Sermon and Worship Resources

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Showing 4226 to 4250 of 5000 results

4226. A New Look for a New Year

Ephesians 1:1-14

Sermon

Fredrick R. Harm

Just a few days ago we greeted loved ones and friends with a cheery, "Happy New Year." And we sincerely hoped it would be a year of joy and happiness for all. A New Year's card put it beautifully: "I am the New Year -- all that I have I give with love unspoken. All that I ask -- you keep the faith unbroken!" Newspapers and magazines covered the fascinating story of Admiral Richard Byrd's second trip to the South Pole. The 180th meridian is an imaginary but important marker. It is the International Date ...

4227. Everybody Loves a Parade!

1 Corinthians 7:1-40

Sermon

Fredrick R. Harm

This is the season for parades. Not long ago we watched the Rose Bowl parade on television; on Thanksgiving Day, Macys of New York entertained us with its Turkey Day extravaganza. Our text for today calls attention to another, and more sobering, parade: the parade of life, the pageant of this world. "For the present form of this world is passing away" (v. 31). The words "passing away" are a translation of a Greek word meaning "to lead by." It suggests the picture of a parade of soldiers being led past a ...

4228. What a Resume!

2 Corinthians 2:12--3:6

Sermon

Fredrick R. Harm

If you were to visit the Library of Congress and look up Jesus of Nazareth in the card catalog of authors, you will not find a single entry. Thousands of books have been written about Jesus, but he himself wrote no books, not even a pamphlet or tract. He was able to write, we know. When a woman accused of adultery was brought to him, Jesus "bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger" (John 8:5). Giovanni Papini suggested that he chose the sand on which to write "expressly that the wind ...

4229. The Source

Hebrews 4:14-5:10

Sermon

Paul E. Robinson

One of the most precious and indispensable needs you and I have is to be able to have at least one person in the world who truly understands us. How often have we known folks who try to be such a one for us, but we know they just don't understand. Surely there are many of you here today who carry great burdens of worry or anxiety or fear. Just the words job or spouse or child or cancer or finances or death bring up such an overwhelming baggage of emotions. (And for some of you, you are already gone and ...

4230. Stop the Offerings!

Hebrews 10:19-39

Sermon

Paul E. Robinson

Go with me to the year 1968, to the basement of Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was the student assistant at that church, while attending Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. One Sunday morning, immediately following the Sunday school hour, the senior high teacher came hurrying into the fellowship hall and engaged me in an almost desperate conversation. The question had been raised in his class that morning, "How could the death of a man 2,000 years ago ...

4231. Easy to Say, Hard to Do

1 John 4:7-21

Sermon

Paul E. Robinson

"Love is a many splendored thing...." Or so we heard Don Cornwall and the Four Aces sing time and again. Of course you or I might have other words to describe love, depending on our situation. Love. "I love you." "I love to play golf." "I just love pistachio lush!" "It's tough to love some people." "Jesus loves me, this I know." Love. What can be said about love that has not already been said? The writer of the first letter of John obviously thought deeply about love and did his best to write about it. ...

4232. Spelling Doesn't Count

1 John 5:1-12

Sermon

Paul E. Robinson

How many of you know what BASE jumping is? BASE jumping is the very scary sport of jumping off Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth objects. If you want to do it more than once, you jump with a parachute or perhaps a hang glider. Some of you may have seen examples of this daring sport on television. An example: Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner, 30, took a sunrise swan dive off the outstretched hand of the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro. BASE jumpers, who parachute from ...

4233. Grace in the Midst of Exasperation

Romans 8:1-17

Sermon

Glenn McDonald

Spiritual storytelling (a.k.a. "my testimony") is often an inspiring experience for a gathered group of Christians. It is also inherently risky. The risk is that the story will sound wonderful. Whenever the overwhelming number of details of someone's garden-variety life are squeezed down to a significant few, it can seem that that four-minute abridged version of existence is fabulously more exciting or meaningful than anything the rest of us have experienced in the previous forty years. We may say to each ...

