Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: beginning, start, origination, genesis, birth, dawning, dawn, emergence, inception, launch, creation, birthplace, cradle, early stages, conception, inauguration, foundation, outset, source, derivation, root, roots, provenance, etymology, descent, ancestry, parentage, pedigree, lineage, line, line of descent, heritage, extraction, background, family, stock, blood, bloodline, genealogy, beginnings

Antonyms: end, conclusion, termination

Showing 1 to 25 of 28 results

1. The Bloodline of Christ

John 20:19-23

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... . You have been red-lettered to invite everyone to become what The Da Vinci Code got right, but didn’t know it: each one of us was conceived to be part of the Jesus blood-line. You too can have a red-blooded relationship with God, and trace your bloodline all the way back to Jesus. [You can end the sermon here, or can use the following by poet Godfrey Rust, who wrote this poem in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. You can find it at www.wordsout.co.uk. It is entitled simply “September 11, 2001.” It ...

2. The Surrogate

Matthew 1:1-17

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... in God’s kingdom than the Pharisees who claim to follow each “letter” of the law, he refers to the covenantal right of ALL people to be sons and daughters of Abraham. Those with a contrite heart will enter the kingdom before any who claim a bloodline but bear a bloodthirsty soul. “By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace.” (Hebrews 11:31) The Messiah’s proud lineage is one of earnest heart and sealed with the promise of ...

3. The Masterpiece

Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-28

Sermon

James Merritt

... the priesthood in Israel or any claim to royalty had to be verified by genealogy. Anyone could claim to be the Messiah, but they would be rejected if they could not prove they had a direct line to King David himself. These genealogies are not just about bloodlines and babies. Not only can we trace the royal line of Israel, but we can also see how God deals with His people, because every person in this chain represents how God's sovereign hand had ordered human events down through the ages to make sure His ...

4. The Ten Commandments #7: No Adultery

Exodus 20:1-21

Sermon

David E. Leininger

... root which means to corrupt. When we talk about adulterated milk or soup, we mean that something has been introduced into it that makes it not as pure as it was. Adultery has the potential of introducing something "foreign" into the bloodline. Come inheritance time, this could get very confusing, not to mention incredibly nasty. No adultery! An instruction to keep folks morally pure? Only accidentally. This was designed to put one more protective fence around the family. The penalty for adultery was death ...

5. Broken Pieces

Matthew 1:3, 5, 6

Sermon

James Merritt

... Savior of the world. Most of the names in either list, quite frankly, are just a bunch of no names. To us they are nobodies - people we have never heard of. Closer examination reveals a shocking piece of information. God had promised He would give a Messiah through the bloodline of Abraham and He did just that, but when He opens up the cedar-chest of the lineage of Jesus it may shock you to find that in that cedar chest is a lot of dirty laundry. You would think the lineage of Jesus would be a roll-call ...

6. The Fullness of Time

Galatians 4:4-7

Sermon

Scott Suskovic

... that mean? There are roughly 300 prophetic references written over a 1,000-year period about the Messiah in the Old Testament that narrow the field down to the true identity of the Messiah. First, there is the bloodline. From Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Judah to David, the bloodline has a strong and definite line. However, by judging the overpopulation of Bethlehem during the census, those in the line of David are very numerous. Second, there are the prophecies. Of those who are descendants of David, the ...

7. The Great Dinner

Luke 14:1-14, Luke 14:15-24

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... are by blood descended from Abraham would be included in the “chosen.” Jesus turns this idea several times in scripture, demonstrating that the “house” of God is not determined by bloodline but by faith, devotion, and loyalty to the God of the Hebrews. More than once in the scriptures, Jesus’ bloodline included those who wrangled their place of “covenant-carrier” from another, or those who were gentiles with an extraordinary faith and loyalty to YHWH. Jesus’ genealogy is not neat and tidy ...

8. The Limits Of Love

Luke 4:14-30

Sermon

Charles H. Bayer

... only preached in that God-forsaken place when a great fish delivered him up on its shore. There was also the story of Ruth, a despised Moabite, who not only was accepted into the community by marriage, but became part of David's royal bloodline. "No intermarriage!" said the orthodox. "What about Ruth?" shot back the liberals. And so the debate went on for centuries, sometimes one side prevailing and sometimes the other. But then Israel was not the first people, nor the last, to cycle from internationalism ...

