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 4226 to 4250 of 4947 results

4226. Do You Have the Great Pearl?

Matthew 13:47-52, Matthew 13:44-46

Sermon

Dennis Kastens

... , of enjoying one round of sinful pleasure after another. To them gluttony is the norm, drunkenness is a legitimate pleasure, and gambling is good sportsmanship. Loose morals are the spice of life. But in the end come heartaches, sorrow, sadness, remorse, shame, and a sense of guilt. In reality, the aim of the Christian is similar to that of an art connoisseur. Rather than having twenty inferior pictures on the walls of his home, he would rather have just one good one to which his eye could ever travel ...

4227. Scenes From a Marriage

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Sermon

Craig Erickson

... nice to have in a marriage, to say the least. But there’s a darker side to these drives, which are ever so easily sullied by the human proclivity to dominance and manipulation. "Scenes from a Marriage" is a tragedy in the classic sense, for Bergman’s husband and wife characters are fatally flawed. They lack that which alone keeps virtues from becoming something other than virtues. They lack grace. Without grace, the best of human intentions becomes tragically disoriented. It is grace that keeps a tragic ...

4228. Who Are God’s People?

Exodus 19:1-25

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... nor acknowledged God as its God. We are a secular nation separated from the church, and various religions flourish in our country. Indeed, some Americans make Americanism identical with Christianity, but this is a mistake. Our text calls God’s people a "holy nation" in the sense that we are an entity scattered among all nations. The emphasis is not to be placed upon "nation" but upon "holy." What does it mean to be a holy people? To be holy is to be different from the world. God is holy and the world ...

4229. We Are Driven!

Jeremiah 20:7-18

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... for us that we might be reconciled and accepted by the Father. Without him, we sinful human beings could expect nothing but death and hell. Think of our deliverance! How marvelous! How wonderful! This means that we can live these earthly days with a sense of victory. Sinners cannot ultimately prevail nor succeed. Where is Pilate or Herod or Caiaphas? What happened to the Watergate leaders - Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell? Evil and evil-doers will go down in defeat. The final victory over all evil will come when ...

4230. Stuffed Bodies and Skinny Souls!

Isaiah 55:1-13

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... something transcendental. People are spiritually starved, and they grasp at food which is not bread at all but simply chaff. These cults constitute a challenge to the church to be more spiritual so that hungry people will find bread that is beyond money and price. Hear! When we sense our spiritual hunger, naturally we look where we can get food for our souls. In our text, God tells us, "Hear, that your soul may live." The food we want and need is in God. Just as God said in Christ, "Come to me," so here he ...

4231. Is Your Sin My Business?

Ezekiel 33:1-20

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... is separation from God. A soul apart from him means death just as a branch dies when torn from the vine. God is love and to be separated from him means to live in hatred. God is hope and to be apart from him spells despair. In the biblical sense, death does not mean extinction. If that were so, death would be a blessing, the end of all our cares. Probably some who commit suicide are under this false impression. The soul apart from God continues to exist, but it is away from God - from life, light, and love ...

4232. Two Bodies for Two Worlds

Isaiah 26:1-21

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... in the church’s commital service, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust." When the physical body has served its purpose, we lay it aside by dying. There are several implications that result from this basic fact of life. One is that there is no need nor sense of trying to preserve the dead physical body as though we were going to use it again in the next world. Many of our funerals are very expensive. We embalm the body as though it were to last for ages. We use copper caskets and place them in ...

4233. Christian The King

Ezekiel 34:1-31

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... . Kings and queens are the most important and the greatest persons in the realm. If then, we Christians are kings and queens, we have inherent worth and dignity. Our value depends upon who we are, what we were made by God. This gives each of us a sense of self-worth, self-respect, and self-esteem. We do not think of ourselves as serfs or slaves but as people of honor and dignity. This comes out in our daily lives by the way we work, live, and talk. During slavery days, a northern visiter watched slaves ...

