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 745 results

1. Zechariah I: Stuck Like a Dope With a Thing Called Hope

Zechariah 9:14-17

Sermon

John E. Harnish

... the people to live into God's vision for the future. Writing to a people who had just come out of 70 years as prisoners of Babylon, Zechariah now calls them to be "Prisoners of Hope." So for me in Advent, Nellie Forbush and Zechariah dance together... Stuck like a dope with a thing called hope, and I can't get it out of my heart. Rejoice greatly, daughters of Zion Shout aloud, O daughters of Jerusalem Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope And their joyful dance has two movements, the first looking ...

2. Don't Get Stuck!

Mark 1:1-8

Sermon

Michael L. Sherer

... enriches and fulfills our lives, or we can turn from life’s gravel roads and mud tracks onto a road designed just for us — one that refuses to see any human life wasted and thrown away — including our own. Take the better road. Don’t get stuck in the mud. Repentance — changing our mind, turning around — is a good theme on which to meditate during Advent. It’s also a good starting point for beginning a new church year. We are accustomed to making ‘New Year’s resolutions’ on the first day ...

3. Stuck in Park

Acts 17:16-34

Sermon

Tony Everett

Martha had lived alone for several years, except, that is, for her dog, Otto, a three-year-old miniature Shih Tzu. Martha and Otto went everywhere together. Even where dogs were not permitted, Otto was content to wait patiently in the car for Martha to return. One particular sunny afternoon Martha had to make a quick stop at the corner grocery store. As was her custom, Martha rolled down the windows to make sure the inside of the car would be comfortable. Otto curled up on the backseat, and Martha started ...

4. Getting Off the Merry-Go-Round

Romans 8:1-11

Sermon

Steven E. Albertin

... to change. We are caught between being thrown off and holding on for dear life. Saint Paul recognizes the same dilemma when he laments, "For I do not do that good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19). He, too, is stuck on the merry-go-round. Faced with such a predicament we cry, "But I am only human!" as if that is somehow supposed to explain and exonerate us from this plight. Yes, we are only human ... and our humanity is exactly the problem. Paul recognizes that in today's text ...

5. Faith is a River That Flows

Genesis 19:1-29

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... them, and we think . . . no kidding! Wow! They are so much braver than I am. But then, that was another time and place…. But wait a minute. We don’t often talk about the stories in scripture where God calls people out, and much like we might feel, they get stuck! Today, I want to put some perspective on one such story. The story of Lot and his family, and in particular, Lot’s wife. We don’t even know her name. Poor woman doesn’t even get a name in the story, but man does her story resonate with us ...

6. The Power of the Staff

Mark 6:1-13

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... or past traumas, and we believe, we cannot fly. And despite knowing it’s not good for us to stay where we are in life, we also, no matter how hard we try, cannot seem to move forward into a different sort of place. We are just “stuck.” Chris Germer, the co-founder of a program called “Mindful Self-Compassion” says that when we experience difficulties in our past, when we feel alone and powerless, most of all when we are frightened to move forward, we do one of three things: we fight (devolve into ...

7. All The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise

Acts 10:34-43

Sermon

Gerald Whetstone

... Is Waiting For The Sunrise." It's a good Easter Sunday title. Deep in our hearts, it is one tune we all know -- waiting, longing, yearning for the sunrise, the dawning in our lives. Easter holds God's response. The dawn has come. The Son has risen. We're not stuck in yesterday. All the promise of tomorrow has broken into our lives. We have God's love, power and grace to fully live in this moment. And the next. And the one after that. We have grace to let go of the hold of a painful past, to change familiar ...

8. Peace And The Peacemakers

Luke 12:49-53

Sermon

Richard Patt

... those who are different from us in any way. What only the Church possesses is the message of the cross, and the cross is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. In the cross, we are saved from ourselves, first of all. We are no longer stuck on our selfish viewpoints. The cross burns that all off as we are ignited by the realization that the great God of heaven has given up everything in our behalf. The Gospel of Jesus Christ frees us from ourselves! What all of us need is the will to look ...

