Sermon and Worship Resources

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1. Have a Jolly Imperfect Christmas This Year!

Matthew 1:18-25

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... Barbie. The time the Christmas pageant went off without a hitch. The year when everyone got to come home. A blanket of snow on Christmas Eve draped everything in white and wonder. But other Christmas’s are forever etched in our memories because they were so IMPERFECT. The year it flooded and Christmas was spent at the neighbors who lived on higher ground. The year no one noticed the oven turned off and the turkey ran with blood-red juice when carved. The year it snowed TWO FEET and a family of happy ...

2. Hidden Imperfections

Illustration

Michael P. Green

... stop some miles before he crossed the foothills because he had not taken time to clean out his shoes. That has been the source of failure in many Christian lives. Eager to avoid the big sins, your life may outwardly be one of extreme piety, but if there are hidden imperfections—little pebbles in your shoe—these will cause failure in your Christian life.

3. On Welcoming the Imperfect

John 10:22-30

Sermon

R. Robert Cueni

... , I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32, emphasis mine). Notice the critical difference between the approach of the Pharisees and the approach of Jesus. The Pharisees wanted to emphasize purging the impure. Jesus wanted to emphasize reaching out and even welcoming the imperfect. As the American poet, Edwin Markham put it in his little verse, “Outwitted.” He drew a circle that shut me out — Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In ...

4. Imperfect Pastors

Exodus 32:1-14

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... in the back of the worship center? You preached too long. It was time to eat!” And my personal favorite. . . “Not enough people signed up for the church golf tournament. You have poor leadership skills.” (1) One day, technology may solve the problem of imperfect pastors. In fact, it may become a reality sooner than we think This year, there was a major religious convention in Germany at which the sermon was delivered by a digital avatar powered by artificial intelligence. Every two years, there is a ...

5. Imperfect Perfect Copies

Humor

Copy machines are capable of making rapid reproduction of human error, perfectly.

6. Loving

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Sermon

Larry Powell

... sew;a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;a time to love, and a time to hate;a time for war, and a time for peace.(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) There is a time for all things, and on this side of eternity, all things temporal are imperfect and shall pass away. The Egyptians constructed in excess of seventy pyramids between 2700 B.C.-2200 B.C. The largest, built by Khufu, was 480 feet high, occupied 748 square feet, and contained 2,300,000 blocks weighing two and a half tons each. Impressive even by today's ...

7. Exercise Your Spiritual Gifts

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Sermon

Richard Hasler

... Steele never met the Nebraska pastor who wrote the ad, but he liked his style. He could not but believe that he was swamped with applicants. Maybe we should put an ad in our local newspaper that would read as follows: "Imperfect church, imperfect pastor, imperfect members, invites imperfect visitors that grace may abound -- Worship 10:30 a.m." Today, we are going to examine the opening words of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. This will be the first in a series of seven consecutive ...

8. Epiphany 3

Luke 4:14-30

Bulletin Aid

Dennis Koch

... Radiance True "Come Follow Me," The Savior Spake O Trinity, O Blessed Light Through The Night Of Doubt And Sorrow The Church's One Foundation Epiphany 3 Gracious Lord, we know that we live in an imperfect world, a world which is filled with ... imperfect people, imperfect situations and imperfect solutions. The brokenness of creation is evident everywhere. Yet, we have such high expectations of ourselves and others. We easily become discouraged when we stumble or when someone else lets us down. Our need for ...

9. Augustine, Defender of the Faith

Sermon

Jerry L. Schmalemberger

... . Augustine, defender of the faith, was one of the great teachers of the church and a great Christian thinker. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants acknowledge his importance as a theologian and shaper of the church. He taught us that: 1. Sin is the result of free will and imperfection. 2. Evil does not stop at the church doors. 3. As a member of the human race, it is only by God’s grace that we are saved. All this came from his own early life of debauchery, and from God, who spoke to him in Romans 13 ...

10. Swimming With The Sharks

Mark 9:2-13

Sermon

King Duncan

... over in my ear . . . By using her term of endearment for me, she said, You are my husband. You will always be my husband. You are still my man." (3) To understand the grace of God poured out in Jesus Christ, we must first understand our inadequacy, our imperfection, our ugliness, as it were. But the transfigured Christ in all his loveliness, in all his holiness, in all his glory still loves us. There was no need for the disciples to be terrified, but they did not know that. All they could see was Christ's ...

11. Paul in Ephesus

Acts 19:1-22

Understanding Series

David J. Williams

... in Ephesus was accompanied “by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit” (Rom. 15:19; cf. Acts 13:11; 14:3, 10; 16:18; 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:4), only here the miracles may have been unusually frequent (note the imperfect, “was doing”) and appear to have been extraordinary in character (v. 11). It was God, of course, who was doing them; Paul was simply the agent (lit., “through the hands of Paul,” v. 11; see note on 5:12). But the ordinary people were not concerned with ...

12. Where God Can Be Seen

John 15:1-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... something to her. Mavis put the first card back and found a blank card with a bouquet of flowers on the front. Inside she wrote a simple message from her heart. "To my mother on Mother's Day ” Thank you for being you! With love from your (imperfect) daughter." (1) Jesus told his followers, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love." What better words could we read on Mother's Day? Jesus' words are the model for us all: mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers, as ...

13. The Perfect Man

Hebrews 10:1-18

Sermon

King Duncan

... with dirty dishes in the sink. He actually put his bath towel back on the rack. (6) What happened to him? Simple. He had been exposed to a higher standard. That’s what Jesus does to us when he comes into our life. Though he does not hold our imperfection against us, still he does not leave us just as we are. He is at work in our lives making us what we ought to be. Perfection is impossible. We know that. We cannot excuse ourselves of responsibility, however, by saying that we are only human. With God’s ...

