Sermon and Worship Resources

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Showing 3576 to 3600 of 4977 results

3576. Deep Water!

Matthew 14:22-33

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... you on the water!" And Jesus said, "Come!" The rest of the apostles have a white-knuckled vise grip on the gunnels of the boat. The storm, the waves, the dark, the wind, the uncertainty - they're not about to move. And, as with the most of us, they are quite happy to stay in their comfort zone and watch as Peter makes his move. Thank God for the Peter's among us. When life grows stormy, when we cannot see, when all is tired and wet and fearful and nobody knows what to do, usually God sends us a Peter ...

3577. Do You Get It?

Matthew 16:21-28

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... that it had been under David and Solomon. Well, what would you expect an oppressed people to think? Preachers sometimes say things like, "The Jews were expecting the Messiah to be a military conqueror, not a suffering servant," as if that had been a quite unreasonable hope of theirs. Of course oppressed people want liberation. It's far too easy for comfortable Americans to criticize them for that. We have our own ways of expressing the same feelings that Peter had - "God forbid it, Lord! This must never ...

3578. As Long As It Is Day!

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... " is literally "tormenters" or "torturers." We are tormented in prison when we are unforgiving! Years ago, on a television show, a comic character was angry with another fellow. He said, "I'm tired of him slapping me on the chest every time he sees me. I've told him to quit and he won't. So I'm ready for him. I've got me three sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. Next time he hits me it'll blow his arms off!" The first character was about to find out that his grudge was going to cost him as ...

3579. History: His Story

Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... got but one option." Then raising his trumpet to his lips, Gabriel asked, "Shall I sound the eviction notice now, sir?" And God said, "No, Gabriel! No, not just yet. I know you are right, but I keep thinking if I just give them a little more time they'll quit acting like they own the place!" Aye, that's what the text, Christ's world history, is all about. God owns the place, but we've been acting like we do. That brings us to the end of the text, the part where the owner of the vineyard has had ...

3580. How to Love God

Matthew 22:34-46

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... the name of the Lord!" You see, Job did not love God just "because" he was good to him, nor did he set conditions: "If you make me healthy and wealthy, I'll love you!" Job loved God, period! And circumstances could not alter that. Yet Job's wife was quite a different story. She loved God because he was good to her. He had given her a husband, a family, wealth, and health. But when all that was gone, so was her love for God. She told her husband, "Curse God and die!" Agape. Unconditional love. This is what ...

3581. The Process of Love

Luke 19:1-10

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times as much." Goal setting is like a doctor's prescription. It is medicine, charting out a new course with God for improvement, change, growth. A worthy goal can be to get debt-free, to quit drinking, to join a small group Bible study, to memorize scripture related to your personal struggle, or to let go of money you've been hoarding so it can work for Jesus. Jesus had a rich young ruler come running up to him, inquiring, "What must I do ...

3582. Three Ways to Know a Saint

Sermon

King Duncan

... society or the approval of others. It is ironic, isn’t it? The more people sit around and think about whether they are happy or not, the more miserable they are likely to be. If they would just forget themselves, they could really find life quite fulfilling. There once was a good and ordinary woman who experienced a rather extraordinary problem: she began to glow. A gentle light shone forth from her features--the unmistakable mark of a saint. While it all sounds like a blessing, in reality it was rather ...

3583. The Holidaze Craze

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... "OH, LITTLE BANK AMERICARD," sung to the tune of "O Little Town of Bethlehem?" Oh, little Bank Americard, you bring me Christmas Cheer. Without your clout, I have no doubt no gifts I'd give this year. Your credit line allows me to run up bills quite large And when I'm through exhausting you, I'll use my Master Charge. (Same tune, sung in late February) Oh, little Bank Americard, you bring me discontent. I calculate your interest rate is over twelve percent. Each month, your cry for payments my letter-box ...