9. The Meeting Of Marriage Partners At The Well

John 4:1-26

Sermon

Mark Ellingsen

... century Jews hearing the story of Jesus' meeting the Samaritan woman at the well would have presumed that a marriage was soon to follow, was that the Hebrew ethnic heritage was built on such meetings between a Jewish boy and a foreign woman (who had some bloodlines in common with the Hebrews) at a well. Moses met his eventual wife at a well. The encounter began when the daughters of the priest of Midian, Jethro (sometimes called Hobab), were trying to get water for their father's flock. Moses was at that ...

10. The Surprising Twist to the Story

Ruth 4:1-12

Sermon

... the blood of heathens, which Ruth contributed by conceiving and giving birth to Obed, David’s grandfather. The storyteller and the Israelite people, regarded this as an act of God. "The Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son." Perhaps this was meant to enrich the bloodline, but it may also have been God’s way of telling them that he is the God of all people, not just the Israelites. Ruth became not only the great-grandmother of King David, but she also became a prototype of the young woman who was ...

11. What Makes A Family?

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

King Duncan

... . If Jesus had problems in his family, I guess you and I can expect to have some problems in ours. THE SECOND THING WE OBSERVE IN OUR TEXT IS THAT JESUS REDEFINED WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FAMILY. A family is not so much defined by its bloodlines but by the love and respect members have for one another. Mutual commitment is more important than shared genes. "Who are my mother and brothers?" Jesus asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!" Jesus ...

12. The Devil Is a Liar

John 8:42-47

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... God at work in Him. In essence, He was saying, “If you are really descendants of Abraham, and Abraham was a man noted for his great faith, how come there is so little of that faith in you?” To be descendants of Abraham was not a matter of bloodline, but of spiritual kinship. To be a real child of Abraham was to share the faith of Abraham. Again, Jesus’ audience became angry at His words. Their reaction was to make an even greater claim: not only were they children of Abraham, they were children of God ...

13. The Purple Church

Acts 2:42-47

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... is the sign of compassion. " " The color purple is the sign of love for each other. " Not red. Not blue. The combination of those two extreme colors brings a new, deeper, richer color to the world's landscape. The Color Purple. Purple has a long, regal bloodline. The color has always been the mark of royalty. Purple dye was so difficult and costly to obtain that it was valued more highly than gold. The deep, true purple color coveted by the rich was created by extracting the colored fluid found in shellfish ...

14. Baby Blues

1 Samuel 1:4-20

Sermon

Mary S. Lautensleger

... journey awaited them. They had assumed that new life was just around the corner. After all, that's what women were for, having babies. In Hannah's day, every wife was expected to give birth to a son who would carry on the father's name and bloodline. In this way Hebrew men lived on after death. Women in the ancient world did not enjoy the myriad of lifestyle choices open to women of our day. Motherhood was the epitome of every woman's experience. If they were unsuccessful at producing offspring, there were ...

15. Having the Last Word

2 Samuel 23:1-7

Sermon

Mary S. Lautensleger

... God; therefore, it was sinful for their subjects to disobey them. Kingships are heredity positions, ostensibly passed on through the genes. The people know who their next leader will be, regardless of his or her qualifications or lack thereof. Inheriting the kingdom through bloodlines was not the case for the first two kings of Israel, though. By the time of David, the Israelites are settled in the promised land, and have grown tired of being ruled by priests and judges. They want to be like everybody else ...

16. Mary Magdalene’s Day

John 20:1-18

Sermon

Donald Charles Lacy

... personal relationship with the man she adored, Jesus of Nazareth. We still wonder what kind of person she was. Fiction writers have had a field day, especially in recent years. Was she really married to Jesus and did they have children? Did they establish a bloodline that is with us today? Such inquiries, while they may border on blasphemy, need airing. That is not to assume our traditional revelation is in error. Wherever we come down in our understanding of her, we are forced to admit that she was a major ...

