Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 26 to 50 of 3160 results

Acts 4:1-22

Sermon

Durwood L. Buchheim

... . In Christ, life begins to make sense. In Christ we experience purpose, meaning, and satisfaction. In Christ, living is no longer a treadmill existence of one thing after another. Yes, living in Christ, the world is different, because we are different. This was sort of Peter’s standard sermon. He preached it with boldness. In fact, Peter is an excellent model of a preacher practicing what he preached. Luke tells us that Peter stepped in the pulpit before the Sanhedrin, "full of the Spirit." Have you ever ...

27. Good News, Release, and Comfort

Isaiah 61:1-11

Sermon

Richard L. Eslinger

... and figuratively, we have become brokenhearted. And we need to be bound up. We need good tidings. That’s the way it was for Israel. The exile had been like one great big coronary for God’s people. But now they were home ... and still afflicted. So in all sorts of ways, we too have had our exiles and are now home. We’ve been afflicted and the wounds still hurt. And that anointing with the Spirit of the Lord is not only needed by Isaiah. We need it too. We need the healing of Christ’s presence. Here ...

28. Life's Not Always Fair, But God Will Straighten It Out

Habakkuk 2:2-20, Habakkuk 1:12--2:1, Habakkuk 1:1-4

Sermon

Mark Ellingsen

... on the treadmill with few alternatives, there is hope. New and better days are coming. God will see to it. Trust him. The Black church in America has a long history of being sustained this way by a hope for the end times. (The technical term for this sort of hope for the end times is to call it an “eschatological hope.”) Life may not be fair, but God is, and so the future has plenty of wonderful possibilities. The slaves understood the Exodus story as a story about their future, about how God was going ...

29. Swimming With The Sharks

Mark 9:2-13

Sermon

King Duncan

... To see Christ as he really is is to experience personal transformation. C. S. Lewis put it quite pointedly: "He (Jesus) never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder, in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present ...

30. A Shocking Revelation

Revelation 1:9-20

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... of some kind! Maybe you don’t even know for sure what it is that you’re looking for. A fellow named Alex Black tried to sort out all of that one time. He wrote a novel (The Great Desire, Harper & Row, 1919) about a young man who was himself trying to ... the man on the shoulder of his heart. And he whispers to him: Aren’t you really a bit hungry? Don’t you think you could sort it all out better after lunch? And he encourages the man to go out to the street and to look for a restaurant. The newspaper ...

31. What on Earth Is the Trinity?

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... lifetimes straining their brains trying to understand it. They have even tried to peer into the inner workings of God’s mind and describe the family relationships in heaven between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I have never found those efforts particularly edifying. That is sort of like trying to psychoanalyze God! So I titled this sermon: What on EARTH is the Trinity? I don’t think that the doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to describe what God is in Himself. Rather, I believe that it is an attempt ...

32. The Shy Member of the Trinity

John 14:15-31

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... Right about here is where most preachers begin to lose their listeners. It is OK when we talk about God as Father or Divine Parent; OK when we talk about Jesus Christ as the Son of God; but when we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit a sort of glassy film begins to spread over the eyes of church members. Everything starts to become fuzzy and unclear. That great teacher of preachers at Yale Divinity School, Halford Luccock, once began a sermon on the Holy Spirit with an old New England story of a Cape Cod ...

33. Whatever became of Kingdomtide?

John 16:17-33

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... very presence at a party made Him a favorite guest. Little children instinctively loved Him, and children do not ordinarily take to a grouch. Therefore I cannot for the life of me understand the gloomy picture that some people want to paint of our Lord, as the sort of person who would bring his wet blanket to every party. In one of his Chicago Poems Carl Sandburg said of Jesus: “(He) had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem everybody liked to ...

34. Life Begins at Thirty-Eight

John 5:1-15

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.” This tells us a lot about the beliefs which ancient people had regarding the healing properties of the water. Every now and then the pool bubbled up. There must have been some sort of a subterranean spring beneath it which every now and then sent out a gush of water. Superstitious people, not understanding how such things worked, believed that the bubbling was caused by an angel who troubled the waters. Thornton Wilder wrote a short play ...

