Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: captured, trapped, catch, took, arrested, grabbed, taken, seized, stuck, apprehended, picked up, entangled, nabbed, jammed, abducted, acquired, got, bagged, gotten, netted, cornered, appropriated, tangled, snared, ensnared

Antonyms: free, freed, unconfined, loose, unrestrained, set free, uncuffed, emancipated, enfranchised, released, ambiguous, flaccid, let go, discharged, unbound, uncaged, unchained, unfettered, unleashed, unshackled, untied, avoided, discounted, disregarded, missed

Showing 1 to 25 of 67 results

1. Emancipation Proclamation

John 8:31-41

Sermon

... ourselves. That’s the bad news of the human situation. So when Jesus came to Galilee to preach the Gospel of the kingdom, he launched the greatest liberation movement in the history of the world, a movement never equaled. The Gospel that he brought is God’s own emancipation proclamation. It is the Word of Life from him who is the Word of Life, the truth that sets us free in him who is the Truth. Pontius Pilate would have fared much better had he asked not, "What is truth?" but "Who is truth?" The truth ...

2. Now Stand Up Straight!

Luke 13:10-17

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... goodness of life given to them as a gift by God. "You are a daughter of Abraham." He is saying, you are equal with men and entitled to all the grace and goodness of this life. I tell you, this passage is not about sabbath laws. This passage is about emancipation. "Jesus came upon a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years." Do you know what I saw when I read that? I saw those women in Washington, D. C., who are bent over with the burden of poverty, the burden of violence, bent over with the burden of ...

3. Family Re:Union - Inverting the Pyramid

Deuteronomy 6:1-25

Sermon

James Merritt

... seconds are politicians. (If you are a politician just forget that I said that.) Myth #4: Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. The truth is his Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any slaves, because at the time the Emancipation Proclamation was given, the states that had slaves were not under the control of the United States Government. The Emancipation Proclamation was effectively worthless. It wasn’t until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865 that slavery was officially ...

4. How to Recognize a Prophet

Deuteronomy 18:14-22

Sermon

Curtis Lewis

... by an old rooster crowing. The sound of the crowing rooster was the sign for the slaves to hit the floor and move out to the field to begin a day of hard work. According to Washington, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and the slaves realized they had been freed, something changed in the Washington shanty. He recalls awakening the morning afterwards not to the sound of a rooster crowing, but his mother chasing that rooster around the barnyard with an axe. According to ...

5. Us Against Them

Exodus 4:21

Sermon

Will Willimon

... would be set up to commemorate the event. There would be a government holiday on a Monday in March to praise the farsightedness of Pharaoh, the one who cut the first new deal. But the story was not written in Sunday School. This is a real story of God's emancipation proclamation, not Pharaoh's, God's great hour, not Pharaoh's or even Moses'; so, God being one, it's for all of God's creatures. That's hard for us. We wonder what all the good church people might think if we asserted, with Exodus, that our God ...

6. Food For Thought

1 Peter 1:13-21

Sermon

James Merritt

... we have been redeemed. Now that word redemption tells us two wonderful things about our salvation. a. The Virtue of Salvation The word "redeemed" means to set a slave free by the payment of a ransom. Every Christian is in effect an emancipated slave, and the Bible is our emancipation proclamation. But notice what we have been set free from. We have been freed from "our aimless conduct." (v.18) Listen carefully. Do you know what salvation does? It not only gives you a place in heaven, it gives you a purpose ...

7. Keeper of the Springs

Proverbs 31:10-31

Sermon

Peter Marshall

... that she should be the mother of the Savior of the world. It was nineteen hundred years ago “when Jesus Himself a baby deigned to be and bathed in baby tears His deity,” and on that night, when that tiny Child lay in the straw of Bethlehem, began the emancipation of womanhood. When He grew up and began to teach the way of life, He ushered woman into a new place in human relations. He accorded her a new dignity and crowned her with a new glory, so that wherever the Christian evangel has gone for nineteen ...

8. We Believe in Jesus Christ

John 20:19-31

Sermon

J. Howard Olds

... break our habits and shape up and do better. We are just addicted to the wrong that lies within us. But, He came as a great Emancipator to set us free. Christ is the answer to our slavery to sin. He breaks the power of cancelled sin and sets the prisoner free. ... great liberator. When he was carried from Washington to Illinois for burial, thousands lined the railroad tracks to honor the emancipator. The story goes that when Lincoln's body was shipped through one New York town, an African American woman grabbed ...