9. Shake It Off!

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

Carlyle Fielding Stewart

... for God. What did Robert Monroe do after being wrongfully accused of murder and rape after spending twenty years in jail? He shook it off by finishing high school and going to college. He's now graduated and running a successful business! He didn't get stuck on what unjustly happened to him. He shook it off and got on with his life! When asked the key to his positive outlook his response was one word, "PRAYER!" What did James Earl Jones do after being teased so badly by his fellow schoolmates for stuttering ...

10. A House Divided

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

King Duncan

... . I believe that everyone who went by us blinked their lights or reached out of their cars and shook their fists and said words that I would not want to repeat to you as they passed. And, oh, what I felt like doing was to scream out, ˜My lights are stuck on high beam; I know it and I can't do anything about it right now. I intend to have it fixed.' And then I realized that in life people may treat us in an unkind way or act in a way that is strange to us because their ˜lights ...

11. Grow Up!

1 Corinthians 3:1-23

Sermon

Timothy J. Smith

... zones and serve others in Jesus’ name. The danger is when we reach a point in our spiritual lives when we feel we no longer need to grow. That was the point Paul was trying to make to the Corinthians. The people stopped growing and were in effect stuck in infancy for far too long. They should have been eating solid food but were still only drinking milk. They should have been maturing in their faith but were behaving like babies. They should have been walking or learning to ride a bike but they were still ...

12. To Be Continued

Acts 1:1-11

Sermon

Paul W. Kummer

... Emmanuel also joined the elite group of Elijah and Enoch. What did it mean? Why did it happen again? They ran to check their Hebrew scrolls to get some answers. The past haunted these men. What about us? Are we planning for a future we know nothing about? Are we stuck in the present and can't see past today by faith? Are we held back by what we learned in the past? Just as the coming of the Holy Spirit is invisible and the second coming of the Christ will be unknown until the trumpet sounds, so we can't ...

13. A Crib, A Cross, And A Cave

Matthew 28:1-10

Sermon

Billy D. Strayhorn

... toy store and the magical man who has owned and run it for over 200 years. Mr. Magorium has a manager and assistant, Molly Mahoney, who was a young piano prodigy with great promise. Only, somehow along the way to writing her great concerto, she got stuck. And in the process she lost confidence in herself. Mr. Magorium decides it's time for him to depart. Neither the magical store nor Molly Maloney take it very well, even though Mr. Magorium is leaving the store to Molly. The store throws a temper tantrum ...

14. Silly Goose

Colossians 3:12-17

Sermon

David E. Leininger

... their own or with another formation to catch up with their original group. A farmer was out plowing his field one morning. A spring thaw had just occurred and there were many muddy valleys. Through one particularly wet place his tractor became stuck in the mud. The harder he tried, the deeper he became stuck. Finally, he walked over to his neighbor's to ask for help. The neighbor came over and looked at the situation. He shook his head, and then said, "It doesn't look good, but I tell you what. I'll give it ...

15. Let It Go

John 3:1-21

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... Nicodemus, helping to make him alive and aware. In the movie Frozen, Elsa’s obsessive control prevents her from freeing up her gift to be the healing and loving touch it was meant to be. Nicodemus's ice is his rationality, his left-brained logic and control. He is stuck in a left-brain paradigm when God has given us two-brains for a reason, and wants us to be whole human beings. If we dwell only in our left brain, that is a very cold place indeed. Our left brain is our place of cold rationality. Our right ...

16. The Good Yoke

Matthew 11:25-30, 1 Kings 19:1-8, 1 Kings 19:9-18, 1 Kings 19:19-21

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... define your life? Which story will you yoke your life to? Yokes in themselves are not bad. But the world is filled with yokes that are deceptively pretty but can pull our lives in directions away from Jesus. Often it’s not intentional. We can just get stuck. Sometimes it can feel right at the beginning. But then sometimes the things we yoke ourselves to can get weighty and start bearing us down. Sometimes what we at first see as a good and worthy thing ends up feeling like a noose around our necks. You ...

17. Moving At The Speed Of Light: Jerusalem: What Word Would You

1 Corinthians 1:18--2:5

Sermon

Frank Luchsinger

... in the mud, I pulled my feet out of the boots sliding back up onto the top of the bank. Back to the house I went returning with my brother's snow boots -- same result. Stuck in the mud. I had the same misfortune with my other brother's and my father's snow boots: four sets of boots stuck in the mud, where I shouldn't have been to begin with. I rehearsed the story I would tell my father upon his return home from work. What story would I tell and how would I tell it? I constructed and reconstructed, asked ...

