Dictionary: Perfection
Synonyms: flawlessness, excellence, superbness, sublimity, exquisiteness, magnificence, perfectness, faultlessness, impeccability, immaculateness, exemplariness, the ideal, a paragon, the ne plus ultra, the beau idéal, a nonpareil, the crème de la crème, the last word, the ultimate, a dream, improvement, betterment, refinement, refining, perfecting, polishing, amelioration
Showing 1 to 25 of 607 results
Sermon
R. E. Lybrand
... desires to serve the other. For in serving one another in marriage, we are serving us. It is a love which is quick to forgive the other - for in forgiving one another, we are strengthening us to move on toward greater oneness. Certainly, we have been talking about the "ideal" Christian marriage which is made up of an "ideal" husband and an "ideal" wife. But I dare say that not one of us here fits into that category. Not one of us is "ideal" because all of us are sinners, and we carry sin into our homes and ...
Sermon
Thomas Peterson
... . Then it is that no moths can get in to the fabric of life and eat away its heart, for the heart rests in Christ. No rust corrupts, for long as monuments may stand, and strong as they may appear, all buildings have their end points. In the ideal -- our Lord Jesus Christ -- we find that which is truly important and eternally real, that which goes beyond the appearance of permanence. To him we give our highest and best. Through him we endure. “Therefore, take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to ...
Sermon
James McCormick
... to the highest values we know. Perhaps the most dangerous thing we can do in the name of patriotism is to make our nation itself the highest value, an end in itself. I believe deeply that the stature of a nation is measured by the size of the ideals it serves. Rightly understood, a nation is not an ideal to be served. Rather, it is the organizational means by which a group of people may serve a common ideal. Therefore, the person who loves his nation best is that person who insists that his nation be ...
4. The Art of Following
Matthew 4:12-17, Matthew 4:18-22
Sermon
Dean Feldmeyer
... off. And on and on it goes until we realize that we don’t really want to play like Tiger at all. What we want to do is admire the way he played the game and go on playing the way we do. We idealize him. That’s Tiger Woods, the ideal in golfing, an ideal that I have neither the talent nor the inclination to achieve for myself, an ideal that is just out of reach for people like me. Normal, semi-talented, quasi-committed, duffers like me. And that’s what we do to Jesus. We admire him and then ...
Sermon
Louis H. Valbracht
... the beauty of love. He loved! He didn't show us in his own life how to escape from life but how to meet it, not how to rise above the world as most pagan religions try to teach us, but to raise the world. He was not giving us the ideal answers to life. He was living the real answers! Does the system still work? Is Christianity still real and practical? Let's look at a couple of places in our world. The Communists say that the cure for oppression and injustice in the world is the death of capitalism, the ...
Sermon
Richard Gribble
... common. This idea was expressed best by Aristotle who called a friendship "one soul dwelling in two bodies." The Old Testament is also an important source for the community ideals of the first Christians. In Deuteronomy (15:4ff) we are told that God established the ideal in Israel that there would be no needy members in the community, but rather, all would share. The ideas of the Jews and Greeks was brought together by Jesus himself. When Luke reports that things would be sold and the proceeds laid at the ...
Sermon
Mark Trotter
... against you, with inalienable rights to be treated fairly as a human being. Our heritage is a heritage of what could be called "humanitarian" freedom. Economic freedom is an important part of that, but it is a by-product. The base of our freedom, the ideal that establishes our country and holds us together, is the heritage of inalienable rights of every person. When that is forgotten, then this nation that is built solely on an ideal will wander away and get lost, the way persons do with memory loss ...
8. Ooo Boy!
Matthew 5:33-37, Matthew 5:31-32
Sermon
John Jamison
... a wife, the Greek husband would have the concubines and the courtesan. It was expected that the Greek husband would be unfaithful to his wife. But it wasn't really unfaithfulness, it was "just the way things were done." The Greeks had the ideal of marriage that every husband would be loyal to one wife. That was the ideal, the way it should be done. But they all knew it just wasn't reality. That was just not the way it was being done, and even if it was the way it ought to be, sometimes reality isn't ideal ...
Sermon
King Duncan
... not how we are supposed to treat our own flesh. Marriage is meant to be a covenant of mutual fidelity to a lifelong union made before God. It doesn’t always work out like that, of course, even for the best of people, but that is the ideal. Then Jesus goes on to add a prohibition. “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Do you see how this all fits together? Because husband and wife are one flesh, no one should ever try to separate them. Later when Jesus’ disciples questioned ...
Sermon
Maurice A. Fetty
... we can lean and from whom we can draw meaning and strength. This projected father, created out of our emptiness and weakness and sense of dependency, is basically an illusion, say many psychologists. It is the Father-God of our wish-dreams similar to the ideal king or president of our wish-dreams who will solve all our problems. Thus, not only is our projected heavenly Father a self-created illusion; he is a symbol of our unwillingness to accept responsibility for ourselves and for the world. Therefore, in ...
Sermon
Bill Bouknight
... on the Cross for the sins of imperfect folks like you and me. The Sermon on the Mount is both absolute ideals and absolute grace, without one compromising the other. Only as we are healed by grace and equipped by the Holy Spirit can we grow toward the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount. Now, let me close with a true story about anger and God's transforming power. There was a pastor who had a chronic problem with anger. His wife and young son had often been subjected to his wild outbursts of temper. The ...
Sermon
Richard Gribble
... in the workplace. As we all know, however, despite the positive strides, women are generally paid less for equal work performance, simply because they are female. We must admit that America does not live the ideal that the Declaration of Independence proposed. In our lives of faith we strive for the ideal, but again we fall short. Jesus' message is clear but very challenging and, therefore, often not fully actualized. The British essayist, G. K. Chesterton, got it right back in 1910 when he wrote in ...