35. The Saint Who Played Second Fiddle

John 1:35-42

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... of man. He always seemed to be in the background. He was not a gifted public speaker, never wrote any books, was not prominent in anybody’s society, and was never elected the chairman of any board. He was just a humble, hard-working fisherman. A very ordinary sort of fellow, if truth be told. When we think of the great personages who have flashed across the pages of human history, when we think of the great men and women of the Bible and of the Church, somehow we tend to leave Andrew out. He was not one ...

36. Family Reunion

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... for all time? The patriarch of the family is usually positioned smack dab in the middle of the first row and is easily identified by that “Gee-did-I-start-all-this” look on his face. Family reunions are funny things. You are thrown together with all sorts of strange looking people, many of whom have never met one another, many of whom you may never have met, and some of whom youUd rather not meet. But there they are-relatives! And when there are preachers in the family they are the ones who are usually ...

37. Only a Carpenter

Mark 6:1-6

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... His own people, the Jews. In Mark 6 there is the same theme. But in this passage, Jesus’ own people are not the Jews as a whole but His own friends and relatives...people in His hometown - even His own family. The passage read this morning sort of wraps up what we found earlier: the attempt of His family to take Him home as a deranged person. Now His whole hometown takes “offense” at Him. Literally, they “stumbled,” or were “scandalized”-that’s what the Greek word means. I have a hunch that ...

38. Pack Up Your Troubles

James 4:13-17

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... failures. But the Gospel is we don't have to let yesterday rob us of tomorrow. That renowned theologian, Yogi Berra, one of the greats of baseball, put it this way: "It's not over till it's over." Yogi was right. Baseball teaches us that in all sorts of ways. In 1986, for instance, Bob Brenley, catcher for the San Francisco Giants, set a major league record with four errors in one game against the Atlanta Braves. In that same game, he came up to bat in the ninth inning. The Braves were leading. The count ...

39. The Church Of Our Dreams

Ephesians 4:1-16

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... for Discipleship." It was a guide for our life together -- accepting all of us where we are, but providing a design that would move us to become reasonably informed, reasonably inspired, reasonably equipped, and hopefully, committed disciples. With building, staff expansion and problems, we sort of got away from that. I want to pull it out, dust it off, update it and let it guide our ministry in growing a church that accepts us where we are, but challenges us to be more.Listen to our text again -- verses ...

40. God's Say-So

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... shame and guilt. And we all know the power of it. We become aware of how far off the path we’ve strayed, how cold and hard we have been to someone we love, the harm we’ve caused, the lost moments and lost opportunities. All of that brings all sorts of emotion: guilt, grief, shame, and anger. It can cause us to move into depression. But the good news is it can also bring us to a spiritual place as well -- a place of new awareness. If we will remember God’s say-so: “Though your sins be as scarlet ...

41. Getting Your Politics Right

Matthew 6:5-15

Sermon

Phil Thrailkill

... live in peace. Peace and plenty; isn’t that the political dream of world and its diplomats and social engineers? But is it enough to deal with the depth of the human condition? No, it is not because there is one more petition that requires an intellectual conversion of sorts. We all know about temptation, with the magnetic lure to do what is wrong. Jesus reminds us that we are not to play with such but to ask God for protection lest we give in. You can never be caught in a place you don’t visit, and to ...

42. Complete Joy

Philippians 2:1-11

Sermon

Jeff Wedge

... only indication we have of the situation that existed in the congregation. It seems that there was a disagreement of some sort, most likely a fairly small matter, with two important members of the congregation choosing sides and attacking each other in ... council was heard to mutter, "That's gonna make one heck of a lump." Paul was well aware of the potential for this sort of disagreement in a congregation. It is quite likely that he had personally witnessed such flare ups both in the congregations with which ...

