Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: humiliation, mortification, chagrin, ignominy, loss of face, shamefacedness, embarrassment, indignity, abashment, discomfort, discomfiture, discomposure, guilt, remorse, contrition, compunction, disgrace, dishonour, discredit, degradation, disrepute, ill-repute, infamy, scandal, odium, opprobrium, obloquy, condemnation, contempt, pity, misfortune, crying shame, cause for regret, source of regret, sad thing, unfortunate thing, discredit to, disgrace to, stain on, blemish on, blot on, blot on the escutcheon of, slur on, reproach to, bad reflection on, bring into disrepute, degrade, debase, defame, stigmatize, taint, sully, tarnish, besmirch, stain, blacken, drag through the mud/mire, give a bad name to, put in a bad light, humiliate, mortify, make someone feel ashamed, embarrass, abash, chasten, humble, put someone in their place, take down a peg or two, cut down to size, show up

Antonyms: honor, pride, respect, glory, praise, dignity, honor, esteem, glorification, laud, compliment, regard, credit, elevate, acclaim, pleasure, favor, kudos, recognition, flatter, admiration, greatness, happiness, self-confidence, reverence

Showing 1 to 25 of 370 results

1. Scandal!

1 Corinthians 1:18--2:5

Sermon

... easily forget that Paul calls us to be "fools for Christ." And we don’t even want to hear Christ’s words "Woe to you when all men speak well of you." But we don’t have to be so respectable. We do have some modern models for living scandalously in faith. There’s Jack Shea, for one. In 1962 Jack Shea was Senior Vice-President of Fina Oil Co. in Dallas, a man moderate in his politics and quiet in his religion. Then came only a few blocks from his office the assassination of President Kennedy. In the ...

2. Are You Part of the Scandal?

Luke 15:11-32

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... the world, or plaster over the cracks in people and history. Forgiveness looks square in the face of wrong, and chooses healing and reconciliation rather than hatred and revenge. It may be the hardest thing in the world to do offer true forgiveness. Scandalously hard. There were three great holocausts of the 20th century: Russia, China, and Germany. Two were done by atheists — Stalin in Russia, Mao in China. One by someone who created a deviant religious cult in Germany. Adolph Hitler was his name. Just ...

3. Scandal

Matthew 16:21-28, Matthew 17:14-23, Matthew 20:17-19, Matthew 26:1-5

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... rock that he would build his church upon. And only in his post-resurrection appearance with Peter, would all be resolved, and Peter restored. Jesus’ prophetic warnings would not be hindered. For Jesus, you are either with him or against him. There is no in between. Ultimately, the “scandal” of Jesus is his foil of the ways of man. Or rather, God’s foil! Would we be his saints or his trip- ups? The Son of Man, human as he was on this earth needed to focus only on the face of God. He would need his ...

4. Scandalous News

Luke 4:16-30

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... wants to make. Jesus stands in the line of the prophets, all of whom were rejected by their people, but everyone of them chosen by God. That's who this man is. Luke wants you to see this. His ministry began the way it ended, with rejection. They were scandalized by what he was saying. From beginning to end, for three years, then rejected him. John says in his gospel, "He came to his own people, and his own people received him not." So what are we supposed to do with this, this strange story of Jesus' first ...

5. The Story Of The Scandalized Neighbors

Luke 15:11-32

Sermon

John M. Braaten

... came back looking like death warmed over and what are they doing? They're throwing a party for him. From what I've heard they are going to spend a bundle on it. Sounds like the affair will be bigger than a wedding bash. If you ask me it's scandalous, celebrating as though he was a wonderful, long lost loved one returned. It is tough raising kids these days and they are setting a poor example for the rest of us. But let me tell the story from the beginning. My name is Aaron. I live on a farm across ...

6. The Scandal Of Redeeming Love

Hosea 2:2-23

Sermon

Frederick C. Edwards

... Jesus teaching by the sea, and then as he passed by the place where Levi the son of Alphaeus was sitting and collecting taxes, Jesus said to him, "Follow me," and Levi rose and followed him. That Jesus would call such a man to follow him was scandalous in itself, for Levi was a renegade Jew. That is, he was one who deliberately chose to separate himself from the Jewish community and become a collaborator with the Roman occupation forces, serving as a tax collector. It was a way of getting rich, and we are ...

7. "The Scandal Of Disloyalty"

Psalm 62:1-12, Mark 14:66-72

Sermon

R. Sheldon MacKenzie

... for it other than Jesus Christ her Lord. It makes no difference where we are, or who we are, we must confess our faith in Jesus as Lord whenever the opportunity presents itself or the situation demands it.-- Amen. Prayer: Mighty God, we have listened to the scandal of a disciple denying his Lord. We have heard him protest his ignorance of what it means to be with Jesus. We have heard him deny any association with the One in whose steps he followed. We have heard his frightful curse as he denied the Man ...