3584. The True Definition of a Sanctuary

Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... " (verse 15). Two of the servants stepped up to the challenge, embraced the potential handed to them, and through skillful trading managed not just to do well, but to increase their master's initial investment by one hundred percent. The third servant had quite a different reaction to the unexpected opportunity offered by his master. This third servant did the safe thing with the single talent he had been given. He buried it in the ground, one of the most accepted forms of responsible safekeeping in the ...

3585. God Will Take Care of You

Matthew 14:13-21

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... ministry isn't about meeting people's needs, although that's a dimension of the whole church's ministry to the reign of God. Still less is it about accommodating people's bondage to the powers of death so that we can keep our jobs. Ordained ministry is quite simply that we wait on table, where Christ is already embracing us with his victory, and eating and drinking new with us in the Father's kingdom (Matthew 26:29). And as table waiters, "God continues to call all of us, even me counting my days, to be ...

3586. Why Not a Christian Live 8 for the Environment?

Romans 8:18-27

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... , prohibition, the 15th Amendment (giving black males the vote), the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote), the Civil Rights Acts - all came about to some extent because of the UNITED work and the committed actions taken by people whose doctrinal faiths were quite different. Live 8 - which was ingeniously designed to be more of a world wide "People's Summit on Poverty" than it was a musical event - should remind the church of her activist heritage. Yet in the 21st century it seems that the church ...

3587. A Talent for Life

Romans 8:1-17

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

Scientists who study the tropical rainforests have succeeded in drawing attention to an entirely new ecosystem. It's an ecological niche quite separate from that of the high mountains, meadows and valleys, the plains or deserts, the estuaries or open waters. In fact, this ecosystem exists within the rainforest. Yet, because human beings walk on two legs, because we're ground-dwelling creatures, we miss it entirely. All one has to do ...

3588. Why Are Christians Such Bad Tippers?

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... tend to look like they are the lint-covered remnants from Ebenezer Scrooge's back pocket. Accompanying the extremely small tip on the table there's often a big chip on the shoulder. The fact that these waiters are working on Sunday, that they are quite obviously not going to church that day, seems to give some Christian diners a sour, accusatory attitude towards the ones serving them. That's why, for the poor wait staff, Sunday's after church have become known as a time of chump change and curmudgeonly ...

3589. Cross Purposes

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... the practice of abandoning unwanted or imperfect infants has been long established and accepted. In the ancient world, children with obvious birth defects, girl-babies, mixed-race offspring, and other undesirable kids were by definition outcasts at birth, and so were quite literally cast out. The child would be taken to the outskirts of the village or city and left there, unprotected, waiting for predators to carry them off. One of the foolish acts practiced by early Christians was the cross-back, the ...

3590. Tell You the Truth

John 14:5-14

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... . Jesus told the truth about God's plans for the salvation of the world. Jesus told the truth about how compassion, sacrifice, suffering, and mercy could be signs, not of human weakness but of divine strength. When Jesus told the truth about God, it was never quite as we would expect it to be. For those convinced they were righteous and blessed by their piety and goodness, Jesus warned, "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street ...

3591. Are You Willing to Be a Donkey?

Matthew 21:1-11

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... presence with "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Ever wonder why the donkey is the only animal in the Bible that speaks? Karl Bart at his 80th birthday party offered this testimony: "In the Bible there's talk of a donkey, or to be quite correct, an ass. It was allowed to carry Jesus to Jerusalem. If I have achieved anything in this life, then I did so as a relative of the ass who at that time was going his way carrying an important burden. The disciples had said to its owner: 'The ...

3592. The Insight of Eyesight

John 9:1-12

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... understand what he was missing. When Jesus gives him vision, for the first time his eyesight clears up immediately. But his insight into what had happened to him took longer for him to process. Although the healed man could now see, he couldn't yet quite comprehend what had been revealed to him. Only after the healed man is forced first by his neighbors, then on two different occasions by the Pharisees, to scrutinize what has happened to him, does he really begin to take in the magnitude of his experience ...

