Sermon and Worship Resources

Antonyms: keep, claim, continue, stick by, self-control, power through, achieve, defend, bear, hope, acquire, quick visit, adopt, continue along, adhere, remain, pursue, support, take up, keep up, reuse, advocate, stay, persevere, cherish, keep going, carry on

Showing 3501 to 3525 of 5000 results

3501. God, Help Us to Laugh

Sermon

Harold Warlick

Each of us is a partial mirror of our childhood. The things we saw grownups do when we were children give us our clues as to how to handle life. In fact, most of our expressions and attitudes toward church date back to our childhood. This past week I attempted to uncover my own childhood experiences and lay bare the initial and most reaching elements of that period in church. Without a doubt, my memory returned to one awareness: the tremendous sadness of the adults or "big people." I would look around and ...

3502. How To Be A Saint In A Storm

Acts 27:13-26

Sermon

Barbara Brokhoff

How do you act in a storm? A friend, who is terribly afraid to fly, was invited to speak at a special gathering of the religious body of which he was a part, in Frankfurt, Germany. As he approached the airport in New York a terrific storm was taking place. He dreaded the trip, and now that the storm increased in velocity, he was sure that the flight would be cancelled. He continued to think this, even as he approached the ticket desk, and finally was ushered aboard his plane. He began to think seriously ...

3503. The Most Misunderstood Gift

Acts 2:1-13

Sermon

Barbara Brokhoff

There is no doubt - the most misunderstood God of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. There is also no doubt - the most misunderstood gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of speaking in tongues. Nearly every Christian has already chosen his "side" regarding the speaking in tongues. Few people are neutral on the subject - most are either "anti-tongues" or "pro-tongues." Not everybody even wants to hear the pros and cons. They remind you of the woman who said to her husband, during a discussion: "Don’t confuse me ...

3504. When Love Runs Out of Breath

Matthew 22:34-40

Sermon

Barbara Brokhoff

The usher, showing me the way to the pastor’s study, wore a big, bright, round button on his lapel which read: "I love you - Is that O.K.?" I didn’t know him, he only knew that I was the visiting preacher in the pulpit that day, so, after re-reading his button, I said; "Yes, I think it’s O.K." His reaction was immediate: he ducked his head, blushed to his ears, and in a choked voice said: "Ah, oh, uh, well, that’s good." Why would anybody wear a button that said that to everybody? "Easy love" - we say we ...

3505. The Little Miracle Before The Big One

Luke 22:47-53

Sermon

Barbara Brokhoff

If you were a Miracle-Worker, and you had one final miracle to perform before dying, what would you choose as a big, never-to-be-forgotten climax? Suppose you had already done such things as calm a storm at sea, multiply five loaves and two fishes into enough food to feed 5,000 people, walked on water, opened blind eyes, caused the dumb to speak, the lame to walk, and the deaf to hear, turned water into wine, and even raised the dead - now you are about to do one more miracle before you die - what would it ...

3506. For Those in Church: Joy and Service

Matthew 23:1-39

Sermon

Jerry L. Schmalemberger

Matthew 23:1-12 is a good checklist for our practice of religion. So many sermons are appropriate for all those Christians who are not there in church to hear them. This Gospel story and these comments are written especially for those who come to church - those of us who consider ourselves the faithful. Jesus spoke these words to his disciples. They are about the pillars of the church in his day - the scribes and Pharisees. Rather then spend our time today giving thunder to the scribes and Pharisees (as ...

3507. The Unemployed Embalmers

Sermon

Louis H. Valbracht

Renan, the French Skeptic, scathingly quipped that the Christian faith was built on the body of a dead Jew. He was right, at least as far as the first resurrection morn. It’s a strange anachronism that we customarily have Sunrise Services on Easter morning, and shake our sanctuaries with the sound of victorious alleluias. Very conveniently we’ve twisted the facts. Those who appeared on the first Easter were, they were sure, dealing with nothing but the body of a dead Jew. They were hastening to finish the ...

3508. Embalmed Alive

John 14:5-14

Sermon

Louis H. Valbracht

The words are probably the most plain, the most authoritarian, the most all-inclusive of the great "I am" statements made by Jesus Christ. In Chapter 14 of the Gospel According to St. John, verse 6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In unmistakable, explicit words, our Lord is saying that the human being cannot have life without him. I suppose that our culture can be divided into two types of persons - those who say in whatever comfortable and luxurious situations they find themselves in: "This is ...