17. Philippians 3:4b-14

Philippians 3:1-11

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... elite status within Judaism. If anyone had bragging rights, it was Paul. In strict obedience to the Torah Paul was circumcised on “the eighth day” (Genesis 17:12; Leviticus 12:3). He makes it clear three times over that his ancestry, his bloodline, has been Jewish for generations. He identifies himself as a member of “the people of Israel” and specifically as a descendent of “the tribe of Benjamin.” Benjamin was distinguished not only by its patriarch being the only one of Jacob’s sons ...

18. Whistling Jesus

John 15:1-17

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... that spreads Christ’s love to the world. Today’s gospel text is all about creating that intimate “family” connection that binds together the odd assortment Jesus collected to be his disciples. Other than a couple of brothers there was no bloodline, no genealogy to hold fast these first believers. So Jesus offered them the image of a “family tree” — except this “Tree of Life” was not some mighty cedar or oak. It was instead a “vine” — a sinuous, growing, spreading, entwining organism ...

19. Mud Makeovers

John 9:1-12

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... the “Harry Potter” genre of children’s books some of the “pureblood” wizard families proclaim their superiority over those who unexpectedly are born with wizarding gifts in non-magical families. Those pure blood wizards assert that those not from wizarding bloodlines are “mud bloods.” They are inferior. Dirty. Polluted. Impure. It is a children’s book lesson in the ridiculousness of racism. The truth is that we are all “mud bloods” — we are all children born from the creativity of God ...

20. A Dance in the Desert

Philippians 4:4-7

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... pleasantries. He didn't use Dale Carnegie's techniques to "win friends and influence people." The only word was slicingly divisive; the only message a stab through the heart. "You brood of vipers!" he harangued his fans and paparazzi, yelling at them that neither bloodlines nor cultural heritage nor religious piety gave them a leg up in life. But for John, the bad news is good news, and the good news only sneaks in on the shoulders of the bad. As another John ("of the cross") would later remind ...

21. The Womb of Amazing Grace

John 4:5-42

Sermon

Robert Leslie Holmes

... a new capital for the northern kingdom of Israel, an attempt to one day supplant Jerusalem as the national capital. As one generation gave way to another, these northern kingdom Jews often intermarried with people from other tribes thus diluting the bloodline. This also was contemptible to the Pharisees for it diluted the pure Jewish bloodstream. Having married outside their own race, the Samaritans, as we might expect, produced children, who were seen by the Pharisees as children of mixed heritage and thus ...

22. A Taxing Encounter

Matthew 9:9-13, Mark 2:13-17, Luke 5:27-32

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... Abundance comes from the Lord! Jesus explains that this abundance is not just a result of following lots of empty rules and coming from the right lineage. But the Hebrew lineage is full of those who have erred and those who are not from a pure bloodline. Those who bear the covenant of the Lord are those who are faithful and devoted to God in all things. “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings,” says the prophet Hosea (6:6). Jesus often quotes from the ...

23. Syrophoenician Lives Matter!

Mark 7:24-30, Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... then that Jesus healed the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter here? In a sense, the act is a restoration of this woman for her faith. What defiles is not where she lives or her history or her lineage. Her faithful heart has deemed her worthy! Jesus’ own bloodline (see Matthew’s genealogy) contains multiple gentile women, whose faith to Israel’s God made them part of the lineage of the Messiah! And in Nazareth, he drives home that one is a child of Abraham not by blood but by the heart, and he indicates ...

24. God Gives the Pharisees the Finger!

John 7:25-44, John 7:45--8:11

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... infertile from her sin), the man could divorce her. If she passed (meaning she became pregnant with a period of time and her loins remained fruitful….that is God-blessed in their minds), then she would be rendered innocent, and would continue to carry on the bloodline of the man, and he would be bound to keep her.** However….here is the rub: “Only when the man is himself free from guilt, will the waters be an effective test of his wife’s guilt or innocence; but if he has been guilty of illicit ...

25. The Funeral Crasher

John 14:1-4, John 14:5-14, John 14:15-31

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... places)” stands out as one that describes the future for Jesus’ disciples and followers in this scripture story. House is always an interesting metaphor, as it means not only a physical place, as in palace, or Temple, or kingdom, or city, but also means “bloodline of.” The “House of David.” The “House of Windsor.” These all describe a line of inheritance. So also is the House of God (Jesus) a house of inheritance. As Paul puts it, we are all inheritors of the gift of eternal life bought for ...

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