Sermon and Worship Resources

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 1401 to 1425 of 2415 results

1401. Christ’s Twin

Philippians 2:1-11

Sermon

King Duncan

... becoming. You are becoming Christ’s twin. 1. (Dallas, Texas: Word Publishing, 1991). 2. Andrea Hughie, “A Holiday Toy That’s Intended to Be Dubious,” New York Times, 5 December 2000. Cited by Stephen Arterburn, Flash Points Igniting the Hidden Passions of Your Soul (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2002), pp. 162-163. 3. From a sermon by John C. Bush, http://www.firstpresbyterianbirmingham.org/sermons/Sermon8‑13‑06.htm. 4. “The Competitive Edge,” by Robert McGarvey, USAir Magazine, February 1992 ...

1402. Philippians 3:4b-14

Philippians 3:1-11

Sweet

Leonard Sweet

... great that he became a Pharisee, one of those who were especially observant and focused on making the Torah a living reality in the life of every Jew. Paul reveals this to be not simply an intellectual pursuit. His devoutness was a passion so enveloping that it drove him to decisive action, “persecuting” or “pursuing” those like the offending “Christians” who seemed to belittle the law. Paul’s scrupulous religious and ritual observance of the law, Paul’s zeal to abide by every jot and title ...

1403. Blue Christmas

Isaiah 40:1-31

Sermon

King Duncan

... . Uncle John, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Christmas Collection (San Diego, CA: Portable Press, 2005, p.125). 2. Adapted from “Matthew and the Matchbox Car,” by the Rev. Barbara K. Lundblad, Day 1, 1996. http://www.day1.net/index.php5?view=transcripts&tid=445. 3. Flash Points Igniting the Hidden Passions of Your Soul (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2002), pp. 73-75. 4. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/claypool_3812.htm.

1404. Perceiving the Presence of God

Luke 1:26-38

Sermon

Richard Gribble

... the Jews" would threaten his power. Years later, Mary continued in sorrow when Jesus was lost for three days in Jerusalem only to be found conversing with the scholars in the temple. Mary's fiat brought four additional sorrows at the time of Jesus' passion and death: her meeting Jesus on the via dolorosa, the crucifixion, his deposition from the cross and burial. Mary had sufficient faith and vision to take the road less traveled, the more difficult road, but the only path that leads to life. She followed ...

1405. Where Are You From?

John 18:1-19:42

Sermon

David T. Ball

... , just as in former times where one comes from was thought to do. In Jesus' case, he didn't have to answer. The answer was well known. How well known is it for us? 1. Jerome H. Neyrey, "Despising the Shame of the Cross: Honor and Shame in the Johannine Passion Narrative," Semeia 68 (1994), pp. 127-28.

1406. From Silence to Sight

Job 42:1-6, Job 42:7-17

Sermon

Mary S. Lautensleger

... accept, much less understand. This is where our faith comes in, where we know that God is with us just as God was with Jesus on the cross. God is present with you and speaks to you in the midst of your suffering. God's greatest passion is not your happiness, but your wholeness. Your most difficult times can become an opportunity for growth. Suffering does not have the final word. God and a victorious life await you. 1. Kent Crockett, I Once Was Blind, but Now I Squint: How Perspective Affects Our Behavior ...

1407. Risking Relationships That Redeem

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Sermon

Mary S. Lautensleger

... . (sometimes called Second Isaiah) spoke these words in the context of his own suffering and the suffering of Israel. But like other words of prophecy in chapters 40 through 66 of Isaiah, these words especially apply to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These words speak of the Passion of our Lord and his servant leadership.

1408. Dusting Off Our Gratitude

Joel 2:21-27

Sermon

Mary S. Lautensleger

... in jeopardy. Joel calls upon the people of Judah to lament and grieve after the swarm of locusts has wasted crops and countryside alike. "And if you think things are bad now, just you wait till the Day of the Lord comes upon us!" Joel passionately warns. The agricultural destruction in the land of Judah is total, and without food or water, both livestock and people will soon wither away. "... Even the wild animals cry to you because the watercourses are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the ...

