizedek the Priest

Hebrews 7:1-10, Hebrews 7:11-28

Understanding Series

Donald A. Hagner

... the repetitive futility of the levitical cultus is immediately evident and telling. See G. Stählin, TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 381–84. 7:28 The “weakness” of the levitical priests is again stressed, as it was in 5:2. By contrast, Jesus is able to “feel sympathy for our weaknesses” because of his full humanity. Yet he did not know the weakness that stems from imperfection and sin. The oath (lit., “word of the oath”), a unique expression in the NT, refers of course to the argument that begins in v. 20 ...

345. The Legitimacy and Superiority of Christ’s Priesthood

Hebrews 7:11-28, Hebrews 7:1-10

Understanding Series

Donald A. Hagner

346. The Song of Deborah

Judges 5:1-31

Understanding Series

Cheryl A. Brown

... surely finding and dividing? She consoles herself with thoughts of the girls for the men, the beautifully embroidered garments for Sisera and for herself. If the picture of a mother waiting for her son who would never return home might evoke some degree of sympathy within us, the mother’s gleeful imagining of men raping Israelite women should stifle any such feelings. We could subtitle the Song of Deborah “A Tale of Two Mothers.” What began with “a mother in Israel” (v. 7) ends with a mother in ...

347. The Family of Abraham

1 Chronicles 1:28

Understanding Series

Louis C. Jonker

... of Esau, Seir, and Edom is therefore significant. The Chronicler provided an elaborate genealogy for this group (by quoting extensively from his source text in Gen. 36). However, Esau is still discussed before Isaac, which indicates that the Chronicler’s sympathy does not lie with Edom but rather with Isaac and Israel. One could perhaps say (with A. Siedlecki, “Foreigners, Warfare, and Judahite Identity in Chronicles,” in The Chronicler as Author [ed. M. P. Graham and S. L. McKenzie; Sheffield ...

348. David’s Victories

1 Chronicles 18:1-13

Understanding Series

Louis C. Jonker

... of, the Ammonites, who fought in coalition with the Arameans. The war is sparked off by a misunderstanding by the Ammonite nobles of the delegation David sent to the new Ammonite king, Hanun, after the latter’s father died. David wanted to express his sympathy in order to return in this way the kindness the deceased king had shown to him. The “nobles” interpret the visit of the delegation as an attempt to spy out the country and overthrow it. The delegation is therefore greatly humiliated by Hanun’s ...

349. The Israelites Confess their Sins

Nehemiah 9:1-37

Understanding Series

Leslie C. Allen

... the same dynamic way. As in Psalm 106:44 God “took note of their distress when he heard their cry,” so the postexilic community poignantly brought to the divine notice their hardship in terms of political and economic enslavement in order to elicit sympathy. They had no claim but God’s own proven quality of mercy that seasons justice. Additional Notes 9:1 For the literary background of ch. 9, see Williamson’s discussion in Ezra, Nehemiah, pp. 308–9. He has also suggested that the prayer originated ...

350. God Rejects Zedekiah’s Request

Jeremiah 21:1-14

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... Jeremiah 38:1 (which context indicates that he may have been from the royal house). As for the priest Zephaniah son of Maaseiah, he appears again in 29:25, 29, as well as in 37:3. In the light of the story in chapter 29, he may have had some sympathy toward the prophet. He is described as being taken prisoner by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar in 2 Kings 25:18 (compare Jer. 52:24). 21:5 When God himself announces that he will fight against his own people (I myself will fight against you), we have what might be ...

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