Sermon
Maurice A. Fetty
... , avoid the modern conveniences of electricity, and disdain any instruction other than that of their own schools. For them, the ideal of the kingdom of God seems to be fixed somewhere around mid-19th century. Riding about in modern automobiles ... with modern dress, many of us are more similar to the Amish than we like to believe. The ideal life, the ideal church, the ideal family was somewhere in the past for some of us. Consequently we keep looking over our shoulders at some period ...
Sermon
Frank Ramirez
... the good shepherd, tells us he is both shepherd and gate. He is the way. He loves the sheep and has com­passion for them. He wants to gather them together and keep them safe from those who would take advantage of them. One of the things that makes Jesus the ideal shepherd is that he is portrayed as one of the sheep, the Lamb of God in the gospel of John, the Lamb bearing the marks of slaughter in Revelation. As the Word was made flesh that dwelt among us, he understands our infirmity. He is one of us. That ...
Sermon
King Duncan
In 1957, Ben Michtom, president of the Ideal Toy Company, had a brainstorm: why not sell a Jesus doll? The majority of kids in America were Christian, so he figured parents would jump at the opportunity to make playtime a religious experience. Other Ideal executives were horrified, but Michtom consulted with some religious leaders, including most notably the ...
16. Playing One Hand
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Sermon
Tom Garrison
... midpoint of his career, and Jesus has a clear recognition that human existence really is a complicated affair. To get anything done in our kind of world is by no means simple or easy. Now, this is always a critical moment in any human process, when the idealism of childhood and adolescence collides head-on with the complexities of the real world. It is easy at such a moment to go from one extreme to the other. The reformer, Martin Luther, often gave his famous image that humanity is like a drunken peasant ...
17. Welcome, Joe!
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Sermon
King Duncan
... person that you want to be.” (3) I think it’s important to point out before I jump into our Bible story today that we have all made decisions that have moved us further from the ideal person we want to be. We have all made decisions that have moved us further from the ideal person God made us to be. That’s exactly what sin is: moving away from God’s perfect character and perfect will. Romans 3: 23 reads, “. . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. . .” So today’s Bible story ...
18. The Flow of Life
Ecclesiastes 3:1-22
Sermon
Gregory J. Johanson
... it isn’t always God who is pushing us so hard and giving us such a judgment. We may be hitting ourselves over the head, as for example, if we think we should have a perfect marriage where there are never any fights or difficulties; or be the ideal parent who always sacrifices and does just what is right for his or her children and never dislikes them; or be the perfectly mature person who never gets upset. We have our ideals and they can be extremely important. We need to have expectations that pull us ...
Sermon
Mark Trotter
... to us. The charter was to go into the world with the message of the love that God has for us in Jesus Christ, and the mandate is to demonstrate that love by a special concern for the poor. "There was not a needy person among them." That is the ideal. That is what should be the result of the Church being in the world, no more needy persons. The poor were singled out as the object of the Church's ministry. This afternoon we are going to hear Cecil Steppe talk about the new welfare legislation as it applies ...
Sermon
King Duncan
... . No one will ever improve on it. One man and one woman becoming one flesh until death do they part. That is the plan. Not everyone will realize that kind of ideal arrangement in his or her life, but still it remains for most people the ideal. Perhaps you saw the original "Rocky" film before Sylvester Stallone. Do you remember the love relationship Rocky had with Adrian in "Rocky?" She was the little wallflower who worked in the pet shop, the sister of Pauly, an insensitive goon who worked at the meat ...
Sermon
... rejoice and celebrate the commitment with you. While I doubt that you ever will be a perfect saint, I am confident that by God’s grace and with his help you can be a "becoming saint." What we are all concerned about, of course, is how the ideals set forth by Jesus get translated into the behavior of everyday living. What do persons look like who are in process of living saintly lives? Some of you may remember an Italian-made film circulated a number of years ago, entitled Rocco and Brothers. Despite the ...
Sermon
Maurice A. Fetty
... some of these attitudes into the use of power wreaked havoc to careers and reputations, and assaulted with cool contempt the institutions and principles which give this nation some of its uniqueness. Tough, cool, calculating, our man-at-the-top, embodying for many the ideal man-come-of-age, believed power was the whole name of the game. Power. Period. Nothing more. Get before you are gotten, strike before you are stricken, push before you are pushed, destroy before you are destroyed. It's one thing to make ...
23. The Lord Is With Us
Luke 1:26-38, 2 Samuel 7:1-17, Romans 16:1-27
Sermon
Will Willimon
... this biblical penchant for keeping everything tied to particular places and people, and revelation coming to us through particularity rather than in spite of it. I'm not just talking about the human difficulty to accept the gap between the real and the ideal, between theory and practice. In most areas of life, we come to terms with this discrepancy. We realize that every vision is expressed within certain limits. The Freshman zeal for "dear old Duke'' eventually becomes tempered in the day-to-day reality ...
Sermon
Wayne Brouwer
... will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn. The children of the church are its testimony in a changing world. They give us a sense of immortality. And they affirm the values and the ideals that we hold dear. III. THEY CONTINUE OUR PILGRIMAGE And there’s a third reason why David talks so much about children here in Psalm 22. It’s because they continue our pilgrimage of life. (1) There comes a time in each person’s life ...
25. A Man for All Seasons
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Sermon
Donald Charles Lacy
... , even in our churches. Survival in this sometimes obviously sinful world means to get the best answer or decision by the grace of God. Must we feel guilty because of this? Must we hang our heads in shame because we have failed to live up to the ideal? Frankly, and without reservation, I do not think so! Good politics means above all — sincerely calling upon the Father for guidance and letting the chips fall where they fall. We cannot flounder in a briar patch just because we refuse to make of it the best ...
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