1409. Tasting the Gruel of Love

Matthew 22:34-40

Sermon

King Duncan

... our random thoughts or daydreams become filled with thoughts about God. As one scholar explains it, “this is holos: All; the position that God wants in our life. Not for His sake, but for our own. In essence, this means every feeling, thought and even our passion must be focused on Him.” We focus our thoughts on God; we focus our acts of service on those around us. (6) Years ago Roger Kahn wrote a book about the old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, titled The Boys of Summer. Kahn tracked down many of ...

1410. Stepping Out on Faith

Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon

King Duncan

... I Can’t Get Up, p. 79. 3. Bob Fenster, Well, Duh! Our Stupid World and Welcome to It (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2004), p. 13. 4. Eric W. Johnson, A Treasury of Humor, (New York: Ivy Books, 1994), p. 187. 5. Flash Points Igniting the Hidden Passions of Your Soul (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2002), pp.167-168. 6. Larry Laudan, Danger Ahead (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), p. 3. Cited in John Ortberg, If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of The Boat (Grand Rapids ...

1411. An Exquisite Attitude of Gratitude

Ephesians 1:15-23

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... teeth and cracked pots, into exquisite sounds of love and life. Each one of us is designed to be a Stradivarius, “vibrating strings of energy,” as super-string physicists would have it, a stringed instrument on which Jesus plays symphonies of love and passionate operas of truth. And the Nessun Dorma of Paul the Apostle, unlike the Nessun Dorma of Puccini via Paul Potts, goes like this: “I am persuaded that neither death nor life . . . nor rulers . . .nor powers . . . nor any thing else in all creation ...

1412. Where Is Loyalty in an Age of Immediacy?

Mark 1:1-8

Illustration

Elton Richards

... little loyalty to the past nor sacrifice for the sake of the future. Christopher Lasch in his classic, "The Culture of Narcissism," notes the forgetful character of the late twentieth century U.S. culture: "to live for the moment is the prevailing passion to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future." There is little loyalty in ...

1413. Wild Beasts

Genesis 9:8-17

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... cosmic, communal nature of God's redeeming activity. This Sunday marks the first Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally thought of as a special period of time, once again forty days, set aside for introspection, self-denial, prayer, and study as the events of Passion week and Easter Sunday approach. As Christians we should find ourselves journeying towards the cross, drawing nearer week by week. The focus of this week's texts startle us with the suggestion that this is not a human journey only, but that all ...

1414. Don't Count Sheep

John 10:11-18

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... fail to notice whether they looked healthy, acted normal, and in general were becoming their best sheep selves. The late John Holt, school reformer/ educator/amateur cellist who tells this story, concludes with the observation that "What we easily forget, in our passionate twentieth-century love affair with abstract thinking, is that to make an abstraction out of some part of reality we must take some meaning out of it." (See Holt's Learning All the Time [Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1989 ...

1415. The Bonds of Love

1 John 4:7-12

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... the bond of sexuality and desire. An obvious component of any marriage relationship, this bond typically runs hot and cold. Perhaps in part this is because its development is rooted in adolescence, a tumultuous period of ups and downs itself. Passion, infatuation, desire, romance, and companionate forms of sexuality are all a part of this bond later in life. Grunebaum finds that desire is perhaps the most crucial, most fragile component within the bond of sexuality. Despite attractiveness and physical need ...

1416. Are You a Crazy Dog?

Mark 10:35-45

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... but then risked everything by traveling to Jerusalem and needling the religious establishment to within an inch of its patience, and then beyond its tolerance. The culmination of Jesus' life and work was the biggest Crazy Dog commitment of all time - his passion and death on the cross, followed by the miracle of his resurrection and of all creation's redemption. John Updike's essay in Incarnation is on the Gospel of Matthew, but his observation applies to the entire gospel narratives, where "two worlds ...