43. A Truly Universal Operating System

Romans 14:1-12

Sermon

Larry Lange

... was reassured that nothing could separate him from the love of God, not even his inevitable participation in a global economy that universally demanded some form of idol worship (Romans 8:31-39). In chapter 13, Billius was somewhat surprised at the sort of positive spin the apostle Paul put on the emperor when he advised Christians to "be subject to the governing authorities," because "the authorities that exist have been instituted by God!" (Romans 13:1). Billius knew there were Christians who held far ...

44. Enemies of the Cross

Philippians 3:17 - 4:1

Sermon

Steven E. Albertin

... and to anyone else who is foolish enough to believe that they don't have any skeletons in their closets. It seems that we are trapped between a rock and a hard place, between "letting it all hang out" and "nailing it all down." It is just this sort of problem that Saint Paul addresses in today's second reading. The congregation at Philippi was one that he dearly loved and it gave him great joy. But it seems that the congregation is threatened by those in their midst whom Paul calls "enemies of the cross of ...

45. Blood: Right and Wrong Uses

Leviticus 17:1-16

Teach the Text

Joe M. Sprinkle

... has also made a proposal. Here is a survey of these views. 1. The Kaufmann view: Leviticus 17 allows sacrifice on Exodus 20–type altars. Yehezkel Kaufmann argues that Leviticus 17 does not preclude the use of lesser but official earthen/stone altars of the sort described in Exodus 20:24–26. It merely limits slaughter to legitimate altars of Yahweh. The expression “the altar of the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting” (Lev. 17:6) could be synecdoche (a part representing a whole) in which the ...

46. Zophar

Job 11:1-20

Understanding Series

Gerald H. Wilson

... ’s speech. His volume of words is suspect, and one wonders whether he is just a glib talker. His speech is idle talk (Heb. bad, “empty/idle talk; chatter”) not worthy of a hearing. Even more negatively, Zophar accuses Job of mockery (Heb. lʿg, a sort of stammering ridicule of others; Job employed this verb himself in 9:23 when he claimed that God “mocks the despair of the innocent”). Zophar fears that, without a firm rebuke, Job’s many words will reduce men to silence, and it will seem like he ...

47. Job’s Reply to Zophar

Job 12:1--14:22

Understanding Series

Gerald H. Wilson

... one among many sages: I have a mind as well as you. Job stands firmly on the ground of his own wisdom. Job’s “mind” (again, a reference in Heb. to the “heart” as the source of reflection and decision-making) is as adept at sorting out the observational and experiential data of wisdom as his friends. He is not inferior to them. In fact, Job says almost maliciously, who does not know all these things? Zophar’s exalted insights are not so unique or elevated, but represent the common understanding ...

48. The Catch

Mark 1:14-20

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... the art of the catch, the art of discernment, and the art of healing broken people. The Kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, they drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So, it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous. (Matt. 13:47-49) Interestingly, the phrase “fish for people” actually comes from Herodotus, a Greek historian ...

49. Faith and Freedom

Mark 5:21-43

Sermon

Billy D. Strayhorn

... touched and held and feel like they belong. B. Coming back from a meeting in Waco, one day I stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken to get something to take with me to eat on the way home. The girl who waited on me was one of those friendly, bubbly sorts. I was tired and her friendly attitude was what I needed. She apologized all over the place for my having to wait for my nuggets and her smile made the wait seem not so important. About that time I heard someone place an order through the drive-in. This young ...

50. Love In Action

Mark 10:17-31

Sermon

Will Willimon

... the Rich Young Man because he loved him. I fear that I (and most of my church), in the name of "love," have decided to help make peoples' lives a little less miserable rather than a lot more redeemed. In the name of our "love" we bless all sorts of behavior. Our goal is to help people adjust, accept, affirm and live with who they already are rather than call them to convert to someone they could never be without the Gospel. Accommodation rather than conversion is the name of our game. So rich young men will ...

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