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 4101 to 4125 of 4947 results

4101. Ready or Not

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

... . He also felt surrounded by brothers and sisters in the faith, surrounded by walls alive with acts of faith and hope. "Bars can't lock up the spirit, infinite presence in every one of us."4 Surely this also is to find life. To live with an overwhelming sense of the presence of the living Christ. To live in communion with a new and enlarged family. To know that Christ has created an unbreakable bond between those who serve him. To know that one is part of a vast circle of prayer and concern and care. My ...

4102. No Weedless Garden

Matthew 13:24-30

Sermon

Richard L. Thulin

... am learning not to get angry about it nor to feel discouraged. I know that we never have to pretend that we are something other than what we are and we don't have to spend our time judging one another. All in all, I guess I feel a great sense of relief." As he left my office he added a closing word. "Someday," he said, "the field will be free of weeds. God will see to it. Pray with me that it will happen soon." 1. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism. In The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the ...

4103. The Promise of the Savior King

Isaiah 11:1-16

Sermon

... for whom to vote. A candidate is elected to the office of President and, in January of the next year, is inaugurated as President. At the time of inauguration most of us, I suspect, even if our candidate was not elected, have a heightened sense of expectation. Maybe this time, maybe in this presidency the promises will be kept. Maybe in this four-year term reality will match the hope that has been generated. Just maybe the rhetoric will be enfleshed in action. Maybe we shall not again be disappointed ...

4104. The Promise of Wholeness

Isaiah 35:1-10

Sermon

... within the company and all he had to show for it were two sea-going tugs, one still in dry dock, and a five-million-dollar debt. He has one firm job in his hand, but nothing beyond that. He is filled with self-doubt, fear, and a sense of hopelessness. Given the world in which we live, Nicholas Berg could well exemplify many of us today. Even given our achievements and advancements in our world and lives, many of us seem to be fearful, despairing, hopeless. Israel addressed in today's text found herself in a ...

4105. The Promise of Light

Isaiah 60:1-22

Sermon

... world in which I lived. Today our world is heavy with the darkness of defeat, despair, and death. The economic disasters of industry and agriculture have turned light into darkness through loss of jobs, loss of farms, loss of homes, loss of a sense of human dignity and worth. The oppressive weight of unjust political and racial policies across our world create a darkness of inhumanity and death and homelessness for thousands of people. The emrror and oppression of poverty and homelessness in our cities, of ...

4106. A Renewed Call

Isaiah 49:1-7

Sermon

... again is met by God's word which renews and refreshes him for his prophetic ministry. In my own discouragement and disappointment, the Lord God meets me in preached and sacramental Word, as the Seminary community gathers for worship to renew and empower my sense of call. Colleagues who are supportive and students who demonstrate care and insight become channels of God's faithful presence to me. Is it not so for us in our own discouragement, disillusionment, and despair about our call to be God's people in ...

4107. Light Shines

Isaiah 9:1-7

Sermon

... darkness. The word of promise from our God says that Ronald Reagan or the Congress or governors and legislatures, or the Libyans or the Russians or even we ourselves are not in control of life. This word from God promises that life in its deepest, rawest, most essential sense is God's gift to us. And that gift is given flesh and meaning in Jesus of Nazareth, the Light of the World. This promise does not mean we shall not be afraid, that we shall not stumble and fumble in darkness, or not still do all we ...

4108. The Call to be Holy in Love

Leviticus 19:1-37

Sermon

... of who is our neighbor. The Lord says we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. In loving our enemies we then imitate God's gracious love and fulfill the command of our Lord to be perfect as God is perfect. Perfection in this sense is the perfection of love for all, excluding no person. To be perfect is to be undivided, whole-hearted. To love all who need our love, even those who are enemies, is to be single-mindedly fixed upon our God and the love with which God loves us and ...

