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 4451 to 4475 of 4943 results

4451. Get Lost

Mark 8:31-38

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... to remind myself of that. Like many of you, I was raised, and conditioned, to believe that my worth as an individual is dependent on my own achievements, especially as measured against other people. Which meant that I was always worried about how I was doing, always concerned about what other people thought about me, and what I was doing. Since I was never doing very well, against the norms that I had used to measure my performance, I was tempted on the one hand to despair, to drop out, give up, and not ...

4452. Have You Heard about Grace?

Romans 5:1-11

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. If you are a United Methodist, then you stand in that Reformation tradition. Like anything that happened over 450 years ago, much of the Reformation is dated and is no longer interesting or helpful to us. It was concerned with questions raised in the 16th century, which are not our questions. But there is at least one permanent contribution that Luther has made for all of us, and that is to emphasize that Christianity is about grace. It is not about rules or ...

4453. I Thought You'd Never Ask

John 1:35-46

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... feast at Cana, where Jesus changes the water into wine, and after that is the scene of Jesus upsetting the tables in the Temple, two action scenes which are there to make the announcement about who he is in relation to Judaism. That doesn't really concern us in this context. But immediately after that come encounters with two people who are searching for something, though they don't know it. Not until they meet Jesus. And they are two very different kinds of people. The first is Nicodemus. He is a wealthy ...

4454. If You Look Like Your Passport Photo

Luke 9:28-36

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... is, like the coin. When you look at the sun you see a ball of fire.] No, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, Holy, Holy is God, the Lord Almighty. I question not my corporeal or vegetable eye, anymore that I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, not with it. Blake is saying the eye is just an instrument. The vision is the gift. We look through the eye, not with it. They eye won't see what it doesn't know what to look for. Every child who has played ...

4455. Lateral Thinking

Luke 10:25-37

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... him." Now let me tell you what the expectation would be if you were a Jew. The Samaritan is going to finish off this poor guy lying in the ditch. That's the kind of people Samaritans were, as far as the Jew was concerned. Samaritans were identified as the enemy. There was a saying in those days, "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." Everybody knew this. You just ask anyone. Samaritans are immoral, unprincipled, opportunistic, mercenary, rapacious and violent. You would never trust a Samaritan. If you had ...

4456. Let Us Pray

James 5:13-20

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... he would like to accompany us to our car, which he did. We stood there at our car and talked to him for about fifteen or twenty minutes. He talked to us as if we were the only people around, as if we were the only people he had any concern for, as if he had nothing else to do but talk to us. He asked about our family, our jobs, intensely interested in us. He took us into the "holy spaciousness" of his life. We said goodbye, and Jean and I felt that we had an old friend. I will ...

4457. Plain Talk

Luke 6:17-26

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... come. In God's time. In the meantime, Christians are to identify with the poor. You can't be a Christian and store up wealth for the future, and ignore those people who have nothing in the present. You can't dine sumptuously everyday, and not be concerned about those who are hungry. You can't laugh and have a good time, and not care that there are people in this world, especially children, who have never smiled. Someday that is going to be different. In the meantime, we as Christians are somehow tied to ...

4458. Reflections on a Bumper Sticker

Mark 2:1-12

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... paralytic himself. Which raises another interesting question, will my faith help somebody else? Can faith be vicarious? I don't know. But I do know what people have said. They've said, "I've felt your prayers." Or, "I was uplifted by the knowledge of your concern and prayers for me." I know that Archbishop Tutu, in South Africa, said many times that what kept him going in the fight against apartheid during the struggle in South Africa, for all those years, were the prayers of people around the world that he ...

4459. Stay in the City

Luke 24:44-53

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... of street crime in New York is due to the reinstitution of civility in the city. We could start there, at least, with civility. It is no small matter. Civility will transform a society, start to turn a city into a community, where we are concerned about everybody, and where we follow Jesus' command to love our neighbors, to take it seriously. A nurse in training went to one of her classes one day. The professor announced that there would be a pop quiz. She breezed through the questions, until she ...

4460. Stirring Things Up

Mark 13:1-8, Hebrews 10:11-25

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... trouble understanding mission. I would guess the attendance was down. "Let's not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some." He doesn't mention any names, but, of course, everybody knew who he was talking about. Attendance is down. He is concerned about attendance, because attendance is important for the encouragement of Christian disciples in a hostile world. When I started preaching, over thirty years ago now, I always felt I had to say something about the way the Church was in the first century ...

4461. The Big Temptation

Matthew 4:1-11

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... , the temptation to be in charge. That's what the devil was offering Jesus. If I could only be in charge. If I could only control things, like my future, or my present for that matter. I have to be honest, and say, my future is increasingly a matter of concern to me. I mean, I've made plans. I've stored up provisions. I've tried to take charge of my life. You know that phrase, "Take charge of your life." The wise men of this age tell us to do that, and I have tried to do it. But ...

4462. The Sin of Being Less

Colossians 3:1-14

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... describes that world, the world that Paul addressed his letter to, that word is "despair." It was the Greek world that invented the idea of tragedy, the idea that our lives are controlled by fate, by some cold and indifferent power that has no concern about our feelings or aspirations. It is also in that Greek world that Ecclesiastes was written. Ecclesiastes is in the Old Testament, part of the Hebrew scripture, but it is really Greek literature. In the Book of Ecclesiastes is the famous line, "For every ...

4463. The Source of Self Esteem

Romans 8:14-25

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... up with the little girl. She was apparently taking a shortcut across the campus to go to her house. He starts talking to her. They stop, carry on a conversation while they are standing there. Then it occurs to Tully Knowles that the girl's parents are probably concerned about where she is. So he tells her to go on home, saying, "You tell your mommy that you were talking to Tully Knowles." She said, "You tell your mommy that you were talking to Sarah Albright." Now that's self-esteem. That is exactly the way ...

