Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 3526 to 3550 of 3852 results

3526. Commercial Communication

Illustration

Neill Postman

... second teaching modules, and the messages they teach are really quite striking. First, they teach that all problems are resolvable. Second, they teach that all problems are resolvable fast. And third, that all problems are resolvable fast through the means of technology. Television commercials do not stress that problems have origins or roots. Problems just seem to strike, which is, of course, very well suited to TV because TV always communicates a sense of the now, of the immediate.

3527. Emphasize the People

Illustration

Editor James S. Hewett

... 't miss a word of it. Here, look at my notes." The old man replied: "Oh, I don't need your notes. I know it by heart. You see, I heard it the first time 'round." By now Bishop Oxnam realized that this man had been present when Lincoln originally delivered his words. He was curious about how his recitation had differed from that of the president. The old-timer explained it this way: "Abe put his hands out over the people like a benediction, and said, 'That the government of the people, by the people, and for ...

3528. Communicating Ideas

Illustration

Richard C. Halverson

... as bullets, they kill inspiration and neutralize motivation. Use them as seeds, they take root, grow, and become a reality in the life in which they are planted. The only risk taken when seeds are planted is that they become a part of the one in whom they grow. The originator will probably get no credit for the idea. If one is willing not to get credit for an idea, a rich harvest will be reaped. "It is more blessed to give than to receive."

3529. Listen to the Angels

Revelation 5:11-14

Sermon

King Duncan

... Valley of Siddim mentions men who fell in the great tar pits of the region; some translators call them asphalt pits, or bitumen pits, or simply great pits. Why the confusion in translation? Exactly what kind of pits were they? The Hebrew text is unclear. The original text gives the Hebrew word for pit and then simply repeats it. The story speaks literally of pit pits . . . there are pits and there are pits . . . But if you fall into a pit pit you are in trouble.” (2) Sproul goes on to say that repetition ...

3530. In Which City Do You Live?

Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23

Sermon

King Duncan

... the declaration that “after due search it has been determined that God cannot be located in New York City.” People in rural areas have always regarded city slickers with suspicion. That is interesting when you realize that the word “pagan” originally meant “country folk.” No environment today has a monopoly on problems. Some of the highest suicide rates, highest divorce rates, highest alcoholism and opioid addiction rates in the United States per capita are found in remote rural areas. You can ...

3531. They'll Know We Are Christians by Our...

Galatians 5:1-15

Sermon

King Duncan

... members of their congregation were stirring up trouble. Surely you would think that couldn’t happen in the church that early in Christian history, but it did. There was much disagreement. Here was the issue: many of the early Christians who had originally been Jews believed that all believers ought to follow the path they had traveled--to undergo the Jewish rite of circumcision as well as the rite of baptism. Since circumcision is not a particularly appealing ritual, this was causing some tension in ...

3532. Are You Suffering from FOMO?

Luke 10:38-42

Sermon

King Duncan

... as well. When the stock market was soaring in early 2018, many experts attributed it in part to FOMO—people were afraid of missing out on great returns on their money. Later many of them wished they had placed their money somewhere safer. The origin of FOMO seems to have come from an article written by a young man named Patrick McGinnis at Harvard Business School around 2003. Patrick and his buddies were young, ambitious, and reasonably well-off. In their early twenties, they experienced the collapse of ...

3533. Get the Garbage Out!

Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon

King Duncan

... who know each other intimately and spend much time with each other invariably start to reflect each other’s character and attitudes and priorities. John is saying, “The kingdom of heaven is near to you. God’s got a plan for restoring this world to His original design of justice and mercy and peace. And you’re going to miss it if you don’t align your thoughts with God’s thoughts. If your mind is fixed on outward shows of religion rather than filled with the spirit and thoughts and priorities of ...

3534. Join in the Singing

Isaiah 35:1-10

Sermon

King Duncan

... the hope of new life in God. This psalm is filled with images of withered plants blooming again, dry river beds gushing with fresh water, and people undergoing miraculous healings. This is a vision of the kingdom of God when Jesus returns to restore the world to God’s original vision. There will be no death or hurting or mourning. God is making all things new. And when we choose to give our lives to Jesus, he plants the seeds of the kingdom of God in our minds and hearts, so we start to see the new life ...