4109. Dog: Man's Best Friend?

Exodus 12:1-30

Sermon

... fried, boiled, or micro-waved). It was to be kept whole. (Recall, on the cross, Christ's legs were not broken - fulfilling the prophecy of him, "Not a bone of him shall be broken.") All the family ate of the one undivided whole, so they could be, in a real sense, one. It is still true the unity of the church comes from the oneness of the bread and the cup. We are one body, partaking of one Lamb, who is our Lord. Bishop Roy Clark and I were both speakers a few years ago, at the Florida Annual Conference of ...

4110. "He Who Commands Is He Who Fulfills"

Matthew 22:34-40

Sermon

... of the law and the prophets. To use a word that is much in vogue these days, Jesus’ answer is "wholistic": it embraces all of life, attitude and actions. "One can love God only by loving one’s neighbor".1 By the same token, "only through a sense of love for one’s neighbor, experienced in concrete actions and embracing all of life, is the Law fulfilled."2 The Law’s concern for justice; the prophets’ passionate pleas for loyalty to God and righteous behavior: all of this is summed up in the bifocal ...

4111. Talents and Trust

Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon

... skills and incipient talents. When that happens, we trade joy for contentment, serendipity for stodginess, stewardship for escrow funds and endowments, the certainty of faith for the security of a "sure thing". Nor does it stop there. Such anxiety and inaction produce a sense that one is a victim. Other people become responsible for life’s trials. The one talent man accuses the master of being a hard man and tries thereby to make the master responsible for his own refusal to risk action. The greater the ...

4112. And Then The End

Matthew 24:1-35

Sermon

... line is the beginning of the line. The line moves, and you move in the line, but you go nowhere except in a rather large circle. Imagine now that the line is life, and that life is one endless walking around in circles. Can you begin to sense the ultimate desperation of the human predicament if life is an eternal cycle, a relentless march headed only to the place T. S. Eliot described as "the empty land that is no land, only emptiness, absence, the void"? Can you feel the emptiness and meaninglessness that ...

4113. The Trifocal Festival

Matthew 5:1-12

Sermon

... a whimsical understanding allows us to see the saints in a new light: not the stodgy, circumspect, stained glass, haloed, religious types, but God’s winsome courtiers sent to do his task of wooing and winning the hand of his beloved. II: In this sense, saints are interpretations of the servant Christ, I: Exemplars of goodness and grace, II: Those of conspicuous sanctity, I: The stars of the church, II: The heroes of the faith, I: God’s familiars II: God’s handkerchiefs I: So great a cloud of witnesses ...

4114. Possession is Nine Tenths of the Fall

Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon

D. Wayne Burkette

... joy and freedom which come with the assurance that our lives belong totally to God, God who loves us completely. We discover that joy and wholeness of life consist not in control but in commitment to the always larger and greater cause of the Kingdom. We sense the beauty of life lived by grace rather than grasp. Having abandoned the deadly desire to possess life and be our own gods, we are greeted by a remarkable serendipity - the abundant life that we could never seize by our own strength is given to us ...

4115. The Gift That Claims Our Response

Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon

... . It’s comfortable to lean back and think, "I’ve done my part; I’ve given my fair share; I’ve used my talents," assuming that we can live off the interest of faith deposits made years ago. The Gospel never speaks of any such sense of completion, not in this life. Our response is never finished; it only changes character from time to time as our circumstances change. The need to respond is equally strong in every stage of life. The feast of the kingdom has commenced, and invitations are extended ...

4116. The Things That Are God’s

Matthew 22:15-22

Sermon

... . So the chicken told the pig what she had decided. The pig responded, "For you, a ham and eggs breakfast is a gesture of great generosity, but for me, it is an act of total commitment!" The truth is that commitment in the religious sense is nothing less than the complete giving of oneself to God. Generosity follows commitment, but commitment comes first. And commitment is the subject of the Gospel for today. Matthew says that an uncommon coalition of Pharisees and Herodians approached Jesus to ask him a ...