9. God's Gift

Jeremiah 33:1-26

Sermon

Derl G. Keefer

... his own freedom, by paying so much per year for his body; and while he was paying for his freedom, he was permitted to labor where and for whom he pleased. He discovered that Ohio paid better wages so he decided to travel there for work. When the Emancipation Proclamation became law he was freed from any obligation to his master. But this man continued to work until he had enough money to pay the full price of his freedom. He walked the greater portion of the distance back to where his old master lived in ...

10. A Call To Community

Acts 16:6-10

Sermon

Douglas J. Deuel

... for our lives. Belief in God's providential care for our lives leads us to seek God's will and to make choices that would be pleasing to God. Abraham Lincoln was severely criticized by a group of clergymen as he was considering signing the Emancipation Proclamation. They attempted to invoke their interpretation of God's will to influence him not to sign the document. He responded by saying that people are often mistaken in their interpretation of God's will. Then he said, "If it is probable that God would ...

11. Wanting To Be Seen

Matthew 6:5-6

Sermon

David Belgum

... Church and had no doubt heard this very text preached about a few times as well as other admonitions to humility and avoiding the sin of pride. He was not using this tour for his personal gain. He saw his very personality, his past successes as emancipator, and his charismatic influence as tools or resources for holding a fragile country together. He preferred not to be president, and wanted to return to his large farm after his tour of military duty was over. He also resisted any effort to make him a kind ...

12. Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany

Sermon

Russell F. Anderson

... came to reconcile us to God and to give us the Spirit of reconciliation Even non-Christians can sometimes teach us a lesson about reconciliation. In the movie Gandhi, a Hindu leader appears at Gandhi's bedside to plead with him to end his fast. The emancipator of India has pledged to keep on fasting until the fighting between the Hindus and the Moslems came to an end. The Hindu leader was angered by Gandhi's resolve to continue his fast and vowed to continue the fight against the Muslims. To justify his ...

13. Here They Come, Singing

Jeremiah 30:1--31:40

Sermon

John R. Brokhoff

... few, they did not constitute a problem for God. He has done miraculous things with remnants. Even today he can do unbelievable things with only a few persons. Their number is not important; their faith in God is what matters. The staggering emancipation of God’s ancient people prefigures God’s astounding liberation of his people today from bondage to sin and death into the freedom of eternal life and peace through Jesus Christ, his Son, our Savior. However, the deliverance bought by Calvary and Easter ...

14. The TV Revolution

Sermon

Michael Rogness

... were the primary medium of communication in the western world. But today's new technology has vastly expanded the possibilities of communication. Roy P. Madsen, who teaches film production, notes that: film and television, ... now offer forms of communication emancipated from the culture bound concepts of the printed word or immobile art. Visual meanings, expressed in movement, may now be sent from mind to mind through the eyes.6 This has vastly expanded the possibilities of communication. From the old ...

15. Grace Is What Christ Has Done

Acts 15:1-21

Sermon

Barbara Brokhoff

... world to be delivered from that kind of works righteousness! When I realized that I was justified and forgiven; not because of obedience to the law, not because of rituals or holy habits, but because of a divine grace that never failed, I was emancipated and felt a marvelous deliverance. We are forgiven, absolutely and completely, when we repent of our sins and trust God's action in our behalf in Christ. Forgiveness cannot be earned nor merited, it has already been given, it can only be accepted by faith ...

16. The Kingdom of God Is Like… a Joke!

Luke 10:25-37

Sermon

Steven Burt

... for that to be challenged. The same was true of slavery. For economic reasons, or for whatever other reasons, for the longest time many people believed that it was acceptable to own another person. That idea persisted until the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Likewise, Jesus realized that his hearers thought the social order was fixed, set in stone, unchangeable. He realized they believed that the lion had the right to kill and eat the lamb. And when he realized the plight of his hearers, Jesus ...

