Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: Levi, disciple, evangelist, tax collector, the 12, the twelve, apostle, sermon on the mount, jewish audience, beatitudes, lord's prayer, great commission, parables, olivet discourse, mount of olives, olivet, synoptic

Showing 1426 to 1450 of 2815 results

1426. RSVP

Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... the option to decline or confirm. God invites all to his kingdom “feast.” Our response is requested. S’ilvous plait. Jesus has just been teaching everyone who will listen what it means to be part of God’s “kingdom of heaven.” Each of his parables illustrate some quality or feature of what it means to enter into that “kingdom” reality. For Jesus, this is not a “place” but a condition; not a destination but the nature of a covenant relationship that exists not only in the future but in the ...

1427. Cast in the Image of God

Matthew 22:15-22

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... that enables us to realize truth,” says Pablo Picasso. Perhaps this is why Jesus always taught in metaphor and parables. If anyone deserves kudos for the “art of politics” it’s Jesus, for Jesus isn’t interested in “doing” “politics,” but he understands ... politics enough to use the art of parable and metaphor as a more powerful weapon for the means of exposing deceit and revealing truth––God’s truth. Jesus is ...

1428. Sent Out As Christ

Luke 24:44-53

Children's Sermon

Various Authors

... Help us to be the little Christs you have called us to be. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen. Follow-Up Lesson: To reinforce this lesson in a home or classroom setting, spend time revisiting some of Jesus’ teachings. Pick three or four of Jesus’ parables that you’re familiar with, and summarize them for the children (the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the lost sheep, and so forth). Ask the children to identify what Jesus is teaching us. Then ask the children how they can apply these lessons to their ...

1429. What Time Is It?

Matthew 24:32-44

Sermon

Will Willimon

... pays them all -- the same wage. The ones who have been out sweating since dawn get paid as much as those who only got in an hour before dusk. There is grumbling. “Do you begrudge my generosity?” the Master asks the grumbling workers. And we love that little parable. Because it means that what we hoped is right: There is still time. So what if you haven't got your life together today? Don't worry. The father waits. You may be the eleventh hour worker who will get as much grace from God as those who have ...

1430. Bread for the Journey

Mark 12:28-34

Sermon

Thomas C. Willadsen

... , or an invitation? Jesus engaged in many conversations with the religious authorities of his time. His message was often offensive to them. Earlier in this very important chapter of Mark’s gospel, Jesus told the parable about the wicked tenants and when those hearing the story “realized that he had told the parable against them, they wanted to arrest him,” but they didn’t because they were afraid of the crowd Mark 12:12 (NRSV). When they asked Jesus whether they should pay taxes and he looked at ...

1431. Scandal

Luke 22:14-23:56

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... world. God has sent representatives like prophets to keep in touch, but we reject them. And then, to put things right, God sent his son. The rest of the drama was about to play out, as Jesus predicted his own death very shortly, just like his parable had anticipated. God has been wronged. God’s people have gone the way of wickedness and wastrels. The world is imbalanced, and the Creator isolated from the people who are to him like loved but wayward children. How will things be made right? Who will bring ...

1432. The Mother of All Yard Sales

Luke 12:13-21

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

... it was accompanied by a vast quantity of things and all that those things represented. He responded to the man with a parable of another man who had many things and wanted even more. Notice that there was, in the story, no condemnation of wanting things and working hard to ... get them. The error of the man in the parable was not in having things, but in his relationship to those things. He was not a fool for working hard. He was not a ...

1433. Walking On Our Hands

John 8:31-41

Sermon

J. Will Ormond

... of the Temple early in Jesus' ministry (John 2:13-22). The Synoptics place the cleansing during the last week of Jesus' life. John has Jesus going to Jerusalem at least three times; the Synoptics record only one such journey. John has no parables, but he has Jesus give long discourses, many of them dealing with Jesus' own identity. "I am ... the good shepherd ... the door ... the bread of life," and the like. This characteristic of being a maverick, of nonconformity, makes John an appropriate Gospel to ...

