Sermon and Worship Resources

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Showing 2176 to 2200 of 4962 results

2176. Courage Me!

Ephesians 6:10-20

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... is a matter of dying in order that we might live. We die to fear in order to live to courage. We die to greed and pretentiousness in order to be generous and honest in Christ. We die to despair and self-doubt in order that we might live hopeful and graceful lives. Here it is in a very simple story. Jack Heacock tells of bringing a young intern to the staff of their congregation in Austin, Texas. This was a young Black man, a member of that annual conference, attending the Perkins School of Theology at S.M ...

2177. A Fragrant Offering

Ephesians 4:17--5:21

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... it has to do the painful thing. It may have to cut off financial support to a son or daughter to bring that son or daughter to a place of maturity. It may have to hang tough to the point of leaving a daughter in jail for a week to hopefully bring her to her senses. That happened with a couple in our church a few weeks ago who know the meaning, but also the pain, of tough love. It may have to speak the painful truth in order to save a person from living a lie and betraying themselves. A ...

2178. My Stress Is Killing Me! -- Is It?

Isaiah 40:1-31

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... going?" The man said, "First, we are going to London." The barber interrupted him, "You are not going to enjoy London. You will hate it there. It's a terrible place. It's dirty and it's expensive. You are not going to like it in London. I hope you will go somewhere else." The man said, "Well, after London, we are going to Paris." Instantly, the barber responded, "Paris? Oh that's a terrible place. Look out; they'll get your wallet. People are not friendly in Paris. You won't like it. Are you going anyplace ...

2179. The Trance Of Non-renewal

Zechariah 9:9-13, Matthew 24:36-44

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... shoulders and shakes us out of our trance. So let's use this image -- the trance of non-renewal -- to shatter our dullness so we may capture the meaning of Advent and the coming of Christ. Let me share three affirmations which Advent sounds for us, that will hopefully shake us from our trance: One, the Lord will come and work when you least expect it. Two, He will work in ways you could never possibly anticipate. And, three, to be alive is to wait expectantly for the Lord to work. I. First, the Lord will ...

2180. Blessed Are Those Who Are Awake

Luke 12:32-40

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... new possibilities. Our God is a God who says through the prophet Isaiah, “Behold I am doing a new thing”, and through His Son Jesus, now ascended and sitting on the throne, “Behold, I make all things new.” The first word of our scripture lesson expresses the hope that is ours: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” We need to stay awake, because we never know when we are going to be surprised by a new possibility. II. Now the other side of that ...

2181. Come To The Party!

Luke 14:15-24

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... a second important suggestion of the parable: The Church is not a showplace for saints, it’s a place of redemption, healing, and hope for sinners. Go out into the streets, the master instructed his servants, into the alleys and lanes and out of the way places ... don't know whether you had the opportunity to hear Tony Campolo when he was here in our church last year. If you didn't, I hope you'll read his book entitled The Kingdom of God Is a Party. When he was here, Tony told a story which is in the first ...

2182. The Heart -- Our Mirror

Proverbs 25:1-28

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... fell victim to polio. She spent the rest of her life in an iron lung. But what about John? Gone were the payoffs John had expected from his marriage to Margie. No housekeeper, no one to share his bed, no one to rear the children. Gone, too, were the high hopes of a big onion farm, for you cannot compete in the big league on onion farming when you are spending chunks of every day caring for a wife who has polio. John and Margie Cooper had a 40th wedding anniversary and someone who did not know John very well ...

2183. If Only... Next Time

Isaiah 43:1-13

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... he swam, until it would seem His struggles began to churn the cream. On top of the butter he finally stopped. And out of the bowl he happily hopped. So what's the moral. It's easily found. If you can't get out, just keep swimming around! I hope you get the picture: the contrast between an "if only" and a "next time" approach to life. No matter what happens, no matter what our circumstances, we can affirm with conviction "next time" because our God is a consuming fire, burning away all the sin and failure of ...