17. Take Off The Grave Clothes!

John 11:38-44

Sermon

Carlyle Fielding Stewart

... bind and obliterate the last vestiges of light and life in us! Taking off the grave clothes was just as important in Lazarus' new life of freedom as the act of being raised itself. You see many people are freed, liberated, saved, unbound, resurrected, emancipated from being spiritually dead to being fully alive, but they still have on their grave clothes. So long as they have them on they can never be truly set free. Our resurrection must be succeeded by a final unraveling of those garments of restraint ...

18. Time and Timing

Habakkuk 1:12--2:1, Habakkuk 1:1-4

Sermon

Paul W. F. Harms

... talking different languages here. Four hundred years is a long time for the promise to be fulfilled for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some two hundred years of slavery is a long time for the black man in America. Add to that, years of not-quite-freedom since the Emancipation Proclamation, and you've got more time. Two years is a long time in a concentration camp. One year is too long. One day is too long. Yet people have spent whole lifetimes in the gulags of Russia. The delay between the sin of Adam and Eve ...

19. Museum or Mission?

Luke 15:1-7, Luke 15:8-10

Sermon

Wallace H. Kirby

... , Edinburgh: "Nothing will ever be taught, I trust, in any of our Halls, which will have the remotest tendency to disturb the existing order of things ..." MacLeod suggests that at this point Marx says to himself, "We must proceed to the emancipation of man without benefit of clergy." Too often does the church choose museum over mission. We commit money, leadership and prayer toward keeping things as they are - at the local level and in our denominational traditions. During the 1960s, when an exciting ...

20. Christ Has Set Us Free

John 8:31-41

Sermon

... . The Lord has taken all blame on himself. Christ has set us free. This is what Luther re-discovered, that the Gospel does not stifle our spirits; it rather gives us new life and new energy. It means Christ is not a wet blanket but an emancipator. Not a giant thumb mashing our souls but a liberator. Devil, begone! You’ve been promising liberty ever since Adam, and all you’ve done is tie us up in chains. Christ, be welcome! You offer us the discipline of repentance and faith and fellowship, and thereby ...

21. Counsel for Discouraged Disciples

Habakkuk 1:1-4

Sermon

... of God revealed in Jesus. The sight of evil pains them; causes them suffering; makes them want to join Jesus in cross-bearing efforts to bring about redemptive change. Regardless of the sincerity of their dedication, however, they are never emancipated from the pain and frustration in cross-bearing. Evil never surrenders without a fight. The wrongs that are resisted often seem to grow more monstrous the more they are opposed. Lifetimes of tears, prayers, and strenuous involvement may pass without seeming ...

22. Religion - One Way to Get in God’s Way

Zechariah 7:1-14

Sermon

... render true judgment is to give people an even break, to give them what they have coming. They don’t owe us thanks. We are not bestowing something special on them. They are only receiving what is properly theirs, which had always been theirs. Neither the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln nor of the United States gave the black man a gift, as though he had no claim on freedom or liberty. He was but receiving that which was already his and had always been his but which had wrongfully been taken ...

23. Dog: Man's Best Friend?

Exodus 12:1-30

Sermon

... "I Am." He plays for keeps and means business in all his dealings. When will puny humanity understand that to declare war on God, to challenge him, to take the other side, is to invite certain death and defeat? So, to the nation who is about to be emancipated, without open warfare, without a blow struck, the command is given, "Get you a lamb! You must have a lamb! Not just any old lamb will do. It must be male, young, one year old, and without blemish." Every household (unless it is too few in number) must ...

24. Trouble on the Mountain

Exodus 32:1-33:6

Sermon

... whom he had redeemed out of slavery only a short while ago, those people who had acknowledged him as Lord, had entered into Covenant with him, had recited vows of faithfulness, now brazenly denying the reality of God, he is angry! They are renouncing their Emancipator and shamelessly worshiping a pagan bull calf. How low could they go? They made themselves a deity which was a pagan representation. It would seem, if they would make a graven image at all, the least they could do would be to form it into ...

25. A Glory Revealed in Liberty

John 8:31-41

Sermon

... extended. But let us say there is the son of some plantation owner who wants to end the abomination of slavery on his inheritance. He has to wait until the his father dies. But the very day after his father’s death, the son issues his own "emancipation proclamation." Now this promise means something. The son has control over all his father’s holdings. The son has the same powers that the father had. So, when the son made the slaves free, they were really free. All they needed to do was believe the good ...

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