Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: complain, moan, groan, whine, mutter, grouse, bleat, carp, cavil, protest, rumble, gurgle, murmur, growl, roar, complaint, muttering, grievance, objection, protestation, quibble, criticism, charge, accusation

Showing 1 to 25 of 63 results

1. For Christ’s Sake, What’s Going On?

Matthew 18:15-20

Sermon

Michael L. Sherer

... to the person who has caused it. That may cause a confrontation. Well and good. The Scriptures tell me I must "grow up into Christ." Part of that maturing process means that I must learn to listen to you and accept what you may tell me if you have a grievance traceable to me - or something I committed or permitted which was hurtful. Of course, if you tell me what the difficulty is, I may explain myself in ways to show you that I had a motive you had not appreciated. Still, if harm was done, I need to listen ...

2. The Wisdom In Waiting

Luke 12:35-48

Sermon

W. Robert McClelland

... reason why the Bible is so concerned about cultivating the ability to wait. The activists of the 60s crowded college campuses across the country. They were occupied with dreams of changing the world, creating a new society, righting the wrongs of the disenfranchised and redressing the grievances of the poor. But the world has gone about its entrenched ways for a long time and society proved to be a stubborn resistor to change. Neither yielded readily to their insistance. The wrongs were not redressed, the ...

3. Pay Back Time

Genesis 45:1-28

Sermon

David E. Leininger

... the Twelve-step programs: 1) Write down in black and white the reasons why we are angry with (someone)...Writing clarifies emotions which have been confused and buried in us, sometimes for years. Also by setting down our grievances in black and white, we place a boundary around them. Our grievances are only so big and no bigger. The hurt had a beginning and it can have an end. 2) Consider "giving away" (telling) what we have written to some trusted person. Consider symbolically releasing the hurt, such as ...

4. Love Your Enemies

Luke 6:27-36

Sermon

King Duncan

... it a few days, and released it to the owner. She never forgot the incident. Decades later she continued tormenting the former newsboy with phone calls. Our newspapers carry stories all the time of people who have a grievance against someone else and they tried to settle that grievance through retaliation. Spiritually, retaliation is deadly. There was a television movie that pointed out how deadly it is. It was about a young man who had a love-hate relationship with his father. He was trying desperately to ...

5. A Terrorist among the Twelve

Luke 6:12-16

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... violent deed that night in the Garden, but whoever it was, it gave occasion for some of Jesus’ most familiar words. “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matthew 26:52) Whatever their grievances, terrorism comes about as close to the unpardonable sin as anything I can imagine. Killing in wartime is bad enough, but killing innocent people to make a political point seems to me to be unconscionable! “All who take the sword will perish by the sword ...

6. Church Discipline: A Cure for What Ails the Body

Matthew 18:15-20

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

... convenient time when your fellow is not hungry or stressed out and pushed for time. Go humbly, and say, "I could be wrong. I'm willing to listen. What happened between us the other day hurts me, and I'd like to talk it over." Then come out with your grievance. The Bible says that if your brother listens to you, then you've gained your brother. "Oh, I am so sorry. I did not realize. Do forgive me. I'd never want to hurt you!" Other times the tack might be similar, but tapered to the need. "I just want ...

7. Stop Fuming, Start Forgiving!

Matthew 6:5-15

Sermon

Bill Bouknight

... I’m just sitting here waiting on more spit.” I know some grown-ups who get angry and react the same way. You can look at them and tell that they are just sitting around waiting on more spit. Indeed, all of us have a tendency to harbor grievances against other people. If there is a single person here today who is not angry or resentful toward anybody, please autograph your bulletin and give it to me after the service. I want to show it to my Baptist minister friends to prove that the first perfect person ...

8. Death Has Been Conquered

Mark 16:1-20

Sermon

King Duncan

... . They grow old and feeble. Their friends and contemporaries die off. At the age of eighty, their property is taken from them and given to their children, who would otherwise never inherit from them. Their bodies contract various ailments, they accumulate grudges and grievances, they grow weary of the struggle of life, and they can never look forward to being released from the pain of living. (2) Thus there may be many things in life we dread more than physical death. For many of us death is something ...