4117. Life in The Meantime

Matthew 25:1-13

Sermon

D. Wayne Burkette

... , and all the oil in the world cannot rekindle the light of joy in their hearts. It is a tragic story about five maidens whose vision was so focused on the future that they failed to notice the demands of the present. They lived with a strong sense of expectation, and for that they should be commended, but they neglected to respond to the meantime in ways that would have equipped them to realize their hope. For them, present time was for little more than just biding time. They did not understand its demands ...

4118. God’s Safety Net

Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon

D. Wayne Burkette

... is so identified with human need that the way we respond to the needy of the world is the way we respond to the Lord himself. It would appear that the Lord of the church is saying to those who are the church that we are to be, in some sense, God’s safety net. How much more plain could it be said than in this parable that the church’s love for Christ will be realized or lost by our efforts to feed and clothe and shelter and console? The world is filled with persons who are unprotected, uncared for ...

4119. The Keeper of the Covenant

Exodus 31:1-11

Sermon

... of a lamb played in it? Or why not golden sandals? Hadn’t they walked all the way? Why a calf? Did they expect to become a nation of cattle herders, or did Aaron think this would make them more like other peoples and, thereby, create a sense of security and peace - or were they just hungry for red meat? No one, I suppose, will ever completely fathom that answer, but the bottom line is that they accepted the new gods that the golden calf represented and celebrated with a great festival. What happened in ...

4120. The Penalty for Betraying God’s Trust

Numbers 27:12-23

Sermon

... he was 120 years old when he died and was placed in an unmarked grave, his death, from this perspective, was tragic, even premature, because he could have done much more for God and his people. From the human perspective, premature deaths seldom make any sense. A forty-two-year-old colleague died of cancer not long after he received his Ph.D., and an extremely promising career was cut short. A young mother, who seemed to have everything to live for and was a genuine servant to others, died when twenty ...

4121. The Beginning of a New Life

Ruth 2:1-23

Sermon

... , if it were a type of intrigue, was an innocent as well a desperate move on her part, the only thing she could do to make some kind of a future for herself and Naomi. Ruth left home and went with Naomi because she loved her and had a deep sense of loyalty to her. She did not do it to gain any kind of reward, but her sacrificial love was what moved Boaz to recompense her as she worked in his fields. And that is as it is with God and those who place their trust for deliverance and salvation ...

4122. The City Unshakeable

Psalm 46:1-11, Hebrews 12:25-29

Sermon

... , and continue to feel today. We look at great symbols of our country - twin towers that symbolize free trade, a root fact of our way of life, and a five-sided building that signifies national military might, our assumption of national security - and we have a sense of despair. What the people of ancient Jerusalem missed is that while God was in the midst of the city, he called them to trust not a place but a Presence. And if they had paid attention to their history, they'd have seen that the dwelling ...

4123. Rekindling Our Fires

Illustration

Among the ancient Indian cultures of Central and South America there was usually a highly developed sense of community. Various rituals and routines were used to demonstrate identity and inter-dependence. Typical of these was a ritual of re-lighting fires. The people lived in homes as we do, about the city and the country. At the center stood their temple, and in the temple burned a ...

4124. Let Christ Speak The Word

Luke 7:1-10

Sermon

... rainy monsoons. It was a period of intense fighting between the Communist and Laotian government forces who were supported by the Americans. Late one night, as Dooley was sitting in the main room of his house, he heard a great racket outside. Sensing that something was happening out there, he took a flashlight and walked out onto the front porch. Dr. Dooley writes that the mountains all around the village looked as though they were covered by swarms of lightning bugs - they were blinking, flickering lights ...

4125. A Joyful New Beginning

John 20:1-9

Sermon

... in Jesus Christ. The risen Lord himself calls us to live in his joy now and forever. That is what it means to participate in the joy of eternal life. Easter Day presents us with an opportunity for a joyful new beginning which can enable us to make sense out of our past and to hope for the future. The greater message is that we can experience the power of the risen Christ here and now. This is the reason why we are here dressed in our newest and best clothing this glorious Easter Day. Because Christ lives ...

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