2184. Thorns and Thistles

Jeremiah 1:1-19

Sermon

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... own thought and work, but gifts of the Spirit, as Paul makes very clear. Apart from God's equipment of us, we cannot do the Lord's work. The task given to Jeremiah is fearful. He is not only to "build and to plant," not only to comfort and give hope to his people, which he does after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 B.C. (Jeremiah chs. 30 and 31 are often called "The Book of Comfort"). Jeremiah is also to "pluck up and break down" (1:10), to utter those powerful, active words of judgment that ...

2185. Living by a Promise

Genesis 15:1-18

Sermon

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... as if they will come true. To be sure, the evidence seems often against the fulfillment of Christ's words. When we are beset by trouble on every side, or when pain is our daily fare; when every circumstance seems to go against us and there seems to be no hope for the future; when we sacrifice for the sake of the gospel and find no peace or reward whatsoever; when we stand beside the grave of a loved one, and sorrow washes over us, do Christ's promises of his presence, of his peace and joy and abundant life ...

2186. Endings

Isaiah 43:14-28

Sermon

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... know that I love you very much." She died that September. Endings can be very sad indeed. Of course endings can also some times be joyful. We have a friend in Africa who told us, "Where there's death, there's hope" -- hope for release from an oppressive government, hope for a remedy from poverty and tyranny. The endings of injustice, suffering, oppression, prejudice are devoutly to be desired. Israel, in our Isaiah text, had no such joyful feelings about endings, however. Her life as a nation was at an end ...

2187. A Church Shaped By The Great Commission

Matthew 28:16-20

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... a kingdom reality of love in which all those things that are expressed in Romans 12 are operative. Our love is without hypocrisy. We abhor what is evil and we cling to what is good. In honor we give preference to one another. We are able to rejoice in hope, but we are also able to be patient in tribulation. We attend to the needs of the saints and we give ourselves to hospitality. We bless those who persecute us; we rejoice with those who rejoice and we weep with those who weep. We associate with the humble ...

2188. Alive In Christ

Colossians 2:6-23

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... speak it aloud, sometimes I simply register it in my awareness. Sometimes I make it a liturgy, repeating it over and over again to a breathing-in-and-out exercise, “[Maxie], the secret is simply this: Christ in you! Yes, Christ in you bringing with Him the hope of all the glorious things to come.” This is Phillips’ translation of Colossians 1:27, addressed to me personally. If there is a growing edge in my life, and I pray God there is, it is at this point: I’m seeking and discovering the experience ...

2189. Compassion Fatigue

1 John 4:7-21

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... down, compassion is at the heart of our call to be Christian – loving out of the love of God, loving with the love of God, continuing to love until we give up the last ounce of our being on behalf of the Kingdom. I believe this is what Hope Foundation is all about – putting flesh on this style of love and compassion. Making ministries of love and compassion possible. But we all know it, don’t we. Ministry to the least of these, seeking to reach out with compassion carries with it meaning and joy. This ...

2190. Constantly Abiding

John 15:1-17

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... struggled in my fingers, but when I let go he didn’t seem to have the strength to fly. I threw him gently into the air, hoping to launch him on his way, but he plummeted to the sand. For a moment I felt pain. I identified with his helplessness. Had I held ... him to dwell among the tombs, but has his mind put at ease as his disease is eradicated. It looks like comfort and hope for two women who are crying in hopelessness because their beloved brother is in the tomb. It looks like hungry men sharing some ...

2191. Generic Christianity Is Not Enough

Romans 12:1-8

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... s nothing bland or generic or iffy about it. We are talking about the definitive issue of life -- what should be the most distinctive thing about us? I want to make three declarations to support my contention that generic Christianity is not enough -- and hopefully provide direction and power to move us along in our distinctive, difference-making Christian walk. One, there are ways of life -- and there is the way. Two, there are books, and books, and books -- but there is the book -- the Christian’s book ...

2192. We Who Are Many Are One Body

Mark 5:1-20

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... that watches us, listens to us, strains to understand us, let us only speak of this! Only this one thing – speak of the mercy Christ has shown us, tell and demonstrate that we who were once “aliens and strangers to the convenants of promise, having no hope without God in the world” now in Jesus Christ have been redeemed and made one body – with one mission: to share His saving grace with all the world. There is another scene in Alex Haley’s book that speaks to us here. He describes a memorable ...