9. How to Forgive

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

King Duncan

... rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” This was just the advice Corrie needed. She writes, “And so it proved to be. There were a ...

10. Hold Me When I'm Angry

Joshua 5:1-12

Sermon

Carl Jech

... ." Even within the family of the church we need to learn to "fight fair" - to be constructively honest about our differences and the things that get under our skin. Sometimes that may mean knowing when it won't do any good to bring a particular grievance out into the open, but more often than not I think it will mean that we can facilitate what is called "conflict utilization" - not the "management" of conflict, but the kind of open-ended give and take that leads to growth. (To speak of managing conflict ...

11. How Do We Forgive?

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

King Duncan

... an unforgiving heart. Some of us, every time we pray, we ask God to forgive us of our sins. That’s a countless number of requests for forgiveness over a lifetime. And yet we may carry in our hearts grievances toward others that we should have let go of long ago. We let go of these grievances, the pain and resentment of betrayal, first of all, by recognizing that we ourselves have been forgiven through the grace of Jesus Christ. Dwight L. Moody once put that grace in a beautiful way. He wrote: “I can ...

12. Making Our Feelings Known

Job 23:1--24:25

Sermon

John A. Stroman

In our text Job makes his lament to God loud and clear, "Today also my complaint is bitter." The word bitter seems to carry the feeling of defiance in the wake of grievance and complaint. Job earlier has spoken of the bitterness of his soul:Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. (7:11)I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my ...

13. Responding In Anger

Job 7:11-21 · Matthew 21:12-13

Sermon

Wallace H. Kirby

... it is not there, to let it seethe underneath until it comes out as passive aggressiveness. The sin is to let anger be directed against people and not against issues and conditions. The sin is to nurse anger in our relationships, feeding it more and more grievances without facing the situation honestly and squarely. Nursed anger becomes hate. And then love is entirely defeated in us because hate is the zero of love. There are three things that I sense are important for us in facing our anger. First, it is ...

14. Forgiveness Freely Given

Isaiah 55:1-13

Sermon

Erskine White

... God's forgiveness of her sins. You can see the need for forgiveness in homes and families, where people of the same flesh and blood can hardly stand to be with one another. Every offhand remark, every look of the eye, every tone of voice dredges up grievances which have been accumulating for many years. These families imprison each other in a living hell and will never escape unless, as a family, they can find a way to forgive and forget. You can see it in a church, when disputes arise and factions form ...

15. Hostage Crisis

1 Kings 19:1-8

Sermon

Carlyle Fielding Stewart

... sabotage, making prisoners of the undeserving. It is not a crisis of oil, guns, bread or butter. It is not the public theater of disgrace, shame, and humiliation brought about by political insurrectionists and dissidents desiring to vault center stage to air their grievances. No, the hostage crisis I'm referring to today is none of these things. The hostage crisis today is where the people of God are taken prisoner by evil and spiritual decadence, where souls have sold out to Satan; where the spiritually ...

16. Christ the King A King Worth Having

John 12:12-19

Sermon

... on the chopping block. Nor were Henry’s mates the only ones to get the axe. A couple centuries later, the colonies in the New World had their grief with another king of England, George III. Thomas Jefferson spelled out a long list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence: sending his soldiers to live free-of-charge in the homes of the colonists; protecting his soldiers, by mock trials, from being punished for the murders they’d committed; imposing taxes on the colonists without their consent ...

17. Love Transcending Law and Custom

Matthew 1:18-25

Sermon

... killing of one Irish person by another is a routine part of life. So commonplace is killing there that it is unusual when the loss of innocent life causes people to stop and actually wonder whether the long, coarse weave of vendettas and grievances might be altered. People in Belfast, Dublin, and London started trying to answer that all-important question after eleven Irish civilians were killed in Enniskillen on November 8, 1987. Among those killed was twenty-year-old Marie Wilson, a student nurse mortally ...