1434. The King On A Cross

Luke 23:26-43

Sermon

J. Will Ormond

... calendar invites us to worship Christ the King, our attention turns to the cross as Jesus' throne and the crucifixion as the means of his exaltation. Through his ministry Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God and declared that it was near. He told parables to set forth some of its characteristics. He invited those of humble, childlike faith to enter it. He warned the self-righteous that they were far from the kingdom. He acknowledged that his kingdom was immensely different from the kingdoms of the world ...

1435. A Modern Day Job

Luke 13:1-9

Illustration

Richard A. Jensen

... should not be used as a hedge clipper. What to do? He thought it over and he said, "I'll sue." And sue he did. The lawn mower company was to blame. The court agreed. He was innocent. The blame was not his! P.S. The legal facts in this parable are true!"

1436. Who's The Neighbor

Luke 10:25-37

Drama

Robert F. Crowley

Theme: Being of service to others no matter who they are. Summary: A modern retelling of the Good Samaritan parable in the form of a game show. Playing Time: 10 minutes Setting: A TV studio Props: Scripts Signs -- "Cheer" ;"Hello Milton" ; "The End"; "Applause", Road map Masks Raiment First aid kit Bandage Costumes: Costume pieces to be added to street clothes Time: Prime time Cast: Announcer Milton Whitestein (HOST) Rupert ...

1437. Look How You Listen

Mark 6:14-29

Sermon

George W. Hoyer

... Elijah.' And others said, 'It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.' " None of them really perceived God-in-Christ. None of them heard correctly. Jesus had not really become known to them. Matthew reports Jesus once said, "The reason I speak to them in parables is that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand" (Matthew 13:13). There's the rub. There's the nub of the problem even today. See it in Herod in the way he listened to John. Herodias, the wife of ...

1438. When All Is Said And Done

Mark 13:1-31

Sermon

William G. Carter

... in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that the same Christ is coming to judge the world and give birth to a new creation. And so, people lose hope. As Hamilton puts it: This substitution of an image of nuclear holocaust for the coming of Christ is a parable of what happens to Christians when they cease to believe in their own eschatological heritage. The culture supplies its own images for the end when we default by ceasing to believe in biblical images of God's triumph at the end.3 The good news of the ...

1439. Tears At The Tomb

John 11:17-37

Sermon

William G. Carter

... Heaven," Eric Clapton and Will Jennings, Unichappell Music Inc. and Blue Sky Rider Songs, 1992. 2. William Billings, "When Jesus Wept," The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 312. 3. Fred B. Craddock, John (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), pp. 87-88. 4. Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), p. 66. 5. See John 12:9-11.

1440. The Fear Of Taking The Plunge

Luke 12:35-48

Sermon

Richard Patt

... , but faith does carry us through our illnesses and any other challenge of life. In this connection, Jesus often introduced the imagery of storehouses into his conversations. He mentions such "storehousing" in the paragraph immediately before this text and in a parable earlier in the same chapter. Admittedly, when he was talking in those instances about putting things away for the future -- storehousing -- he was viewing the practice in a slightly negative way. But along with the idea of total faith in God ...

1441. Arise! Shine! For Your Light Has Come

Isaiah 60:1-22

Sermon

Robert A. Hausman

Doubtless you remember the television commercial in which a man steps up to a bar and says: "Give me a light." After he is blasted with every possible sort of light, from fire to laser beams, he sheepishly corrects himself: "Give me a Bud Lite." This is a modern parable. Like all living beings, we look for light, but often we are willing to settle for lite beer! It is just something to get us through the night, a little pleasure in a bottle, a little truth in a can. Give me a Bud Lite! It comes to us ...

