Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 1476 to 1500 of 4999 results

Exodus 3:1-22

Sermon

Lori Wagner

We hear a lot about covenants in scripture. Anyone know what a covenant is? How would you define it if someone asked you, “What’s a covenant?” That’s right. It has “legal” connotation. It’s actually ancient legal language. You might call it a kind of agreement or contract between two or more parties in a legally binding promise or vow. If you look at our marriage liturgy, you can see it there! You can also see it in our communion liturgy. In the marriage contract, the covenant of marriage ...

1477. Song of Promise

Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 1:46-56, Luke 1:39-45

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... ones sometimes dread the holiday that won’t be shared with their treasured one this year. Those without food may retreat in sadness as others join in feasting. Others may simply be lonely. So many are without family, without friends, without joy, and without hope. And yet, even in that kind of darkness, you can still hear God’s song. It’s a song of hope, of courage, of faith, and of love. And it’s a song of change…if you dare to embrace it. There’s a story about a girl who grew up in a very poor ...

1478. Run Away Bride

Exodus 24:1-18, Matthew 22:1-14, Hosea 1:1-2:1

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... organ for a wedding. It began like any other wedding with about 20 minutes or so of preludes. I thought it a bit odd that the only music the couple had chosen for the wedding were tunes from The Phantom of the Opera. But then again, people have all kinds of reasons for the music that they choose. So off I played. But when it got to be about quarter ‘til the wedding hour, the pastor discreetly whispered to me, that the groom was getting nervous, as the bride had not yet showed. Hoping she was merely caught ...

1479. Dorcas, Dinah, or Delilah (Who are You?)

Genesis 34:1-31, Judges 16:1-22, Acts 9:32-43

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... appears in the Acts of the Apostles. But all three tell something about the community of faith in that time and how one person or one heart can be a change agent for an entire people or an entire community. Like the name Israel, these names too indicate a kind of “state of the union” on both a micro and macro level, a personal and also a communal level. In the story of Dinah, we see an Israelite (Jewish) culture that is not sure how to co-exist within its world. The question for us today: How do we ...

1480. Lion of Judah

Gen 49:1-28, Judges 13-15, Matt 4:12-17

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... right when he depicted God as Aslan the Lion in the Chronicles of Narnia. God is the brave, courageous, protective, regal, dignified, powerful ruler of field and forest, earth and heavens. But those who are God’s people also have a lion’s share of that kind of courage and strength. When the patriarch Jacob names his sons, he names Judah in particular a “lion’s whelp.” Dan and Gad receive lion-like references as well. The word used for Judah is “gur aryeh” (whelp of a lion), which means a cub ...

1481. Job and the Mind Storm

Job 42:7-17, Job 42:1-6, Job 38:1--41:34

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... sense of fairness and proportion. God operates out of an unexpected, unpredictable, overflowing dynamic of mercy, love, and extreme patience. That kind of God doesn’t strike Job down for his impertinence. God simply puts Job in his place. Can you hear ... our lives, to fire us up into beings of breath and passion for God’s love and mercy. The metaphors in Job describe the kinds of things going on in the character’s mind and emotions, as is typical in the Hebrew scriptures. As powerful as these forces are ...

1482. The Good Yoke

Matthew 11:25-30, 1 Kings 19:1-8, 1 Kings 19:9-18, 1 Kings 19:19-21

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... the lure of the addiction, the less authentic he or she becomes. I often hear people say, “my daughter’s personality completely changed. I didn’t know her anymore.” “When my husband would drink, he would change into someone I don’t know.” This is the kind of yoke that begins to weigh heavy upon your spirit and can actually break your spirit. And we all know a lot of broken people, don’t we? Well, here’s the news –we are all broken! We may not all suffer from serious addictions like drugs ...

1483. Metathesiophobia

Ecclesiastes 11:1-6, 1 Corinthians 3:1-23

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... of people, this culture of religion-less, issues-driven, authority-rejecting people. It has not learned how to be in relationship with this new kind of people. It has not learned how to offer this new kind of people grace and love. And it has not learned how to encourage this new kind of people to invest in faith, and in a faith community, in Jesus, and in a mission that summons their sense of care and compassion, vulnerability and vision. The Church has become a “wall flower” in the digital dance of ...

1484. Holy House

Eph 2:11-22, Rev 3:1-22, Heb 9:1-28, Jn 14:15-31

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... ’s presence. And you Dwell with Him and He with you. In this, you are FED. We as the people of God must look at our “diet” –our spiritual diet which determines the way we live our lives and the fruit that will come of it. We must choose what kind of foods we allow into our daily meals. We all know what we need, know what we should do, but can we make the commitment to follow through? Only with the help of Jesus who said, “I am The Door.” The Open Door. The Holy Tabernacle of hope and love ...

1485. The Pardoning of Jezebel

Mark 7:24-30, 1 Kings 9:10-28

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... or pastor. It’s usually based in a view of scripture that puts punishment and a lot of rules and regulations (often created by the church ordering council) before forgiveness and grace. If you know “shunning” from personal experience, you know the kind of emotional torture this kind of punitive action bestows. No one talks to you. No one eats with you. No one lets you into their home. No one will even acknowledge you on the street. It’s an exclusionary practice that elevates some to a false level ...

1486. The Politics of Love

Mark 15:1-15

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... and hate and returns it with love, forgiveness, advocacy, and compassion. Even on the cross, Jesus makes his own atonement plea to God: “Forgive them. They don’t know what they’ve done!” As disciples of Jesus, our Lord and Savior calls us to a different kind of politics, a politics of love. To love those who hate, to forgive those who attack us, to pray for those who are unfair, to appeal to God on behalf of those who don’t yet know Him or appreciate His sacrificial gift. For only the power ...