3593. What Names Are You Naming?

Isaiah 49:1-7

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... that no longer even exist. It's one thing to say that 17 coastal villages were destroyed in Myanmar. It's another thing to name those 17 coastal villages. It's one thing to say that 150,000 people died in the tsunami. It's quite another to name names, names like Barrera Jann, Curlos Barong, Major Tomas, Mary Tanagtong, Sesilvia Bargoa, Sevrine Pairuno, Flona Gallan, and Feri Cornelia, and tens of thousands more. One of the greatest resurrections that could come out of this deadly tsunami is if individual ...

3594. Soren's Heart

2 Timothy 3:10--4:8

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... no tremor in the apostle's trust that "the Lord will rescue me from every evil." I have a nine-year-old daughter, Soren. She and I have an amulet ritual that's as life-sustaining for me as it is enjoyable for her. Since I'm on the road quite a bit, I make it a ritual practice to bring Soren home a heart from the places I visited while I was away from her. Since she has my real heart, I bring her back hearts made of every material imaginable in every form imaginable to convey to her the ...

3595. The Seven Deadly Fears

2 Timothy 1:1-2:13

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... story had originated in a Muslim country and the deported individual was named Joe Christian. According to today's epistle text, Timothy was feeling like some anonymous, beleaguered Joe Christian. He'd been embroiled in terrible conflicts with quite popular, but completely heretical teachers, individuals who threatened to skew gospel truths so badly that Christ's sacrifice became but an unfortunate, unimportant, or misunderstood detail. Timothy was a Joe Christian, a third-generation, devoted, working-for ...

3596. But Wait! There's More!

Luke 20:27-40

Sermon

King Duncan

... a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” Quite a question. My first thought is, Men, stay away from that woman! She’s bad luck. It makes you wonder if perhaps she was poisoning all these husbands. Seven times a widow! But that’s beside the point. Theoretically, what the Sadducees want to know is ...

3597. The FUD Club: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

2 Thessalonians 2:13-17

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... group called Rezawrecktion—-with the emphasis on the “wreck” more than anything. In times of plague, one of the most heart-sinking images was that of a plain yellow flag fluttering from the stern of a lonely vessel lying at anchor somewhere quite a long way off. In “Dr. Strangelove,” Stanley Kubrick coined a new adjective--- “Strangelovean”---which means . . . a person who has a potentially fatal fascination with the idea of nuclear war, and by extension, with end times scenarios. For a little ...

3598. Dolphin Drops

Isaiah 56:1-8

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... year old has decided to call his new home. Thane regaled us with stories about all the amazingly spectacular and all the embarrassingly inept moves various kids had been displaying. Then suddenly Thane got very quiet. After a momentary pause, Thane looked at me quite seriously and asked, "I'm not a poser, am I, Dad?" Being bad or being good, having great skills or just getting started as a beginner, didn't matter as much as whether Thane saw his performance as genuine. In his identity as a skateboarding ...

3599. Follow That Star (New Year's Day)

Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... even know. [This year], I'll give a sincere compliment to someone who seems down. I'll tell a child how special he is, and I'll tell someone I love just how deeply I care for them and how much they mean to me. This is the year I quit worrying about what I don't have and start being grateful for all the wonderful things God has already given me. I'll remember that to worry is just a waste of time because my faith in God and his Divine Plan ensures everything will be just fine. Tonight, before ...

3600. For All the Saints

Luke 19:1-10

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... refers only to a very small, select, elite group of individuals – thankfully all long dead – who accomplished stupendous healings and feats of faith far beyond the capabilities of us ordinary sit-in-the-pew folks. This lets us off the sainthood-hook quite nicely. In fact, the church made these saints into such otherworldly beings that a whole side industry in reliquaries became hugely popular. A relic, of course, was something personally connected to a saint. Sometimes it was a piece of clothing, or an ...

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