1442. The Silence Broken, The Bride Restored

Isaiah 62:1-12

Sermon

Robert A. Hausman

... faith may seem to us to be presumptuous, but it is the kind of faith which Jesus applauds. A Canaanite woman who continually implored Jesus on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter was commended for her great faith (Matthew 15:21-28), and the widow in the parable of the unjust judge was applauded for her persistence in seeking redress from an unjust judge. The judge, flooded by the woman's pleas, is brought to her cause: "... I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual coming" (Luke 18:5 ...

1443. Fear and the Farmer

Colossians 3:1-17, Colossians 3:18-4:1

Illustration

John R. Steward

... rule in your hearts...." He even goes on to say that we have been called to this experience of peace in Jesus Christ. We were built and designed by God to be a people of faith, not fear. Faith in the one who redeems us will lead to peace. Source: Parables, Etc. (Platteville, Colorado: Saratoga Press), October 1991. Used by permission.

1444. The Organ

Luke 13:31-35

Illustration

John R. Steward

... only one who can fix it." This was the cry of Jesus as he looked over the city of Jerusalem. He wanted to fix the people but they would have nothing to do with him. The truth is that only the one who made us can fix us. Adapted by Parables, Etc. (Platteville, Colorado: Saratoga Press), February 1987, p. 6.

1445. Blood Ties

Hebrews 12:24

Illustration

John R. Steward

... Nazi that they had the blood that was needed to save his life. Then they would tell him that the blood was from a Jewish donor. Most of the Nazi officers would receive the blood but there were some who absolutely refused to receive it into their veins. Adapted from Parables, Etc. (Platteville, Colorado: Saratoga Press), June 1985.

1446. The Limits Of Love

Luke 4:14-30

Sermon

Charles H. Bayer

... line of the Hebrew people. "No intermarriage!" said Ezra, the priest. The race had to be kept pure. Foreign wives were a plague. Since Semitic peoples of all sorts, including Jews, often made their points by telling stories -- like Jesus, the parable maker -- old cautionary tales such as those about Esther or Daniel were recited. In these stories the preservation of God's people in the face of the demonic influences of foreigners was the clear point. Such conservative, albeit heroic, stories were bound ...

1447. Getting and Giving

John 13:31-38

Sermon

Glenn E. Ludwig

... -- because only by doing that can we really find out what life is all about. It is the paradox of Christian living, and it is true. In sermon preparation this week, I ran across a wonderful fable titled "The Dance of the Heart." It is a fitting parable for the message of the gospel to us this morning. Once upon an ancient time in a distant land lived an emperor and an empress, who had a son and a daughter. The children, as children will, often quarrelled and nagged each other in ways that distressed their ...

1448. The Other Ninety-nine

Luke 15:1-7

Sermon

John G. Lynn

... him. Finally a police helicopter spotted him walking along an abandoned railroad track. "I'm not lost," he said, "I know where I am going. I'm going back to see my grandfather." He was going back to his shepherd. In today's gospel parable, Jesus defies a group of murmuring scribes and Pharisees, cooing like pigeons on a church steeple about Jesus' search for lost sheep. Walking down the railroad tracks in Jesus' day were men collecting Roman taxes and women wearing alabaster jars around their necks -- lost ...

1449. The Sponge And Wine

Mark 15:33-41

Sermon

Harry N. Huxhold

... cross. No one can tell if that was said in the form of a taunt or as a change of heart in one who had taunted him. What is important for us is to note that Jesus accepts this offer of sedation. As Jesus did, we think back to a parable he told about the rich man and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. In hell and in torment the rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus with a drop of water to come and cool his tongue. Now as Jesus has completed his suffering of our hell and death upon the ...

1450. Through The Eye Of The Needle

Mark 10:17-31

Sermon

Steven E. Albertin

... . Whatever we most love having and most fear losing is our functional god. Insofar as our use of money reflects these values and commitments, our use of money is a very "religious" issue. No wonder Jesus talks so much about money in his sayings, teachings, and parables. There is no more "religious" subject in life. There is no other subject that gets so close to our hearts. In our modern capitalist societies money is very important. Money is the measure of most, if not all, things. A good job with a good ...

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