4464. The Time of Waiting Is Over

Mark 1:14-20

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... now. The time of waiting for that life to come to you is over. The reign of God is here. Repentance means, reject the idea that you are trapped by something so that you can't realize the life that you want to live. As far as your salvation is concerned, there are only two times. There is the time for waiting for it to come, and there is the time of choosing it. The coming of Jesus into our world, casting out demons, means the time of waiting is over, the new age is here. Now your life is in ...

4465. This Is Not Rocket Science

Acts 2:1-8

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... faith. The beginning of our faith goes clear back to Abraham and Sarah. It is just amazing. Before Abraham, everybody in the world believed that the gods, or God, were separated from us, foreign to us, and indifferent to us. After Abraham, God is revealed as concerned about us. And what was most surprising and shocking of all, was God is gracious toward us. God chose Abraham, and all of Abraham and Sarah's descendants, to be his people, not for any virtue the Jews had within themselves, but only because of ...

4466. Two Women

Luke 1:39-45

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... turning numbers inexorably, counting the billions of people on this planet. Mary was just one of those. That's who Mary was, a nobody. Emily Dickinson has a poem with this wonderful line. "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you Nobody too?" As far as the world was concerned, that's who Mary was. And the revelation coming to us at Christmas is, God does not treat her that way. God does not treat her as a nobody. God treats her as if she were special. And it must have shown, because the minute Elizabeth sees her ...

4467. Until It Dawns on You

Matthew 17:1-9

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... the north. Jerusalem is in the south. I imagine Palestine to be like California. Galilee in the north would be where the San JoaquinValley is. Jerusalem would be down south, where Los Angeles is. It's a bad place, Jerusalem, as far as the Galileans were concerned. San Diego on this map, incidentally, would be the Garden of Eden. Jerusalem, in our mind, is a holy city. We visit it as tourists, or on religious pilgrimages with our pastors. But in the minds of the Galileans in the first century, Jerusalem was ...

4468. Uses of the Past

Philippians 3:4b-16

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... Jesus Christ." Then he comes down to earth all of a sudden, as if he has forgotten something. He writes, "Let us hold on to what we have attained," as if his enthusiasm for pressing on to the future threatened to overwhelm another equally important concern. So it is something like this. Mature Christians are those who move into the future in faith, but hold on to what they have attained. Which works out as a pretty healthy axiom, and a good guideline for the Church. Especially a church that is celebrating ...

4469. What Time Is It?

Matthew 24:36-51

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... New Testament. The church at Thessalonica had two questions. One, "What happens to those who die before the Lord returns?" Second, "When will he return?" Paul answers the first question in the fourth chapter with these beautiful words: "We would not have you ignorant concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as those who have no hope." What a wonderful passage. It recognizes that human grief belongs to all of us. Christian faith does not immunize you from the tragedies of life, or from the ...

4470. When to Be Extravagant

John 12:1-8

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... going to stand up and say, "Why are we spending all of this money on ourselves when we should give it to those who really need it?" That is not an inappropriate question. That is a typical Church question. It is the moral question. Church people are concerned about that. You can't be Christian and spend extravagantly in the face of all of the misery in this world, the starvation of people, especially children. You can't do that and be a Christian. So Judas' question is a good question. "Why was this perfume ...

4471. When to Hold On

II Timothy 3:14-4:5

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... one another. Carter put it in this marvelous phrase: "Civility is a way of loving the stranger." Which is not only a command that has been given to us by Jesus, but is a necessary part of being a civilized nation, to love the stranger, to be concerned about people we don't even know but who are fellow citizens, fellow human beings. Loving the stranger. He says that civility is taught by three institutions in any society, and three that are in crisis in our time. One is the home, another is the Church ...

4472. While You Are Waiting

Matthew 25:1-13

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... in life. A lot of people live in misery simply because they don't expect anything more for themselves. I can remember back in the 80's, there was an organization called Beyond War. Some of you were involved with it, I know, in this church. It was concerned about changing the mentality that said that war is inevitable, because you will probably get what you expect. So they said, if we expect peace, then maybe we will get peace. And they set out to change the way people think about the future. I think it ...

4473. Will You Be in that Number?

John 11:32-44

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... back row raised his hand, "When you were in heaven, did you see my mother?" The actor was stunned. He didn't know how to answer. He knew that for the boy to ask that question, he must have lost his mother recently. It must be a matter of ultimate concern for him. He knew he had to say something. Then he heard himself say, "I'm not sure if she was the one I think she was. But if she was, she was the prettiest angel there."1 You can be in that number, when the saints go marching in ...

4474. You Will Never Walk Alone

Luke 24:13-20, 25-26, 28-35

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... depending on your need, where you are traveling, where you've been, what you have been through. But the advice is essentially the same. Travel light. Don't get bogged down having to worry about your baggage. Don't get preoccupied with the wrong things. Don't get concerned about things that are on the periphery of life, the things that are not essential to life, because you will miss the joy of the journey. That is why when anybody asked Jesus advice on how you travel in this life, how you get to the Kingdom ...

4475. In the Darkness of Anxiety, There Is the Light of Peace

Luke 2:8-20

Sermon

Thomas A. Pilgrim

... that you will accept the promise of God’s peace. A young lady was on her way to China where she would serve as a missionary, teaching in a Christian school. She had to travel by boat, and she found the voyage to be long and difficult. She had many concerns about this and wondered how she would be able to survive there. One night, she had a dream in which she was standing on a plank out in the ocean. In her dream, God told her to start walking toward China. She said she could not do it. She could ...

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