8. Scandal

Luke 22:14-23:56

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

While Don Richardson was a student at Prairie Bible Institute in the 1950s, his heart burned in anticipation of bringing the good news about Jesus to an unreached tribe. He and Carol found their prayers answered in 1962 as they sailed out of Vancouver harbor toward Netherlands New Guinea. Before long, they were deposited by a missionary plane among the Sawi people, a group of tribes living in the trees of the interior rain forest. The jungle floor was too damp for permanent dwellings, so the Sawi helped ...

9. Harmony and Humor: The Ties That Bind Christianity’s Many Christianities

Luke 4:14-30

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... Christ when it sounds its most complex tones. When only one line is sung, that’s when we come the closest to losing our pitch. Hear the Crusades. Hear the Inquisition. Hear the Salem witch trials. Hear the Ku Klux Klan. Hear the Nazis. The cross isn’t the only scandal that marks our faith. Christians are scandalous in so many ways. Long before Jesus was convicted as a criminal of the state, as a heretic of faith, and was executed in the most public, excruciating, and humiliating way, he was advocating ...

10. You Have a Story to Tell

John 9:1-41

Sermon

King Duncan

... no actual athletic experience. Some parents even photoshopped their kids’ faces over the bodies of professional athletes to make it look like their kids had real athletic experience. (1) Comedian Trevor Noah from The Daily Show had one of the best jokes about this scandal: “Some of these parents allegedly paid up to $6.5 million,” he said. “Which is insane. Honestly, for that amount of money, just buy a smarter kid!” (2) It’s easy to make fun of people who seem to have many privileges. Did they ...

11. Know What Time It Is!

Luke 16:1-15

Sermon

W. Robert McClelland

... . The miracle of faith is that we call this misfit, "The Son of God." Look at how we as believers have come to regard his crucifixion. We call his cross a symbol of "life," not "death." We speak of it as a symbol of "glory," not "scandal." A sign of "hope," not "dead end." "New beginnings," not failure. It is a remarkable feat of faith that we dare to call the Friday of crucifixion, "Good Friday." Jesus' cross is not eradicated, but in the resurrection God gives us permission to rename it. Consequently ...

12. Freedom Can Be Frightening

Leviticus 25:8-55

Sermon

Louis H. Valbracht

... by customers and employees, cutting so deeply into the profits of our supermarkets, reported to be adding at least 15% to the cost of food. You wonder why your food costs are going up? Here is it - by theft! All of these, and many similar scandals, justify our current concern about our so-called national ethic. We look around in bewilderment and ask: "Where did our morals go?" This is just one of the dangers of liberty - the fact that it rests upon the precarious foundation of national ethics and morality ...

13. A Seeking Savior

Luke 10:1-24

Sermon

W. Robert McClelland

... Emmanuel - God with us - and Emmanuel is a God who knows what it means to be vulnerable, weak, defenseless. Emmanuel is a God who has joined the troops as a foot soldier slugging it out in the trenches; born in a barn as a helpless babe with the hint of scandal about him and died on the cross a sinner's punishment. If the God of grace be for us, who or what indeed! can be against us. We may be crushed, but we are not destroyed. We may be discouraged, but we are not left in despair. Bereaved, but not ...

14. Tears, Perfume and Forgiveness

Luke 7:36-50

Sermon

Billy D. Strayhorn

... . But of course this wasn't a decent woman. She was a sinner with a bad reputation. And it was totally scandalous for this unclean woman to enter the house of a righteous Pharisee named Simon. It was even more scandalous that she knelt by the feet of the guest of honor and wet his feet with her tears. It was scandalous that she poured her perfume over the feet of Jesus. And it was scandalous that she dried his feet with her hair. Everyone was offended; everyone that is, except Jesus. You see, everyone else ...

15. The Invitation

Matthew 20:1-15

Sermon

Will Willimon

... the same generous grace which God offered to them so long ago. The first shall be last, the last, first. God's grace is the same. The wages are the same for the last as for the first. But such interpretation may not get at the true scandal of this little story. On the first day of class the professor says, "Now students, I have this complicated, very complicated, math problem, the solution to which shall constitute your grade for the entire semester. I'm going ahead and giving you this problem here at the ...

16. An Unpopular Profession

Matthew 9:9-13

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... in town. Wherever he went, he would be hissed at. No one would want to even be seen with him. He and his family received no invitations to dinner. In fact, he was well advised to avoid large crowds and dark alleys. Can you see why the crowds were scandalized with Jesus’ words and actions? He not only ate and drank with “sinners and tax collectors,” but He even made a tax collector the hero of one of His most famous parables. We find it in Luke 18, where Jesus talked about the two men who went up to ...

