Synonyms: thirstiness, dryness, parched, craving, strong desire, longing, yearning, avidity, hunger, voracity, keenness, eagerness, lust, appetite, passion, love, crave, want, covet, desire, hunger for/after, lust for/after, hanker for/after, have one's heart set on
Antonyms: aversion, distaste, apathy, dislike, hatred, antipathy, disgust, disregard, abhorrence, acrimony, wet, animosity, animus, antagonism, bad feeling, bitterness, be averse to, detestation
Showing 1226 to 1250 of 2415 results
Sermon
Harold Warlick
... others in their skills. The Garmu and Abtinos patriarchs gave the same answer. The two families were concerned that outsiders might use the skills to their financial advantage and make the showbread and incense for purposes of idolatry. In addition to their passionate concern that items used in the holy Temple would not be misused for idolatrous or secular purposes, the families of Garmu and Abtinos were highly praised for their moral concern that no one in their families should be suspected of using Temple ...
Sermon
King Duncan
... the case. There were no needy among them because they took care of the poor and distressed and raised them from their disadvantaged situation. Joseph M. Stowell in his book, The Trouble with Jesus, makes a powerful case for the early church’s passion for those at the bottom of society. He points out that mercy and pity were considered defects of character, not virtues, two thousand years ago in Rome. The Romans had rationalized away any sense of obligation for the needy in their society. “Christianity ...
Sermon
Brett Blair
... possess a thing. To follow the Master we must be able to echo the words: Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. There was Simon the Zealot. It embarrasses me to say that I see some of myself in this man, for he was one who hated with a passion. He reminds me that anger is an emotion that I am not beyond myself. The zealots were a political faction who wanted the Romans out and the Jews in, and they were more than willing to commit murder and mayhem to accomplish their goal. They were terrorists who said ...
1229. First Light
Isaiah 9:1-7
Sermon
Curtis Lewis
... fantasy or wishful thinking? This vision is too wonderful to grasp. Is it possible that Isaiah's "first light" can fulfill everything Isaiah attributes to him? Yes, because the "zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this." Zeal expresses the thought of urgency, passion, jealousy. Has this happened? Yes, in Jesus Christ whose birth we celebrate on this night. John writes of Jesus the Messiah, "His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for your house will consume me" (John 2:17). In Isaiah's view, God's ...
Sermon
Richard Gribble
... almsgiving allow us to evaluate our lives and take stock of who we are and where we find ourselves along the road toward God. The Lenten signs, like the law, and the church, provide direction; they assist us to navigate safely toward the paschal mystery -- the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus -- and the one and only path that gets us to God. As assuredly as the buoys safely guide mariners and road signs lead us to our destinations, so Lent and its special emblems of God's grace will assist us in ...
1231. Obedience to God's Plan
Jeremiah 30:1--31:40
Sermon
Richard Gribble
... and impatience we often find ourselves "doing our own thing," for we have not received the message we so earnestly wish to receive concerning the proper road to follow. Lent is a sacred time when we journey toward the celebration of the Paschal mystery, the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our Lord spent long periods in prayer with his Father so he could be faithful to God's will, the message he was to proclaim, and the mission and kingdom that he was asked to inaugurate. We know and ...
1232. Death Leads to Life
Isaiah 52:13--53:12
Sermon
Richard Gribble
... ' life and mission appeared to be a failure. His master plan seemed to all to end on Good Friday when he was nailed to the cross and all but a select few of his faithful followers abandoned him. Yet, as we recall from Saint John's passion narrative, Jesus' death was his greatest victory. The thorns he wore were his crown and the cross upon which he died was his throne. Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, like all the actions of his life, contradicted the prevailing culture and societal norms. He challenged rules ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... love. This is an essential foundation stone. Making love. Hearing that we immediately think of sexual love. Certainly we should not ignore the physical significance of love-making. "The truth of the matter is that you and I were once conceived through the passionate bonding of our mothers and fathers. Following such a conception, we had mothers who carried us within their bodies for several months. And without exception, each one of us was given that moment in time when our mothers labored to give us birth ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... is so tenacious in the hold that it has upon us. My own confession will make the point. This has been the primary struggle of my life. Coming from a poverty bound situation in rural Mississippi, I was economically, educationally, and socially, deprived. The passion of my life was to overcome the limitations of that deprivation. I became a driven person, an almost hopeless workaholic. I haven’t overcome that yet, a tough task master of myself, wanting to perform, to achieve, to gain status. I drove myself ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... 13th and reading through the 21st verses. This is the word of the Lord. Therefore, gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is Holy, be Holy yourselves in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be Holy for I am Holy. And if you invoke as Father him who judges each one impartially according to his deeds, conduct ...