18. Rocky

Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon

William J. Carl

... going with all of this?” “There’s not a lot you can do to change a rock or crack it or get under its skin, and, barring earthquakes, you can depend on it about as much as you can depend on anything. So Jesus called him the Rock, and it stuck with him the rest of his life. Peter, the Rock (Buechner, op. cit.).” And on this rock, on this knucklehead, said Jesus, I will build my church, which should give us all hope to see that Jesus would pick such a bumbler as Peter to be the foundation-stone for ...

19. Waking To A World Upside Down

Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

King Duncan

... . She had forgotten that when she went under the bed she had to turn her head to the side. She couldn’t remember how to get out. Finally she had to yell, "Mom, I’m stuck!" How many of us have gotten ourselves into an uncomfortable situation through our sinfulness and have had to plead with God, "I’m stuck"? But our situation is not hopeless and neither is the world’s. There is a cure for the world’s madness and it’s found on a hill called Calvary. I began this message describing some practical ...

20. The Terrible Burden Of Judging Others

Romans 14:1--15:13

Sermon

King Duncan

... at that point in time, they really can't help it. Others in the church, says Simmons, need to understand and minister to them, rather than trying to run them off the road, or out of the church, or trying to out-bright them. Some people simply have their lights stuck on high beam for awhile and can't help it. It would make all the difference in the world if we knew all the facts, wouldn't it? Father Michael Mulvaney, a speaker and counselor on self-esteem, traveled a great distance at his own expense to do a ...

21. Salty Saints

Mark 9:42-50

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... in people’s minds. Often, while they could remember the saying, they did not remember the context in which it was said. The result is that we sometimes get a whole bunch of disconnected sayings of Jesus stuck together because they stuck in the writer’s mind in a certain way. That seems to be the case here. Mark got off on a tangent about salt, one thing led to another, and he strung together everything he could remember that Jesus had ever said about salt. The result is several very confusing ...

22. From Hurting to Helping

Mark 10:46-52

Sermon

King Duncan

... the word "can’t." Then, from somewhere far away, she remembered reading a line that said, "if you think you can’t, you’re right." The reality of the sentence shook her and she knew at that moment, that if she didn’t get up that morning, she’d be stuck in her pain, and she’d be lost. It was on that morning that she chose to live. She had to struggle to find the strength that would put her on the road to healing and finding peace. Somehow, by the grace of God, (and she prayed like mad for ...

23. Inward, Upward, Outward

Romans 9:30--10:21

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

... was about to get up out of bed and eat in the dark, in secret. On this night he was envisioning eating the entire half gallon of strawberry ice cream that he knew was in the freezer. My listening attention suddenly shifted, not to the still stuck traffic on the freeway, but to whomever it was that had been so unthinking, so uncaring, so uninvolved in that boy's struggle that they had allowed a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream into the freezer. In the interest of full disclosure: our own household oozes ...

24. Unlocking the Access

Ephesians 3:1-12

Sermon

Billy D. Strayhorn

... boy up very slowly. The teen lost his pants on the trip out but wasn't hurt. (1) Have you ever been locked out? I've never been stuck in a chimney like that young man but I have been locked out before. It's a horrible feeling. If you've ever locked your keys in your ... mirror and saw the woman and an equally old man waving for him to come back. So he made a U-turn and drove up to them. He stuck his head out the window of his car and the old woman said "This here's my husband. He doesn't know how to get to Des ...

25. Veni, Spiritus Sanctus, Veni

John 14:8-17 (25-27)

Sermon

Arley K. Fadness

... " expect the second P of Pentecost: power! power engaged! power excited! After all, Jesus promised power in Acts 1:8: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you ... you will be my witnesses." Why be weak? Why be paralyzed? Why be stuck at low tide — marooned on life's sandbanks? My children sometimes gave me a farewell as I left to conduct worship at our church. They never said, "God be with you" or "preach the gospel" but "Dad, don't be boring." A certain church signage advertised ...

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