1417. A Lovehope Faith

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... It gives us perspective - on how to view those triumphs and tragedies (vv. 9-10); patience - to endure the bad and accept the good graciously (v. 4); purpose - providing us with a reason to want to surmount the setbacks and look for celebrations (v. 7); and passion - for living life through all its blessings and hardships (v. 12). The universality of Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 13 has not been lost on the present age. Over a year ago Life asked 173 people the question "What is the meaning of life?" The ...

1418. Wounding Love

Psalm 23:1-6

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... , but, as the seventeenth-century poet Ed-mund Waller put it, 'He proffers death who proffers love'. And this, as it happens, is perhaps my own most central fear: that there is an unbreakable and intimate connection between love and death; between passion and violence; between sex and chaos; between intimacy and destruction of the ego...I am afraid of AIDS because it carries the imaginative delineations of my darkest fears. It is a living metaphor of my own vulnerabilities." ("Is Health a Gospel Imperative ...

1419. From a Distance

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-19

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... covenant, he needed to have the ability to keep focused on the promise from a distance. Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has revealed a fascinating and frustrating tendency in human interpersonal relationships in his book The Triangle of Love: Intimacy, Passion, Commitment (New York: Basic Books, 1988). In examining the "rules" of attachment, he uncovers a strange paradox that seems to verify everything your mother/father ever told you about playing "hard to get." It seems that whenever one person in ...

1420. Is Your Christmas Spirit a Controlled Substance?

1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... that the gift of Christ imparts is of sublime strength. The Christmas spirit may have been best captured by Hudson Taylor when he described the attitude of Christ this way: First it is impossible, Then it is difficult, Then it is done! (A Passion for the Impossible by Hudson Taylor, p. 5) The Thessalonian church was right to have “pneumatic concerns,” because the spirit refuses to follow the rules and bread-and-butter the blueprint. The Apostle Paul did not even give parameters to predict the “good ...

1421. What Are You Looking For?

John 1:38

Illustration

Susan R. Andrews

... repeat her comments about his becoming a brain surgeon and keeping people from dying and making a lot of money, and always his response was the same. Finally the son had enough, and, when the same mantra began, he cut off his mother with exasperation, and with great passion he told his mother, "Mama, I don't want to keep people from dying, I want to show them how to live." This morning's Gospel Lesson from John is a "call" story, but unlike so many call stories in scripture this one is not crisp, dramatic ...

1422. The Arrival of Hope

John 1:6-8, 19-28

Illustration

Joel D. Kline

... of black Africans and had just finished writing a book about the need for justice in that hate-torn nation. In his grief the pastor goes to the father of Arthur Jarvis, to apologize for his son's crime. The elder Jarvis little agreed with his son's passion for working against the evils of apartheid. But in the aftermath of Arthur's death, the father struggles to make sense of the changes in his son's perspective that had set him on such a markedly different course in life. As a result, the father reads and ...

1423. The Hand, the Lamb and the Dove

John 3:1-17

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... pain; work through your pain; give your pain a purpose; and work with others in pain. Recognize where you have been so that you will know where others have been. Like Christ, you bear wounds where you have been broken. 3) To incarnate God the Holy Spirit: Work with your passion what do you care about? What makes your heart sing? What gets you outside yourself and into the world?

1424. The Monster Under Megan's Bed

John 6:1-21

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... from Jesus' hands. Children don't yet see generations of hatred and animosity. They see common needs, common desires, common hungers. Remember Yitzhak Rabin's funeral? What do you remember? The tears and testimony of his young grand-daughter spoke the most eloquently and passionately for the dream of peace for which her grandfather had just given his life. Her words breathed life back into that dream and gave renewed vision and hope to a grieving country. As we sit at the feet of our children, however, our ...

1425. The Double Cross

Mark 10:35-45

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... unique relationship as the Divine Son that he was able to stretch out his arms on the cross as the Suffering Servant, taking on all humanity's sins. Have you been double-crossed? Are you a double-cross disciple? Is the power and passion of the vertical sustaining you for the presence and compassion of the horizontal? Will you double-cross others? Alternative Sermon Idea Downplay the "double-cross" theme and work harder at developing a typology of suppers based on Jesus' ministry. Gethsemane Suppers tend to ...

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