4234. Your Money and Your Life

Matthew 6:19-24

Sermon

Robert Bachelder

... to purchase a pearl of greater price by contributing to our United Church of Christ Hunger Action Fund, which combats hunger and poverty here and abroad. That would be a Lenten sacrifice which counts for something. By doing this you will begin to experience a new sense of freedom. You will be emboldened to make additional sacrifices of non-essentials and your values will become more like those of Jesus himself. We should sacrifice not until it hurts, but until it begins to feel good and we come to see it is ...

4235. A Book Which Reads Us

John 4:1-26

Sermon

Robert Bachelder

... is shriveling up the souls of our young people, painfully, and they are using alcohol as an anaesthetic. In Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illyich, Ivan could resist the pain of his cancer as long as he believed his life had meaning. When he lost a sense of meaning, however, he could only scream. When teenagers repeatedly get drunk, they are really screaming. They are crying: Does anybody care about me? Does life really matter? Does it matter to anyone what I am doing? Am I loved? In the Gospel of Christ the ...

4236. Loving Unconditionally

John 13:31-38

Sermon

Robert Bachelder

... that all heavenly and earthly powers must bow the knee before Christ. These passages do seem to suggest that the road to salvation is narrow indeed. One can begin to see how St. Augustine could say of the unbeliever: Compel him to come into the Church. How do we make sense of this apparent conflict? Let us be quick to affirm that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. But then let us go on to ask if we are entirely clear in what his way consists. Let us be quick to affirm that Christ now reigns ...

4237. General William Booth

Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon

Carroll Gunkel

... led Booth out of the Wesleyan movement led him into the conviction that an army can have only one general, and by God’s will William Booth was general of the Salvation Army; as such he expected total obedience from his soldiers. That sense of demanding discipline has, to a large measure, accounted for the success of the Salvationist movement. These problems notwithstanding, the Salvation Army of William Booth has been the means whereby untold numbers of people have, like the Army’s founder, met the ...

4238. Hiltgunt Margaret Zassenhaus

Deuteronomy 31:1-8

Sermon

Carroll Gunkel

... we rush to judgment on the German people for their sheep-like acquiescence to Hitlerism, let us remember that most of us have at one time or another been deceived by national leaders. We have had full stomachs, comfortable homes, good jobs, and a sense of personal security and have deemed these accoutrements to be sufficiently worthy to he able to say, "We have good government." The very government, which has provided us the creature comforts we believe to be so vital, has at the same time, on occasion ...

4239. Reach Out and Touch Someone

Acts 2:1-13

Sermon

Peter Rudowski

... and touched someone." God reached out and touched his disciples. God reached out to us. As I sat and read that lesson, I asked myself, "What do you say?" The lesson for Pentecost is always the same, year after year. What new twist can we take that would make some sense to us? I decided I would try to put my feet in the shoes of the people who lived that day. I would try to walk the streets of Jerusalem. As I slid my feet into the shoes of the Jews who lived in that city and the Jews who ...

4240. "Two Men in White Suits"

Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon

Peter Rudowski

... to have the principal say to me that I had been recommended to run for school president. He checked my record and noted that I didn’t have any discipline cards. Would I be willing to run for that office? I don’t think I heard any other words. The sense of relief that rushed through my body at that moment was magnificent. I felt like the man in the Prudential ad going up the escalator with those two men in the white suits, saying, "Wow, at least we’re going up." The judgment - at least we’re going up ...

4241. A Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Acts 9:1-19a

Sermon

George Bass

... is included in the "Days of Commemoration" in our worship book but Loyola is not; Xavier is to be remembered as a great Christian missionary and confessor rather than as a Jesuit. Loyola gets the same treatment from Lutherans that, in one sense, Luther used to receive from Roman Catholics. The past decade and a half has witnessed a near-inquisition in one part of American Lutheranism, deep divisions in congregations over neo-Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, and power-politics in the churches so ...

4242. Telling the Right Story

2 Timothy 3:10--4:8

Sermon

George Bass

... , with all of his heart; he certainly must have told it to all who would listen, and he just had to write it down so that it could be told to people who were beyond the sound of his voice. John Mark was an evangelist in every sense of the word, preaching and witnessing as opportunity presented itself and, perhaps, as Paul gave him assignments, and finally putting the story into manuscript form as the Gospel of St. Mark. John Cheever once wrote an interesting little story about an English-speaking man in mid ...