3535. Joseph, When Did You Know?

Matthew 1:18-25

Sermon

King Duncan

... by to decorate the church, they found that the mission organizer had forgotten to take the mission banner off the pulpit. They thought the motto on the banner was a good message for a wedding too. The banner read, “Worth the Risk.” (3) When Joseph originally heard the news of Mary’s pregnancy, he was going to very discreetly arrange for a divorce. He was a kind and merciful man. He could have had her stoned for adultery—a very public, humiliating and painful death. It would have brought shame on ...

3536. Family Tree

Illustration

Dr. Ray Pritchard

... called “napolis.” He also remembered bits and pieces of the stories his aunts and grandmothers used to tell him when he was a child. With that meager information, he began to put the story together. Across the generations, a few syllables of the original African language had been repeated. He went from one linguist to another, repeating those few syllables, asking if they knew what language they came from. No one seemed to know, until one day he met someone who identified the words as belonging to a ...

3537. A Bridge Between Two Worlds

Luke 18:1-8

Sermon

King Duncan

... else saw his vision. No one else encouraged him. But he persisted until his vision became reality. Jesus spent most of his ministry creating a vision of the kingdom of God. More than anything, he wanted people to understand who God is and what God’s original plan for creation was. And he wanted them to understand that no matter how corrupt and unjust this world can be, he would come back as Messiah someday and establish the kingdom of God, God’s vision for this world. And how do we fight off frustration ...

3538. First the Bad News...

Luke 21:5-19

Sermon

King Duncan

... s cargo was lost at sea. In 1858, divers found part of the wreckage of the Lutine, including the bell that had hung at the front of the ship. The bell was turned over to Lloyd’s of London, the insurance underwriters who had insured the HMS Lutine’s original trip. The folks at Lloyd’s of London hung the bell in the underwriter’s office. They started a new tradition with it. For many years, whenever a ship was late in arriving at its destination, a Lloyd’s employee rung the bell once to let all the ...

3539. The Smell Test

Illustration

H. A. Ironside, Litt. D

... the skin seemed to be partially torn from its body in a way that made me feel the poor little creature must be suffering terribly. But when one of the herders caught the lamb and brought it over to me, the mystery was explained. That lamb did not really belong originally to that ewe. She had a lamb which was bitten by a rattlesnake and died. This lamb that I saw was an orphan and needed a mother’s care. But at first the bereft ewe refused to have anything to do with it. She sniffed at it when it was ...

3540. Jesus Destroys the Power of Sin

Mark 2:1-12

Sermon

Richard Gribble

... to its genuineness. The argument is that later copyists would have been concerned more with presenting Jesus in the best possible light, being “compassionate,” not changing a favorable portrayal into something more problematic, “anger,” to explain. If Jesus was originally described as “angered” at the presence of this leper before him, even that response can be given a compassionate reading. The sight of human misery and suffering moved God to anger in the Old Testament (see Judges 10:16). It ...

3541. Recognizing Who God Is

Job 42:7-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... questions, "Who is God?" and "Do I trust God enough to submit my life to God's complete control?" I pray that you will trust in God's love for you, knowing that God's plan for your life is perfect. 1. "Why Me?" by Elizabeth Gilbert, originally published in GQ, Reader's Digest, February 2003, pp.117-121. 2. By Sheila Walsh, "Staying Alive," Leadership, Summer 2002, p. 52. 3. "The Up Side," Guideposts, July 2001, p.8. 4. Gerald Sittser, A Grace Disguised (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), pp. 36-37. Cited in ...

3542. Aha! I See It Now!

John 1:29-42

Sermon

King Duncan

... to make our objective complete obedience to God’s will? There is a world outside these doors that is separated from God and dying in its sins, and we can point them to the source of life. Will we take action? 1. Originally published in Reader's Digest. From Psychology Today, (March 9, 2015), Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Grierson, psychologytoday.com. “The Meaning (and Science) Behind Those Life-Changing, Transformational Aha Moments” Bruce Grierson, Reader's Digest https://www.rd.com/culture/aha-moments ...