4234. Grace in the Midst of the Crush of Time

2 Corinthians 6:3-13

Sermon

Glenn McDonald

In the year 2000 Forbes Magazine featured a special edition on a single topic that it called "the biggest issue of our age -- time." The editors wrote, "We've beaten, or at least stymied, most of humanity's monsters: disease, climate, geography, and memory. But time still defeats us. Lately its victories seem more complete than ever. Those timesaving inventions of the last half-century have somehow turned on us. We now hold cell phone meetings in traffic jams, and 24-7 has become the most terrifying phrase ...

4235. Grace in the Midst of Unanswered Prayer

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

Sermon

Glenn McDonald

No one ever really prepares you for your first theological bull session. Usually it arrives without fanfare or advance warning. Usually it happens long before you enter the relative clear-headedness of your adult years, or before you take that philosophy course in college. Usually it happens when you're a junior high school student, up late with friends at a sleepover, or camping out in somebody's backyard. There's just something about a smoky fire and charred food and stars out overhead that turns twelve- ...

4236. People See Through Us

James 2:1-13

Sermon

Harold Warlick

A lasting contribution to American life was made by a simple business woman who turned a small bakery on Long Island into America's best-known and largest baked goods company. In 1925, then nineteen-year-old Martha Schneider married her boss, William Entenmann. The two expanded their bread and rolls shop into a thriving home delivery business. When William died in 1951, Martha assumed management of the office and kept the company's books. At the time, quality baked goods came in white paper boxes tied up ...

4237. Lift High the Tree

John 12:20-36

Sermon

George Bass

Suddenly, we are a week ahead of our Lenten schedule. This story belongs to the Week of the Passion of our Lord, because it occurs sometime between the days we call Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. It was during that interval that a group of Gentiles, who were simply called Greeks, approached Philip with the request to see Jesus. Jesus must have been in some sort of seclusion pondering, no doubt, what was about to happen to him. His retort to Philip and Andrew, when he heard the request, certainly suggests ...

4238. The Lions Are Shackled

John 18:1-19:42

Sermon

King Duncan

Nearly three decades ago, a California minister had himself nailed to a cross as a protest against crime in the streets. The Reverend Willie Dicks, of St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in San Jose, set up a 9-foot by 12-foot wooden cross in a park in Oakland. Removing his white cotton gown, he leaned against the cross and extended his arms. Using carpenter’s nails sprayed with Bactine, an assistant affixed the pastor to the cross, hammering the nails through the skin between the third and fourth fingers ...

4239. Yes! (Easter Sunday)

John 20:1-9

Sermon

King Duncan

Dr. John Trent tells about a wedding video he once saw. The video was shot from the back of the church looking up the aisle toward the bride and groom. Because of the camera angle, you could see several members of the congregation. Suddenly, during the vows, a man jumped up from his pew and yelled, “Yes, Yes, Yes!” as he pumped his fist. Then he froze and slid down into his seat--and sheepishly took off his headphones. It turned out he had been listening to the Auburn-Alabama football game, and his ...

4240. Joy to the World

Isaiah 61:1-11

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

Open the hymnals. Pull out the stops on the organ, for we are going to sing a song. What song shall we sing? We could sing Martin Luther's hymn of the Reformation, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." Maybe a hymn by Charles Wesley, such as "And Can It Be," would express how we feel about our Christian faith. We might want to consider something on a little more feeling level like Joseph M. Scriven's "What A Friend We Have In Jesus," or Fanny J. Crosby's "To God Be The Glory." No, let's not sing any of these. ...

4241. A Song, A Dance, A Savior

Jeremiah 30:1--31:40

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

Simon Wiesenthal in his book, The Sunflower, relates a discussion that took place at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp when he was a young Jewish prisoner. Wiesenthal was sound asleep one night when Arthur, another young prisoner, a sort of dreamy skeptic, grabbed him by the shoulder and began to shake him awake. "Simon, do you hear?" "Yes," he stammered, "I hear." "I hope you are listening; you really must hear what the old woman said." "What could she have said?" "She said ...'God was on leave.' What do ...