17. Only a Carpenter

Mark 6:1-6

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... ’t cost us too much, inconvenience us too much, then we are quite willing to be His followers, His family. But the minute a cross rears its ugly head, and we are asked to make a sacrifice for our faith, like Jesus’ friends and family of old we become scandalized. Would it not be tragic if the record were to say that Jesus was not able to a great work here in Ann Arbor because of our unbelief? We rant and rave about those “godless Communists,” and we print “In God We Trust” on our coins, but from ...

18. How to Look Foolish

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... God ended up on a cross, it doesn't say so much about the Son of God, as it does about what kind of a world this is. There is something terribly, terribly wrong with this world if the Son of God ends up on a cross. So keep the scandal in the cross. Also, the way of the cross is the way this world is going to get fixed. The way of the cross is the way of love. He explains it in the llth and 12th chapters. He describes what is happening in Corinth, people separating themselves from others ...

19. Stick to the Knitting

John 1:43-51

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... be with us. The theological word for that is "incarnation." Incarnation means "in the flesh." That is how God came to us, as one of us. "Scandalous," that is what the Jews said. "Foolishness," that is what the Greeks said. Do you know what Paul said? "Then I am a fool for ... and suffering of human life. That is why it was "foolishness to the Greeks" to say that God became like us. It was "a scandal to the Jews," because the Jews believed that God was holy, and to be holy means to be pure. To be pure means that ...

20. Pre-Game Analysis

I Corinthians 9:19-27

Sermon

Mark Trotter

... preached exaltation, ascension and return in glory. There are a lot of preachers that do that even today. They just talk about triumph and glory. They're still around. But not Paul. Paul said, "I preach Christ crucified," a stumbling block to the Jews, a scandal to the Gentiles. It's a stumbling block and a scandal because Jews and Greeks both believed that God is supposed to be above the pain and suffering in human life. But Paul said, "When God took on our flesh, he took on our suffering." That was the ...

21. Living in the Red

Galatians 6:11-18

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... Some will say, "Well, the cross isn't good for me." You know, the cross was not good for Jesus either. Some will say, "I find the cross offensive." Well, the cross is offensive. In fact, the cross is a scandal. But the scandal of the cross is the salvation of the world. The Greek word for scandal actually refers to the trigger that springs a trap. When Paul uses this word, it means that boasting in the cross is the trigger that springs the trap that saves the world. "In the cross of Christ I glory, Towering ...

22. The Revelation Code III: The Mark on Harry's Forehead

Revelation 13:11-14:7

Sermon

John E. Harnish

... movies, you've seen the posters: Harry Potter, with the dagger-dash of what looks like a birthmark on his forehead. Growing up, he has no idea where it came from or what it means. Finally, he meets Hagrid who helps him understand who he really is. "It's a scandal! It's an outrage!" roared Hagrid, "Harry Potter not knowin' his own story." Then he relates to Harry the story of the death of his parents at the hands of the dreaded Voldemort, the name so fearsome Hagrid can't even say it, so he refers to him in ...

23. The Job Description of a Leader

2 Samuel 23:1-7

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... encapsulated by the text from 1 John 4:18 which claims that "Perfect love casts out fear." Without this love, the fear which chased away those potential disciples traveling along with Jesus in Capernaum was a fear of being associated with the scandalous message Jesus was proclaiming. Without confidence in God's love, King David could not assert his commitment to ruling with justice and righteousness as his constant guides. Christian leaders grounded in love are capable of shaking off the bonds of a timid ...

24. Mary and Martha: Nine to Five and Five to Nine

Luke 10:38-42

Sermon

Maurice A. Fetty

... relate and serve and yes, how we love. Do we really love anyone but ourselves? Woman: However, the spiritual breakdown of our society surely isn't due only to working women. Most of the people involved in the Wall Street scandals, corporate scandals, and the government scandals have been men. The breakdown of the family surely cannot be blamed on the working mother. Many men long ago abandoned family, church, and school for the sake of their careers, identifying themselves primarily by their jobs. Man: If ...

25. Secret Swerve

Matthew 1:18-25

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... . Although he was a pious man, he felt skeptical about Mary’s encounter with the Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t you? But he was also a good and kind man, who loved his betrothed and didn’t want to see her or her family submitted to scandal, disgrace, shunning, poverty, mistreatment, or death. He felt conflicted. But after a dream in which the Holy Spirit touched his heart and vouched for Mary’s story, he came to her with a plan. They would keep her pregnancy under wraps. While the custom of marriage meant ...

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