3543. The Time Is Near

Luke 21:5-19

Sermon

Molly F. James

... be a real possibility, but we likely live in a well designed house and operate in a community with an early warning system. So “earthquake” does not mean the same thing for us that it did for our ancestors. This seems a text designed for its original hearers. It seems designed for the early Christians for whom the end of the world and the return of Christ seemed imminent. Those who did not have scientific or economic explanations for famines our earthquakes. Those who lived in a world where choosing to ...

3544. Listening 101

John 4:1-26, John 4:27-38, John 4:39-42

Sermon

David & Marian Plant

... it doesn’t always end up with the same wonderful results, it is clear that it begins with listening. My brothers and sisters, it would be so easy to bring our own tribalisms to the table of this scripture, just as the original hearers, the Samaritans and Judeans, did. We might speak of Muslims and Christians, evangelicals and mainline, illegal immigrants and citizens, pro-life and pro-choice, organic and genetically modified plants adherents to name only a few. The tribal lists and differentiations are ...

3545. Learning to Walk in the Dark

Matthew 26:14-16

Sermon

David & Marian Plant

... , and was protected from his own lie by the same priest who told the police, he had forgotten to take these candlesticks as well. Years later, a man wrongly identified as Jean Valjean was about to be executed for the real Jean Valjean’s original crime (stealing bread for his sister’s family). Jean Valjean faced a choice: stay silent, invisible to the law, and alive — or publicly proclaim that the man they held was innocent, the prisoner could not possibly be the Jean Valjean they wanted because he ...

3546. The Garden of Betrayal and the Garden of His Burial

John 18:1-11

Sermon

King Duncan

... of God he would need to be born all over again. Evidently Nicodemus experienced that new birth because here he is after Christ’s death ministering to the Master with an expensive mixture of spices and ointments. This was after all of Christ’s original disciples had fled. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them, Joseph and Nicodemus, wrapped the body with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. This happened at our second garden. At the place where Jesus was ...

3547. By the Sea

Matthew 4:18-22, John 1:35-42, John 1:43-51

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... his first disciples in conjunction with his move to the sea. In Matthew’s account, Jesus moves to Capernaum in response to John’s arrest (John the Baptizer). In John’s (the gospeler’s) account, it’s clear that some of Jesus’ first disciples were originally disciples of John’s (the baptizer). Whether Jesus called Simon Peter and Andrew (and James and John) standing with John the Baptist by the Jordan, or fishing by the Sea of Galilee is not so important. What IS important is that Jesus calls a ...

3548. Jacob's Well

John 4:1-26, John 4:27-38, John 4:39-42

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... for the woman he met at Jacob’s Well that hot day outside of Sychar. And it’s the message he still has for us today. Samaria where Jacob’s Well was built by the hands of Jacob as an altar to God many years ago was part of the original Israel –the northern kingdom whose Jewish people were scattered, who intermarried, who were lost to the faith. Jesus is seeking all of those lost sheep of Israel to bring them back to God, back to faith, back to wholeness and life. And God is seeking YOU. Many of you ...

3549. Your Faith Has Made You Well

Mark 5:21-43

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... before she dies. Then, the “selah.” During the “selah,” we learn about the meaning of true faith, and the power and grace of God through the person of the chosen Messiah through the story of the hemorrhaging woman. And then, we return to the original story. When Jesus reaches the girl, we are told, she is already dead. This is extremely important to this witness. He is now not there to “heal” her, because she is already gone. In fact, Jairus’ friends and family tell him, “Leave the rabbi ...

3550. Parabola

Luke 10:25-37

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... , a predator had come in the night and stolen her babies away. Heart stricken, she had no family to carry on her lineage. Now let me give you some background –a bit of a “provenance” about the ostrich and her egg. The ostrich has a poor memory, the original “bird brain” about the size of a pea. When she lays her eggs in the desert, she buries them in the sand, so that predators cannot find them. However, if she takes her eyes off of the place where she buried them, she will forget where she hid ...

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