3509. Numbered Hairs

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

Herchel H. Sheets

The Plague is personalized in Albert Camus’ play State of Siege. It comes into a town in the form of a man who is accompanied by his secretary. The Secretary carries a notebook in which she often makes entries. She is always smiling, but at a stroke of her pencil, a person can be struck with plague and die. Few have the courage to challenge this threatening team. But a young medical student by the name of Diego does. At one point in the play, he says to The Secretary, "But of course only masses count with ...

3510. Drastic Surgery

Matthew 5:27-30

Sermon

Herchel H. Sheets

In February, 1966, a young surgeon from India, then a resident at a St. Louis Hospital, took a radical step in an attempted reconciliation with his estranged wife. She was a staff physician in Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, and was living in a dormitory there. The surgeon called a taxi driver to his apartment door and gave him a package which he asked him to deliver to his wife’s room. His wife’s roommate answered the knock at the door and accepted the package. It was blood-soaked, and when she opened ...

3511. Unlimited Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

Herchel H. Sheets

I don’t know how much arithmetic Simon Peter knew. But if he did not understand the answer Jesus gave to his question about how many times a person should forgive one who has wronged him, it was not because he was deficient in mathematics, but because he was short on love. In asking the question, Peter must have known that he was speaking for a lot of other people. Injuries of one kind or another are inflicted upon every person at times, and it is not unusual for one to experience injury at the hand of the ...

3512. Mighty Faith

Matthew 17:14-23

Sermon

Herchel H. Sheets

Engineering by command! That is what Jesus’ words about faith and mountain-moving seem to suggest. He says that if one has only a tiny bit of faith, he or she can move a mountain just by telling it to move. The feats of our modern earth-moving equipment are astounding enough, but they are nothing compared to this engineering by faith! But this could create problems. Suppose a person was unhappy with the location of a certain mountain and decided to move it somewhere else. Who could guarantee that its ...

3513. What On Earth Is God Doing? - 1940

Psalm 76:1-12

Sermon

Kent Moorehead

Confronted with such a catastrophe as the contemporary world situation presents, with evil so wildly rampant, destruction and death so widespread and violent, and the threat of the triumph of ruthlessness so imminent, one question keeps coming up to pester and plague religious faith with an incorrigible persistency: With everything seeming to go to pieces, what on earth is God doing? Where is he? Doesn’t he care? Is he unaware, or unseeing, or impotent to do anything about such a ghastly calamity? Of ...

3514. Achieving An All-In Victory - 1952

1 John 5:1-12

Sermon

Kent Moorehead

We have talked so much about winning an "all-out" victory during the years of World War II that our attention has been focused and our interest centered upon mass behavior. We speak of the world as having gone mad. But madness is a malady of the human mind. The world outside cannot go mad; only the world inside is capable of sanity and insanity. We talk of the Government’s having full responsibility for making all the decisions. But the Government is not an abstraction. It is composed of individuals. And ...

3515. The Christian’s Style - 1960

Matthew 11:1-19

Sermon

Kent Moorehead

What do you consider the most important and revealing fact to know about a person? Is it his antecedents, heritage, background? Certainly that is not to be overlooked. Or would you be most interested in his possessions, the position he occupies, the nature of his reputation? Unquestionably this factor would seem to be of no little practical consequence. Or would it mean most to know his possibilities, his promise, what he might become? That surely is highly significant. But there is something more ...

3516. The Narrowness Of The Christian Way - 1950 (date estimated)

Matthew 7:13-14

Sermon

Kent Moorehead

It is perfectly possible to tell a lie without saying anything untrue. As a matter of fact, the most effective liars are those who never deliberately say anything that is not so; they simply tell a piece of the truth and refuse to tell all of it. Let me illustrate the lying power of partial truth. I know a man who, with two other men, deliberately planned to get a fourth man in a particular situation where he would be utterly at the mercy of the three men. It would then be possible for them to kill their ...

3517. The Time of Our Visitation

Sermon

Leonard Mann

You know how it was that Jesus of Nazareth began his career as a teacher and public figure in Galilee. You know how John came out of the wilderness and preached to the people who gathered around him on the banks of the Jordan. You know how for many long centuries the Jewish people had looked for the coming of their Messiah. When John appeared, their scholars speculated that perhaps this impassioned wilderness man might, actually be the Expected One. They sent their representatives to inquire of him ...

