Sermon and Worship Resources

Antonyms: keep, claim, continue, stick by, self-control, power through, achieve, defend, bear, hope, acquire, quick visit, adopt, continue along, adhere, remain, pursue, support, take up, keep up, reuse, advocate, stay, persevere, cherish, keep going, carry on

Showing 2226 to 2250 of 2331 results

Where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.

W. Beran Wolfe

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Will Durant

To prove his love for her, he swam the deepest river, crossed the widest desert and climbed the highest mountain. She divorced him. He was never home.

Rose Sands

2231. All You Can Do is Laugh

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

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... not seen,” says the author of Hebrews (11:1). For every Christian, for every human being created and sanctified by God, faith is that irrational force that laughs in the face of darkness, barrenness, danger, and despair, and believes in fountains in the desert, water gushing up from dry wells, olive trees in winter, new life emerging from dead seeds. Faith knows that God’s absurd miracles can always transcend the absurdity of sin and evil, restoring meaning to the meaningless and hope in the void. So ...

2232. Cross Choices

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

R. Kevin Mohr

... Mary responded saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Thirty years afterward, Mary’s son, Jesus, would ask his disciples first, “who do you say that I am?” and then, after some were deserting Jesus because of his message, he would then ask them, “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter answered for the disciples both times, saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of ...

2233. Remember to Say Thank You

Deuteronomy 8:1-20

Sermon

King Duncan

... the world of business—to say, “Thank you.” I hope you and I are here for this Thanksgiving Day because we realize the importance of expressing our gratitude to God. In our lesson for today, the Hebrew people have spent forty years wandering in the Sinai desert after escaping slavery in Egypt. They are now standing on the borders of Canaan, the promised land. Moses is an old man and is about to die. And he gives the people instructions for how they are to deal with this new phase of their existence as ...

2234. Jesus' Advance Man

John 1:6-8; 19-28

Sermon

King Duncan

... for this task. The prophet Isaiah assigned him to this task 400 years before. As we saw last week, the prophet Isaiah foretold John’s coming. “A voice of one calling,” wrote Isaiah, “‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the ...

2235. House Rules, Forgiveness, and Why Rat Poison Is not Good for You

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

Roy Howard

... at Jesus’ call to forgive, again and again and again. I find it terribly complex, and frankly impossible, to unfold neatly in a single sermon. Christians have been working on this since the beginning. Perhaps it is important to remember a story from the desert fathers of the sixth century. Some brothers came to their abbot asking him to judge another who had committed some unnamed sin. The abbot refused, but they insisted. He relented. As he approached the nearby village, they could see that he had a ...

2236. Waving Out an SOS

Humor

A rather snooty millionaire took some of his upper-class friends yachting. They passed a deserted island where a man with long beard and tattered clothes stood, waving his arms and screaming in their direction. "Who is that?" asked the friend. "I don't know," said the millionaire, "but every time we sail by he goes crazy."

2237. The Sahara Forest

Humor

Don't forget about the little fellow who put on his application for a lumberjack's job that he had learned his trade in the Sahara Forest. The employment manager said with a smile, "You mean the Sahara Desert." The little man stuck out his chest and said, "Sure, now it is."

2238. Driven to Their Knees

Mark 9:2-13

Sermon

King Duncan

... kind of effect on people. The verses that follow Peter’s mindless babbling are insightful. Mark tells us, “Then a cloud appeared and covered them.” The Jewish people associated God with a cloud, remembering how God led the ancient Israelites in a cloud through the desert. On the Mount of Transfiguration the voice of God thundered from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” At this, according to Matthew 17:1-6, the three disciples “fell on their faces, and were filled with awe ...

2239. No Promotion Required

Mark 11:1-11

Sermon

King Duncan

... a dog. (4) But you have to look. Brian J. Waldrop, in his book titled Ocean Breeze: Inspirational Moments with God at the Beach, tells of flipping through the channels of his TV one morning when he stopped to watch a painter skillfully painting a desert landscape. As the man proceeded to color the canvas in deep browns, reds, and yellows, the picture really started to look good. He felt that the painter ought to stop. The picture looked complete. Then, as he was thinking those very words, he cringed to ...

2240. A Nod of Recognition

John 3:14-21

Sermon

Timothy W. Ayers

... passage, that the Jews were once again in rebellion against God. They complained once again that Moses had taken them out of their pleasant, peaceful life as slaves in abject poverty with little to eat and little to live for just for them to die in the desert. It amazes me and others how much the wandering Jews romanticized their lives in Egypt. They often wished to go back. In the early 1980’s Keith Green became one of the leaders of the Christian rock movement. One of his classic songs was a parody of ...