4242. I'll Be Somewhere Listening

1 Samuel 3:1--4:1

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

Children are very perceptive. When our friend's daughter was small, if she was talking to her father or her mother and she felt that they were not quite tuned in to what she was saying, she would adamantly inform them that they were not listening to her. Sometimes she would take a different approach, especially if they were seated in a chair or on the couch. She would be talking away and realize that they were not giving her their undivided attention. Her approach to handling their inattentiveness was to ...

4243. The Gospel According to Johan

Jonah 3:1-10

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

Have you ever encountered a real "Scrooge"? I'm speaking about a negative, critical, carping, demanding, selfish person who cannot stand to see other people happy and enjoying life. You remember that the original Scrooge was a figment of the imagination of Charles Dickens, the great English author. Out of the imaginative mind of Dickens comes "A Christmas Carol" whose main character is one, Ebenezer Scrooge, whom Dickens calls, "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" ...

4244. Going Down to Look Up

2 Kings 5:1-27

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

Our story opens with Naaman, the military Chief of Staff of the Aramean army. Naaman is a very great man who has received the favor of the King of Aram, Syria, because of his victory over Israel. Anytime Israel lost a battle or a war, the disaster was felt to be the hand of God at work. In the theology of ancient Israel, no foreign army could be victorious over Israel unless it was God's will. As we read this story in 2 Kings 5, we come to the conclusion that Israel's defeat is in accordance with the will ...

4245. The House of Hope

Hosea 2:2-23

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

A friend of mine lives in a remote area of the United States which has a very low emotional quotient. Because of this, alcoholism is rampant, incest is above average, and spousal abuse is prevalent. One of the dominating social ills is the abuse suffered by teenagers. In a recent study released by the state where my friend resides, a survey revealed that one out of every three teenagers has been abused sexually. In order to help these teens who have suffered mentally, emotionally, and physically because of ...

4246. Preparing for Our Homecoming

Joel 1:1-12

Sermon

Richard Gribble

The idea of going home is experienced by various people in different ways, depending on circumstances, time, past history, and many other important factors. When we are young, the experience of returning home is generally very pleasant, not troublesome, and most often an opportunity which we all welcome. If we were away from our home visiting grandparents or a friend, or even the day-to-day return home from school, it was nice to know that we had returned. Home was a place of safety; it was the location of ...

4247. Look Inside and Discover Life

Numbers 21:4-9

Sermon

Richard Gribble

Oscar Wilde's short novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, written in the early part of the twentieth century, describes the life of a tortured man who is unable to look honestly at his life. He refuses to look inside and accept who he truly is. Dorian is a physically handsome young man who possesses power, wealth, and prestige, the three great assets and temptations of contemporary life. An artist, Basil Hallward, who is enamored at Dorian's presence, paints a portrait of him, which is indeed a master work. ...

4248. Teammates in the Cause of the Lord

Acts 4:32-37

Sermon

Richard Gribble

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below." Grantland ...

4249. The Reality of the Resurrection

Luke 24:36-49

Sermon

Brett Blair

Many years ago a teacher was asking the kids in her fourth grade class to name the person whom they considered the greatest human being alive in the world today and the responses were quick in forthcoming and also quite varied too. A little boy spoke up and said, "I think it's Tiger Woods. He’s the greatest golfer in the world, ever" A little girl said, "I think it's the Pope because he cares for people and doesn't get paid for it at all." Another little girl said, "I think it's President Bush because he's ...

4250. No Other Name

Acts 4:1-22

Sermon

King Duncan

What is it that constitutes an emergency when it comes to your health? I ask that question because researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston found that emergency room visits at hospitals in Boston slowed significantly when the Red Sox were in the World Series in 2004. During especially crucial match ups, such as Game 7 of the league championship series and the final game of the World Series, emergency-room traffic fell by up to 20 percent, as fans stayed glued to their TV sets. "It's as if when they ...

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