1487. Hold Me When I'm Angry

Joshua 5:1-12

Sermon

Carl Jech

... and bitter, in the hospital he lashed out at those who tried to help him, including the young woman who loved him. Then, suddenly, during one encounter the anger turned to tears and now, instead of bearing the brunt of his anger, the young woman achieved the kind of tender closeness she had hoped for. Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the famous authority on death and dying, tells us that we should consider it a compliment when a dying person shares his or her anger with us. It seems absurd at first when we are ...

1488. The Next Big Thing

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... , while ignoring sometimes the humble servants who have the best hearts. We want to embody our sense of change in things we can see and touch like a haircut, or a new set of clothes. But God’s dreams don’t require any of those things. Just a kind and servant heart, and a strong faith. This is what God finds in young David. Samuel first tries to anoint Abinadab, and Shammah, and the rest of Jesse’s 7 eldest sons. But none of those were God’s pick. And just when Samuel thinks he has exhausted every ...

1489. Heart Shaped Stone

Psalm 118:1-29

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... His wisdom, His ways of turning our conceptions inside out and upside down. He will jolt us out of our imagined realities and into a new kind of truth that changes us and humbles us. He will be a “horse of a different color,” a “round peg in a square hole.” ... to put aside our own expectations, and to follow Him into new ones, to build our hopes and faith upon a stone that is not the kind we are used to, but is exactly the opposite of what we might expect Him to be. That is the truth of who Jesus is. ...

1490. What's Your Superpower?

Luke 24:36-49, Acts 1:1-11

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... the books of Acts and in Luke, Jesus is adamant in telling his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until God’s power comes upon them. He explains to them that they will be infused with the power of the Holy Spirit, and that power will enable them to do the kind of miraculous ministry that God has in mind for them. If they were to go out simply on their own devices or rely on their own unique gifts, their ministry would fail, or at least, they would not be able to turn the heads of those in their own culture ...

1491. God’s HS Smart App is Always Watching

Genesis 1:1-2:3

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... , when we need help. We don’t so much like it when we are doing something shady, hating on our neighbors, cheating our employees, or worse, letting our anger and our need for control guide our actions and make excuses for our behavior. Most of you work in some kind of workplace or have at one time or another. If you do, you know that the job you do bears a huge responsibility. If you can work with minimal supervision, all the better. It makes it easier on the boss. If you can bring out the best in others ...

Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!

Lawrence G. Lovasik

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli

1494. All You Can Do is Laugh

Genesis 18:1-15, Genesis 21:1-7

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... too awful, to the point of absurdity, you just need to laugh. It’s like a shout of protest in the face of circumstances beyond one’s control, the mundane sadness of life, the moving in of walls, the feeling of being boxed in. Laughter is a kind of “breaking free” from that existential cage, and a spit in the eye of the darker side of life. Laughter is our deep outburst of defiance against the gravity of the world.It is God’s gift to the human spirit, spontaneous laughter, the ultimate defiance to ...

1495. Jesus’ Recipe for a Kingdom Style Feast

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... composition will be made new. One alteration can change a proven old recipe into an award-winning, new, innovative success. What’s Jesus’ message? We don’t need to change the Story. The scriptures are timeless. How we present them, how we interpret them, what kind of new twist we can see in them, how we can insert something new and interesting, familiar and yet unique that will resonate with people, that is the question. As the old song goes, “it only takes a spark to get a fire going.” Make ...

1496. God’s Quality Control Crew

Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... the story strikes disturbingly close to home, as we realize, the Son is Jesus, and Jesus is describing his own impending death by those who believe, they can attain God’s kingdom by their own means, their own power, their own authority, and their own right. If that kind of power-hungry arrogance doesn’t scare you, it should. For at one time or another, we all assume, we can “build God’s kingdom” by our own means, or raise up the church by our own power, or make the world a better place by our own ...

1497. The Invisible Robe of Righteousness

Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... , and pay homage to his Son Jesus as Lord and Savior. We not only need to feign our loyalty to God, or just show up at the venue, but we need to “dress” for the part! We need to put on clothing that indicates the kind of character inside, at least the kind of intent we have to follow through. To understand Jesus’ parable, we need to not take it literally. This is not about God chastising someone for not wearing a lavish enough suit or a sparkly enough dress befitting a wedding guest. This is about God ...

1498. The Jesus Straightway

Mark 1:1-8

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... was or is built, the process still requires “smoothing.” As in wood constructions, in road construction too, smoothness matters. Any of you who have driven over (or shall I say into) potholes, ditches, and into stones on faulty or worn-out roads know that this kind of road is not only uncomfortable but dangerous. And those driving on them may be prone to accidents and tire damage. Road building therefore is a major industry in any developed city or country. In the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire was ...

1499. Justice

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

Will Willimon

... Does that seem harsh? But $150 million is a lot of money. Imagine a king giving a servant even $1 million. That would be a very generous king, very generous indeed. But this king has lavished $150 million on just this one servant. What became of all that money? What kind of life would you have to live to blow $150 million? Don't waste your sympathy on this guy. He blew $150 million. He has nothing to pay back? Nothing? A wife, a couple of kids, a stint in jail, it really isn't so much when compared to $150 ...

1500. Unsanctified

Mark 1:21-28

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... resurrection in every person who calls upon His Name. Do you believe in evil? Do you believe there are forces, spiritual forces that oppose the will of God? Jesus did. And he knew, they exist not just in the world, not just in “bad” or “dark kinds of places,” but they can exist right under our noses, in our best places and among the best people. There’s an old saying, attributed to the poet Daniel Defoe, that says, “Wherever God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel.” How do you battle ...

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