1236. Living Lightly
Genesis 45:1-28
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... while you’re waiting to die, wells the singer in one of the scenes. Among the elemental, poverty stricken people of Greece, death is the constant companion to living, so they dance in the face of it. The big movement in the story however is that passionate affirmation of life by the grizzled bull of a Greek, Zorba, “the only death,” he growls, “is any day not devoted fully to living.” Now we may not like the content of Zorba’s lifestyle, but the style is captivating. He had an expectant stance ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... Saturday night if it doesn’t rain. We have trivialized the word love abominably. We love everything from cashew nuts to Jesus Christ. The problem has been with us a long time. We use the word love to translate the Greek words for immoral passion, sexual feeling, and fraternal and family affection. But there’s a fourth Greek word which the New Testament has really lifted up to immortality – the word Agape. Peter and John and Paul especially, selected that word for love in order to express to us what ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... Britain to survive. And its trust of every person – at every stage of life’s journey – we must have goal. Then there is this final word. Concentrate on the path. There is no question about the power of an ideal. The energy that is produced by driving passion, and the likelihood of our achieving what we set our hearts on. How important that it is then that we choose our goals wisely. And that suggests another piece in the pattern of what really matters, as we seek the prize of the high calling of God ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... you don’t have to take your love apart to see what makes it tick. Now there’s truth in that decent, but not much truth. The spontaneous love that we feel at the time we marry, which has a lot to do with physical attraction and sexual passion, may lose some of its zest. Our feelings may become numb, even confused. And our concept of marriage may become vague, even distorted. Then, deep down in that mysterious abyss of ourselves, we begin to doubt – am I in love? Was I ever in love? Those are the wrong ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... and radiance of a marriage banquet. Excitement, like that of a man finding a pearl hidden and going out and selling everything that he had in order to possess that pearl. Somewhere though, we’ve missed the point. We haven’t gotten beyond the passion and death of Jesus to resurrection and Pentecost. Now I hope that you have noted that I have deliberately stayed away from phrases like baptism in or baptism with the Holy Spirit. Those phrases are too loaded with unfortunate imagery and misunderstanding. I ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... meaning of this? How have we missed it? Ours is not a God that is far removed from us. Not a God that we meet at special times, in special places such as this, but a God who dwells among us, within us, in our struggle to become, in our passionate drive to be transformed and to transform, in our persistent gnawing urge to keep on moving in our life and in our death. This is the mark of our being, this divine discontent is always a fragment – unsatisfied this side of paradise. And that brings me to the next ...
1242. If I Have Not Love
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... he says suggests it. And the haunting phrase, "but have not love" -- drives the point home. "If I have not love, I die." I think I have told you this story before -- but it's so fitting here. A United Methodist pastor tells about the most passionate person he had ever known -- a lady named Gladys. She was a retired school teacher who lived with her only child, a daughter, in the community where he served his first church. Gladys loved everybody, and everybody loved her. When a new baby arrived, so did a ...
1243. Loving The Jesus Way
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... tongues so often betray our Christian profession. Elbert Hubbard once said, "Gossip is a vice enjoyed vicariously." You may not engage directly in the forms of evil that are being talked about, but we listen and witness the gossip and it seems to pander our baser passions. I came across a prayer recently which I've been trying to pray daily. Listen to it. "Lord, make my words sweet and tender today for I may have to eat them tomorrow." Have you ever had to eat your words? You verbalized suspicions that were ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... know the pain and sorrow of children gone astray.) All of this is just a finite expression of the infinite emotion of God in the story of the flood. The Creator described in the Old Testament is not the "unmoved mover" of the universe. This is a passionate God who feels the pain of alienation, who is offended by the evil of the world, and who will ultimately act in judgment against anything that thwarts the divine, good purpose... "I suspect that if I had been God, I would have been ready to shut the ...
1245. Courage Me!
Ephesians 6:10-20
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... . Left to direct the show, the evil one finally tears the family to shreds by diverting them from perseverance and patience and love and forgiveness. The "evil day" comes in all sorts of ways. For one it may be that final yielding to sexual passion that pronounces infidelity to the marriage. For another, it may be the occasion of unexplained suffering when the Devil tempts us to curse God as he did Job. We hang precariously on that precipice of unexplained, mysterious suffering. Just a week ago, a young ...
1246. God's Hello People
1 John 1:5--2:14
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... Williams got down on her knees and asked God to forgive her. The next day, the children in Room 401 were greeted by a new teacher. Something had happened to her. Miss Williams had become a different person committed to loving her children with a passion not known before, and especially the slow ones. Especially Grover Junior Johnson! By the end of that year, "Grubby" showed dramatic improvement. He had caught up with many of the students and was even ahead of some. The years went by, and Miss Williams lost ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... sense of what is right and the will to do it. Then we can say no to what is not in keeping with God's will and not in harmony with our Christian commitment. We can say no to that which hurts another person. We can say no to the passions of our felsh which give us pleasure for a season, but threaten the values that sustain life and provide stability. We can say no to the attractive shortcuts that deceive us, no to the invitation to cut a corner here and cut a corner there, knowing that there are no ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... centuries, but I am quite sure that for a pastor in Western culture in the latter part of the twentieth century the aspect of world that makes the work of leading Christians in the way of faith most difficult is what Gore Vidal has analyzed as "today's passion for the immediate and the casual." Everyone is in a hurry. The persons whom I lead in worship, among whom I counsel, visit, pray, preach, and teach, want short cuts. They want me to help them fill out the form that will get them instant credit (in ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... love. This is an essential foundation stone. Making love. Hearing that we immediately think of sexual love. Certainly we should not ignore the physical significance of love-making. "The truth of the matter is that you and I were once conceived through the passionate bonding of our mothers and fathers. Following such a conception, we had mothers who carried us within their bodies for several months. And without exception, each one of us was given that moment in time when our mothers labored to give us birth ...
Sermon
Maxie Dunnam
... is a good place for decent people. Maybe here—in the church—our decency will become more than cultured good manners and middle-class notions of what is acceptable and proper. Maybe here our decency will become love and our love will burn with passion, which will express itself in compassion for those around us in the church, outside the church, and outside our proper social network. It rolls off our tongues so easily. And it lends itself to a good sound bite in a modern media campaign: Open Hearts ...
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