4243. A Person Approved by Christ

John 1:43-51

Sermon

George Bass

... was Bartholomew. In this respect, he was really a child-like person, and this part of Bartholomew’s character, as Jesus perceived it, appealed to him very much. As Zukav comments: "The child in us is always naive, innocent in the simplistic sense," and this means that "the beginner is open to many possibilities." At that point in the story, even if Bartholomew has the highly desirable quality of guilelessness, his mind actually seems closed to "many possibilities" in Jesus Christ: "Can anything good come ...

4244. Call Him a Story Teller

Luke 1:1-4

Sermon

George Bass

... . John: ‘And when you are old another will lead you whither you will not go.’ In the car he stared straight ahead. His face was white; but when Aunt Dorothy got in behind the wheel, he said firmly, ‘Home, Dorothy.’ He knew he had had a heart attack and sensed he was going to die. But he wasn’t going to be taken to any hospital." He lived his last couple of days at home. Coffin continues: "The day before he died he slept most of the time awakening only in the early evening to ask Aunt Dorothy what ...

4245. Who Keeps Getting in My Way?

Matthew 5:1-12

Sermon

Wallace H. Kirby

... is of God and not self. I suppose we could come closer to understanding this first Beatitude if we were to substitute the word "ego" in its earlier meaning for the word "spirit." Blessed are those who are poor in ego. Ego means self in the sense of too much emphasis on self: self-satisfaction, self-seeking, self-centeredness. Words like pride, conceit, and self-importance describe us if we are rich in ego. We’re like a character named Edith described by a writer in a novel as "a little country bounded ...

4246. Do I Dare Be Different?

Matthew 5:10; 10:1-42

Sermon

Wallace H. Kirby

... who knows it all. If we’re not careful, it can make us intolerant and argumentative, critical and rebellious. Unhappily, some of us Christians have a streak in our nature that enjoys being disliked and persecuted, and we derive from our martyred feelings a sense of morbid satisfaction. We enjoy being unpopular because we think it makes us feel that we are morally superior and proves that we really are Christians. It is only too easy to let our difference turn us into snobbish Pharisees who pray in the ...

4247. What Does It Mean To "Believe"?

Romans 4:1-25

Sermon

Dennis Kastens

... the simple word "Believe." Now what is the meaning of "believe"? The dictionary says, "to consent with the mind." When you, therefore, have given "intellectual assent to the truth," you have believed. You have taken the second step. But you are not saved. In this sense you can believe all you want to believe about Jesus Christ, and still not be saved. You can believe everything about the Bible, and yet perish eternally. This is the fate of demons. James 2:19 states: "Thou believest that there is one God ...

4248. Overcoming Self

Philippians 1:1-11

Sermon

Dennis Kastens

... something of resurrection, something of new life. The Bible says, "God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble." Such a response is in total contrast to the Pharisee in Luke 18, the well-known account of the "Publican and Sinner" which, in a sense, parallels our text. The Pharisee in that story lacked such humility! He was a proud man, thinking only of himself, his own image. His interests were all that mattered. To be sure, he may have listened to others’ interests, but he did so primarily that ...

4249. Faith A New Potential for Life

Romans 4:1-25

Sermon

Robert G. Tuttle

... for a moment, black being white; being my enemy for a moment, my enemy being me for a moment. God was in Christ, being us! He was understanding us, suffering with us, loving us. By the mystery of our faith, God makes us righteous, loving persons. We sense a new unknown power, a new exponent, a new capacity; we are newly alive and growing. Back to our Scripture: "(Abraham) staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith." And the world became a different place. Am I ready for ...

4250. On Being Lifted Beyond Ourselves

Romans 8:18-27

Sermon

Robert G. Tuttle

... were born out of the depths of his despairing spirit, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." Something in him declared a faith he did not have until he heard himself speaking the words. His unutterable groanings were finding expression, and they were making sense. The Spirit himself was speaking for him, through him, and the light was dawning. In final spiritual birth pangs, the Spirit cried out in Job and through Job, "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee." Job ...

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