14. A Perfect Prayer

Sermon

Erskine White

... we ought." We need to learn. We need to learn not by the spirit of selfish success which surrounds us, but by the Word of sacrifice and service which Christ has put within us. Remember that like Solomon, we can offer God our own perfect prayers, even with our imperfect lives. We can pray for an understanding mind and for the grace to live rightly in God's ways. Remember that God is the power in our prayers to Him, not ourselves, and what finally matters is not our will, but God's will be done. Amen Pastoral ...

15. Children of the Heavenly Father

Romans 8:12-25

Sermon

Steven E. Albertin

... , filled with racist attitudes, and are unable to really do anything about it in spite of our best efforts to the contrary. The problem is even worse. Paul asserts that this human fallenness also extends to the natural world in which we live. It, too, is broken, imperfect, and not as it was intended to be. The natural world, too, has been infected with sin and cries out for redemption. This is a rather politically incorrect thing for Paul to assert in this world of ours. We usually don't think we live in a ...

16. Honk If Something Falls Off

Matthew 5:43-48

Sermon

King Duncan

... Maybe so. But what guarantee do you or I have that we will never lose a piece of truck in our travels? Let me be clear, says Doyal: living an “I’m not perfect, so get over it” life is not what he is advocating here. Admitting that your imperfections show up on occasion is another matter. Second, this driver God bless his sweet soul assumes that people will be so kind as to inform him if he drops a chunk of truck on his journeys: a muffler, a bumper, a hubcap, the transmission. With wear and age, the ...

17. Love

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Understanding Series

Marion L. Soards

... should cause the attentive reader to recall Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 concerning what kinds of things will survive God’s scrutiny on the Day of final judgment. 13:11–12 To make his point concerning the passing away of imperfection (that is, the gifts) and the eternal nature of love, Paul offers a dramatic metaphor in regard to the putting aside of childish ways. Immaturity gives way to maturity, so that a childish concern with flamboyant gifts should run its course and end with ...

18. For a Thirty-three-year-old Cancer Victim

Matthew 13:24-30

Eulogy

Harold Warlick

... told you." Deep down, all of us know Jesus' words to be true. The good and the bad do grow together - the perfect and the imperfect, life and death, joy and suffering. We also know that there is a final harvest and that the one who has created and redeemed us ... some understanding of this disease to help those who would come after him. And he did. He and Kathy got all out of this imperfect situation there was to get. No one can do more. 2. Secondly, Charlie made a promise. He promised that since he was going to ...

19. Perfect Strangers

Exodus 1:1-22

Sermon

Justin Tull

... on the true gospel. As a Christian I am called to reject the action of the Pharaoh who acted out of self-interest and fear and to follow the example of Pharaoh’s daughter who acted out of compassion for the stranger. I am not permitted to be an imperfect stranger. To the outsider I am asked to be a perfect stranger! When I was in high school, a young student came from Germany to be a foreign exchange student in our high school. I did not know him or feel very comfortable around him at first. I invited ...

20. Good News Or Bad News?

Sermon

Rolf E. Aaseng

... the future God has in store for us is that we shall be in God's presence forever. This is not possible for any person or thing that is tainted by sin. God's holiness is so thorough that it cannot stand the presence of the slightest imperfection. It must react to destroy anything unfit that ventures into the divine presence. Thus at the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai the Israelites were warned not to venture too close lest "the Lord break out against them" (Exodus 19:22). But God's intention ...

21. The Gift

Drama

Esther Lense

... the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. "Love never ends; as for prophecy, it will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease, as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowlege is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but ...

22. No Longer Afraid

John 1:1-18

Sermon

Daniel G. Mueller

... thought that crosses our minds usually is a question: "What did I do this time?" People tend naturally to feel guilty. Whether we have actually done anything to be guilty of or not doesn’t matter all that much. Our predisposition to guilt is the result of our imperfection, our sin. We know that we aren’t perfect, we aren’t all that we should be even when we are doing our best. So it’s easy to feel guilty and afraid. Even more frightening than having to talk to Dad, the principal or the boss, is ...

23. The Family Was God’s Idea

Sermon

Gregory J. Johanson

... , knowing that the Christian sign is not perfection. That is a mistake we make in our churches. The Christian sign is not perfection (the one thing you are asked and must admit as you come into the church is a confession of sin), but redeemed, forgiven imperfection, seeking to witness to perfection, which lies only in God. And what about Paul’s demand and his phrase "without blemish"? That is what we seek. Not out of pride or to outshine lesser lights, not to win God’s love; that is already guaranteed ...

24. God's Job Profile

Amos 7:10-17

Sermon

King Duncan

... way out. Where are you, Lord, when I need you? God could also use some advice about the kind of people He calls to do His work. He seems to have this thing about calling very imperfect people. Certainly Abraham was imperfect. Why he once tried to pass off his wife as his sister. What a wimp. And Moses was imperfect. He once killed a man in a fit of anger. Then there was Samson. Look how easily he let a woman lead him astray. And then David. Adulterer. Murderer. Surely God could have done better. And Jonah ...

25. Family Survival

Genesis 37:1-11

Sermon

Stephen DeFur

... along. Here's Amy being born. Here's Amy's first day of school. Here's Amy graduating. Then the fourth one--the last kid, open that book. Here's Ben being born . . . we've got to get some more pictures of Ben! All of us have some dings from imperfect families, but most folks in this room have some real deep hurts. I want to speak in these moments to three categories of people. 1. Some of you have never worn the robe. Some of you have never received the kind of affirmation and love from your parents that you ...

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