2241. Enduring the Trials of Faith

Romans 4:13-25

Sermon

Richard Gribble

... we live tests our faith in varied ways on almost a daily basis. Since the dawn of civilization humanity has been tempted with power wealth and prestige, the same ideas that Satan unsuccessfully tried to get Jesus to grasp in his famous forty-day desert experience before the onset of his public ministry. Today we measure the success and unfortunately even at times the quality of people on the amount of power, wealth, and prestige they have accumulated. It’s almost impossible to avoid at least one of these ...

2242. Wisdom to the World, but Foolishness to God

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Sermon

Richard Gribble

... turned the tables on evil and rejected all its allurements. What Jesus did might have seemed like foolishness to some, but it was a manifestation of the paradox that Paul addresses in today’s lesson. People today are equally tempted as was Jesus in the desert, but things might be even more challenging now. In many ways society measures our value to the world and our success by the amount of power, wealth, and prestige we obtain. We are considered important if we hold positions of power, amass great wealth ...

2243. The Eleventh Commandment

John 13:1-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... a servant girl concerning his association with Jesus, he gave a curse and denied he ever knew him. Judas, Peter—then the rest of the disciples. Jesus tried so hard to get through to them even though he knew that for a while, every one of them would desert him. Listen as John continues: “When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. ‘Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked them. ‘You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what ...

2244. Gratitude

Ephesians 5:15-20

Sermon

Will Willimon

... . You must be taught to live with Gratitude, I think . "Say 'thank you' to the nice lady," they tell you when you're young. "Say 'thank you' to the nice God," they teach you in church. And, on that winter midnight in 1974 when we drove hurriedly through deserted streets of North Myrtle Beach, rushing into the labor room for our first child, guess who greeted us there? "I didn't expect to see you out at this time of night, here," I said to him. "Really," asked Gratitude in amazement. "Typical of you to think ...

2245. Survival

Luke 21:5-19

Sermon

Will Willimon

... it possible not to be terrified? It is possible only for those who are convinced that something decisive has happened for the world in the life and death of Christ, that God has entered our world and - despite what we do with the world -- God will not desert us. I believe that there is no way for you to think about the future realistically without thinking with faith in the fact of God's loving grasp upon the future. So much of our thought about war -- and peace -- arises from our terror rather than from ...

2246. Imagine

Revelation 21:10, 22-26

Sermon

Will Willimon

... for the present. Too much talk about the good things God is going to do in the future may result in the abandonment of human action now. Eschatology = quietism. "Don't worry, be happy." God will fix it! Someday. Why worry about the deserted streets of downtown Durham after dark when, someday, God will turn asphalt to gold? Talk of the end, the last things, the future, leads to quietism, inaction, in the present. So how many sermons have you heard lately about heaven, pearly gates, or Revelation ...

2247. R.S.V.P.

Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon

Will Willimon

... that we are one of those infamous "Party Schools." Late one Sunday night last winter, I was awakened in the middle of the night and asked to deliver a sad message to a Duke freshman. I got up, put on clothes, stumbled out into the night, drove through deserted Durham streets, wondering if I needed aid from Public Safety to get in the sleeping dorm. I stumbled into a full-fledged party at two o'clock Monday morning. People were up, running through the halls, every room door open. "No, I am not the man from ...

2248. Homecoming

Exodus 17:1-7

Sermon

Will Willimon

... . A person who is at home in two cities is cosmopolitan. A person who is at home nowhere is a saint." "All the trouble, between us and God," says Will Campbell, acerbic Baptist preacher; "began when we got too good to be with God out in the desert in a tent and began building churches trying to housebreak God." When my mother died, I kept having these dreams of home. I had been raised in the rock house my mother designed and had constructed. Every inch of that house bore the imprint of her creativity ...

2249. We Wobble, but We Don't Fall Down

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Sermon

King Duncan

... and productive one. How do we strengthen the inner person? Do not lose heart. Focus on the tasks at hand. Author Patsy Clairmont tells of a conversation she had once with a young Marine. He was returning from serving a year and a half in Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait. Clairmont commented that it must have been difficult to serve overseas while missing his family back home. The young Marine said, “Oh, no, Ma’am. We were taught never to think of what might never be, but to be fully available right ...

2250. Good Show

Revelation 5:11-14

Sermon

Will Willimon

... row because he's been there, the lamb who knows what it's like to be helpless because he's been there. And because the lamb, who has been here sits on the throne up there we do have something to show the child dying of starvation in the African desert, the refugee perishing in the camp in Lebanon, the young man on death row in Atlanta, the child in Duke Hospital. What we show is a vision of a new heaven and a new earth were the one who was slain, in behalf of all these who are slain, now ...

Showing results

Showing 2226 to 2250 of 2331 results

Where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray

W. Beran Wolfe

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Will Durant

To prove his love for her, he swam the deepest river, crossed the widest desert and climbed the highest mountain. She divorced him. He was never home.

Rose Sands

2231. All You Can Do is Laugh

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

Sermon

Lori Wagner

2232. Cross Choices

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

R. Kevin Mohr

2233. Remember to Say Thank You

Deuteronomy 8:1-20

Sermon