3518. A Faith for the Uncharted Way

Matthew 1:18-25

Sermon

Leonard Mann

A few summers ago my family and I made a motor trip west from our home in Ohio to the Pacific coast, and returned. We crossed the prairies and the plains, the Mojave Desert and the great salt flats of Utah; we drove through the Badlands and the Grand Tetons, and crossed the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains twice. We followed the trails of the pioneers, the Mojave, the Wyoming, and the Santa Fe. We traveled on good roads in a good automobile with a good road map. We had never been in any of that ...

3519. In The Nick of Time

Genesis 22:1-19

Sermon

Jon L. Joyce

The story of stewardship goes back to the beginning of the Bible when, high on a mountaintop, a father actually offered up his little boy. It is the first reliably recorded "pledge" in the Bible. We moderns, however, have flinched so in horror at this barbaric episode, which God stopped in the nick of time, that we have been afraid to take another look; and we have missed the extraordinary valor and enviable devotion that went, this once, with stewardship. God never meant to let this man make such a ...

3520. I know You by Name

Exodus 33:12-23

Sermon

Jon L. Joyce

YET THOU HAST SAID, ‘I KNOW YOU BY NAME.’ How often in Holy Scripture the promise of personhood is carried out by Almighty God. As for instance, when he speaks through Isaiah in the first verse of the 34th Chapter: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, and you are mine." Or as that promise is fulfilled in the New Testament in John 10:3: "He calleth his own sheep by name." Think of the wonder of it that the individual human being is known to Almighty God by name. The deepest desire ...

3521. Illustrations for Lent Easter Old Testament Texts

Isaiah 42:10-17, Isaiah 42:18-25

Illustration

Jon L. Joyce

1. God destroys as well as preserves [Isaiah 42:14] Luther says that God is to be both loved and feared. The same God of compassion who is eager to show love to those who turn to him is equally determined to root out and destroy evil. Isaiah is warning us not to be lulled to sleep by thinking only of the kindness of God. He who shows patience toward our waywardness will eventually cease to overlook unatoned sin and will destroy. He holds all the power of the universe in his hands to work his ends. Our ...

3522. Significance in Life

Isaiah 55:1-13

Sermon

Jon L. Joyce

"WHY DO YOU SPEND ... YOUR LABOR FOR THAT WHICH DOES NOT SATISFY?" A woman in our parish referred a lady to me for consultation, and the parishioner said of her friend: "I don’t know what her problem is. She has a very successful husband. She is certainly a success at everything she tries herself. I really can’t understand what her difficulty is." But when the lady came in, she placed her finger precisely on her problem, as she said to me: "You know, it seems that nothing I do feels important." You see, ...

3523. The Old and the New

1 Corinthians 5:1-13

Sermon

Jon L. Joyce

"CLEANSE OUT THE OLD LEAVEN THAT YOU MAYBE A NEW LUMP" I suppose that the oldest controversy in history is the struggle between the old and the new. Even our Lord got into it one day when he said to the religious leaders: "No one puts a new patch on an old garment" ... and ... "neither is new wine put into old wine skins." So the conflict goes on between the past and the future. In age after age, there are patchers and there are creators - some who try to patch up the thread-bare garment, and some who are ...

3524. Our Unmanageable God (The Second Commandment)

Exodus 20:1-21, Ephesians 3:14-21

Sermon

Bill Bouknight

I saw a cartoon somewhere picturing two Army trainees standing in front of a military chapel. On the chapel bulletin board was the sermon topic for that Sunday. It read: "The Second Commandment--Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Images.” One soldier said to his buddy, "Now there's a commandment I haven't broken yet." Maybe you're thinking similar thoughts this morning. Surely we haven't worshipped any graven images lately. But let's take a closer look at what the Second Commandment means before deciding ...

3525. Worthy Is The Lamb

1 Timothy 2:1-15

Sermon

Bill Bouknight

I am especially excited today! While preaching is almost always a joy, sometimes it is an absolute delight, especially when I am declaring the heart of the Gospel, the good news of the cross. Why, I could hardly sleep last night. I feel like a bird-dog on Thanksgiving morning or a racehorse in the starting blocks at Churchill Downs. I love to talk about the cross! The Gospel is so simple that even a child can grasp it. It's so profound that no Ph.D. can fully plumb its depths. Here is the heart of it: ...

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