2193. Abraham and God's Promise

Genesis 15:1-18

Sermon

King Duncan

... ? Even if she had a child at this advanced age, how would she ever have the energy to keep up with it? What hope could there possibly be that God would ever grant Abram and Sarai their deepest and most significant dream, that of parenthood? Many couples ... two hundred gave up and returned to England. But over the next decade, Winthrop governed his people and motivated them with the same message of hope he had given them from the deck of the Arabella: “We shall be as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people ...

2194. Playing to the Right Audience

Matthew 6:16-18, Matthew 6:1-4

Sermon

Phil Thrailkill

... to the eye of our heavenly Father with whom there are no secrets and therefore no privacy.3 What we think and feel, what we hope for, our besetting sins, the passions that drive us, our fears, and what we dream about at night. Each of us is an irreducible ... kingdom way, which means that God gets the right to squeeze you often and squeeze you hard that the poor in this world may find hope and help in Jesus Christ and in his church. And the only real reward God has to give is more of himself. I would rather ...

2195. To Live Is to Dance

John 10:1-21

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

... for the church. But listen. The world is our agenda. It is our agenda. It doesn’t set our agenda, but it is our agenda. Unlike many religious leaders, Jesus lived in the world and he loved the world. He loved it so much that he died for it. I hope a lot of you heard Billy Graham on that special news program the other night, this past week. I was thrilled to hear Billy Graham talking about not only a need for a freeze in the building up of nuclear weapons, but a soft agreement that would eventually lead to ...

2196. Oh, God!

Revelation 7:9-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... mind’s eye? “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” Here is the God Jesus showed us. A loving parent bending down and personally wiping the tears out of his child’s eyes. Here is comfort for the grieving, healing for the bruised and battered, hope for the despairing. There is a God who is aware of our heartaches, our frustrations, our fears--who personally longs to bow down before us and wipe the tears from our eyes. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like good news to me. God is ...

2197. Warning To The Clueless Enthusiasts

Luke 14:25-35

Sermon

R. Robert Cueni

... they can't play golf or bridge every day to serve as ministers in small rural congregations. We need people to listen for God's call to ministry in the middle of their lives. If your once-chosen profession is proving to be far less fulfilling than you hoped, perhaps God is calling you into ministry. The Church of Jesus Christ needs ministers. Now doing this might be sacrificial. That, however, is just what Jesus is talking about when he says that to be faithful we have to be willing to turn our back on the ...

2198. Some Things Ought Not to Happen

Genesis 21:8-21

Sermon

James L. Killen

... of their humanity. But things could have worked out much better if the people involved had been willing to work with God. Abraham and Sarah had no children. God had promised to make of their descendants a great nation, and they had hung all of their hopes upon that promise. But God had not yet given them any children, and they were getting old, and they were getting worried about whether or not there would be a fulfillment of that dream around which they had planned their lives. Instead of just trusting God ...

2199. Discovering that It’s Not about You

Genesis 22:1-14

Sermon

James L. Killen

... and drop into despair. Or you can decide that the story is going to go on, and that you will have a role to play in it, but it is not primarily about you. And that decision -- or discovery -- can surprise you by giving you new freedom and meaning and hope. Now, I am very frustrated because we are almost out of sermon time and I need to tell you lots of stories and show you lots of pictures that could help you visualize what life might look like in this new set of relationships. I can only make the briefest ...

2200. Saved (Again)!

Exodus 14:19-31

Sermon

Arley K. Fadness

... their lives during the storm at sea, fear has been a constant sidekick of Christians. And whenever it becomes our friend, we make big, hairy mistakes."2 How then do we neutralize fear? We neutralize fear by being strong, compassionate, and hopeful leaders. Fear can possess us Christians only when we shut faith, hope, and love out of our lives. We neutralize fear by demonstrating a calm, non-anxious presence even though our hearts are beating like trip-hammers. We neutralize fear as Christians when we are ...

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