18. The Church’s Fear and Comfort

Acts 9:19b-31

Sermon

Richard F. Bansemer

... or far south in the interior of Africa. Your job, as employee, is to do whatever is demanded by the boss. As fate would have it, your boss has a reputation. He is absolutely the boss. There is no board of directors to hear complaints, no grievance committee, no union. Once you accept the job, you are his for eight, ten, twelve hours a day. To make matters worse, he doesn’t often make himself visible to his employees, and rumors shared at the lunch room tell of his ruthlessness, his demands for perfection ...

19. Who Has Everything?

Matthew 5:5

Sermon

Wallace H. Kirby

... do, and treat us as well as they do. The meek person has strength, but has learned to control if; is aware of certain rights, but does not flaunt them. The meek person has ability, but does not lord it over others; has grievances, but is patient. He or she has advantages, but never takes advantage of, cooperates rather than dominates, assists rather than accuses, forgives rather than avenges. Jesus said that such gentle, restrained, meek persons are on the pathway to happiness. They will inherit the earth ...

20. Forgiveness Unlimited

Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon

Jerry L. Schmalemberger

... relief and pardon and a clean slate, he went to Calvary. That means we have the opportunity to start over forgiven. When you get that kind of forgiveness, you are just compelled to make a part of that starting over the forgiveness of those petty little grievances with other people. We get angry with that servant whose master forgave him so much while he refused to forgive so little. Yet we are often like him. We nurse along a grudge, and we refuse to overlook a mistake, we keep warm a dislike or resentment ...

21. A Courtroom Confrontation

Matthew 27:11-26

Sermon

Bill Bouknight

... to do is turn loose of the rice and he would be free. But he can't bring himself to do that. There are higher life forms than the monkey that fall for the same trap. Then there is the rope of resentment that can bind us...all those collected grievances of the years that we yearn to pay back with interest, all our angry yearning that so-and-so get what's coming to him. When the poet Edwin Markham reached the age of retirement, he discovered that his banker, who he thought was his friend, had defrauded him ...

22. The Seeds of Social Conflict

Genesis 4:1-26

Sermon

Bill Bouknight

... within me that wants to wallow in the mud.” It’s true for all of us. Haven’t you felt both the eagle and the hippo within your own heart? One side of us wants to fight and rage, to prejudge and gossip, to brood and nurse grievances. But on the other side of us, inspired by the Christ within us, wants to withhold judgment, to make honorable compromises, to give other people the benefit of the doubt, and to build bridges of reconciliation. You see examples in your private life and also in the public ...

23. The Miracle of Salvation

Isaiah 52:13--53:12

Sermon

... s never the final one, toward overcoming our guilt. For behind all of today’s hustle and bustle is a sense of loneliness that the best psychiatrist in the world can’t overcome. Inside us is a feeling of guilt that involves more than a real or imagined grievance toward our fathers and mothers. In short, there exists within each of us a state of rebellion against God that colors all of our actions and our reactions. Usually we don’t recognize it for what it is but it’s there. This feeling of guilt and ...

24. In All Things Be Thankful

Ephesians 4:17--5:21

Sermon

Brett Blair

... that I can get better.” She underscored a universal truth. When trouble slams us, we do have choices. Ralph Sockman, a renowned [Methodist] minister of a generation ago used to express it this way. He said, “A grief is a sorrow we carry in our heart. A grievance is a chip we carry on our shoulder.” All of us must face trouble. None are immune. Indeed, I stand before you this morning as one whose clerical robe provides no shelter from misfortune. At one time or another trouble will come up to all of us ...

25. All I Want for Christmas is Peace

Luke 2:8-20

Sermon

James W. Moore

... , how hostile they can feel toward one another? When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn? We spend weary days and sleepless nights brooding over our resentments, calculating ways to get even. We demand our pound of flesh, seethe over our grievances, and wallow in our self-pity — shackled by our silly pride — unbending, unmerciful, unable, and unwilling to forgive and reconcile. Isn t that tragic? A cruel word is finally only an echo. Revenge actually is never sweet; it ultimately becomes a sour ...

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