Sermon and Worship Resources

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1 Peter 2:19-25

Sermon

David O. Bales

Peter writes to Christian slaves. In the late first century AD, when the Christian church spread from Palestine into the larger Roman Empire, a greater and greater percentage of the church was slaves. In the ancient world slaves were any color. Masters thought up excuses why it was allowable to enslave another, but at least they didn't create the most laughable and tragic excuses, reasoning that i...

2. A Friday We Call “Good”

Hebrews 10:16-25

Sermon

David O. Bales

After our last trip to Israel, a number in our group met to share photos and memories. Several of us said that we didn't respond favorably to the elaborate Byzantine and medieval church buildings. They made none of us feel particularly worshipful. We'd rather be outside and see the place something like it was when the folk of the Bible were there. Yet, our visiting Jerusalem and seeing the places...

3. A Living Hope (If It Hadn’t Been for Easter)

1 Peter 1:3-9

Sermon

David O. Bales

A church member read the New Testament and concluded, "Amazing things were going on back then. People converted not just their faith but their lives and values. They were healed, dropped prejudices, crossed ethnic boundaries, and ... and, people were beaten, tried, and killed for their faith." Then she looked at our modern American church and saw little similarity between the early Christian churc...

4. Dust and Ashes Wednesday

2 Corinthians 5:11 – 6:13

Sermon

David O. Bales

The Passion of the Christ, is a helpful movie to consider for Ash Wednesday and Lent. Nothing's pretty about it. Our faith isn't based on pretty. Every time I finish reading a gospel, I'm horrified with the beatings, the whippings, and the humiliation Jesus suffered. It's not pretty. It's real. No matter what skeptics in the ancient or modern world might say, Christianity isn't a religion anyone ...

5. Duuuh!

John 14:15-31

Sermon

David O. Bales

If you’ve been around the Christian faith for a while, you’ve noticed how people pick what they like from the Bible. Like a giant magnet at a wrecking yard we each reach down into the material of the Bible and pick up only what we want — get the iron, leave the wood, paper, and plastics. We’re not convincing if we say, “I don’t do it but everyone else does.” We all do. It’s just that some are so o...

6. For Example

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Sermon

David O. Bales

If you're going to study a subject or learn a profession, a good strategy is to investigate one of the earliest theoreticians or practitioners. If you study physics, you might start with Albert Einstein. There were others, but he's a good beginning. If you're interested in drama, you could turn to William Shakespeare. Other playwrights are around, but he'll give you a good start. If you're conside...

7. He Ascended Into Heaven

Luke 24:44-53

Sermon

David O. Bales

After John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, he met with the Soviet astronaut Titov. The Russian asked him sarcastically if he had somehow met God in his spaceflight. Glenn responded that he believed in a God that you couldn’t see from the window of a space capsule. And so John Glenn spoke for modern Christians, because when you consider what Christians have believed about...

8. He's Back

John 20:19-23

Sermon

David O. Bales

Most Christians know about the Holy Spirit’s power granted one morning in Jerusalem seven weeks after Jesus’ resurrection. It occurred on the Jewish Festival of Passover recorded in Acts 2. Many Christians don’t know what John 20 reports. This text is about Jesus’ giving the Holy Spirit before the exciting spiritual event at the Passover Festival. Seven weeks before Pentecost we’re with Jesus lat...

9. Humility: We Know It When We See It

Philippians 2:5-11

Sermon

David O. Bales

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the Illinois Republican Presidential nomination in this way: Lincoln's friend, Richard Oglesby of Decatur, learned that, when he was young, Lincoln had split rails near Decatur with a fellow named John Hanks. Hanks still lived near Decatur; so Oglesby found Hanks and asked if any of those rails still existed. Hanks remembered a farm ten miles out of town where they'd s...

10. In the Balance

Romans 5:12-19

Sermon

David O. Bales

"He started it." You've probably heard that from the backseat or from a distant bedroom. "He started it." If you have a daughter, the variation is, "She started it." Children become more sophisticated as they grow up, but the jostling and blaming continue. Blaming one another is a human trait; that's why it's recorded in the Bible's story of Adam. In Hebrew, the name, Adam, means "humanity" and t...

11. Jesus’ Prayer: The Pause in the Battle

John 17:1-11

Sermon

David O. Bales

In 1936, near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War one horrible center of fighting was the Alcázar fortress near Toledo. In the middle of horrific fighting, however, every day the firing stopped twice in order to allow a blind beggar to tap his way on the street between the firing lines. We can imagine how welcome those few minutes were to the men on both sides. They probably hoped that the blin...

12. Jesus Tempted In Us

Matthew 4:1-11

Sermon

David O. Bales

It’s good to be here with you. Ten days ago my wife and I were visiting our daughter and son-in-law in central Mexico. In Mexico City they took us to the National Palace in which hangs a painting of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. I’m intrigued by this painting. Hidalgo was leader in the Mexican war for independence from Spain; but, by the time people wanted a portrait of him, he was dead. Half a centu...

13. Life Beside The Falls

Ezekiel 47:1-12

Sermon

David O. Bales

The first storm of autumn clamped down with unseasonable cold -- lows at night in the teens -- which turned the shores of the falls in the middle of town to parallel strips of white lace. Despite the frozen ground the season's last football game would be played, swirls of snow sometimes making the players invisible from the stands. The teams warmed up on the field, stretching and shouting numbers ...

14. Life in the Resurrection Zone

Colossians 3:1-4

Sermon

David O. Bales

Sermon Note: Before this sermon something like the following needs to be included the worship: Leader: Since the earliest days of the Christian faith, Christians have greeted one another on Easter morning: The Lord has risen! People: He has risen indeed! Leader: Our Lord Jesus has risen, breaking the power of sin and death, People: and setting us free to live for him. Leader: The Lord has ris...

15. Lighting up Lent

Ephesians 5:8-14

Sermon

David O. Bales

Can you recall a significant event that changed many things about you: maybe a natural disaster like a flood that swept away your house, maybe you had a car accident that left you with a limp, or a happier change when you got married? Either way, on the next day you are different and now you must start living life differently. That's how Paul begins our text. "Once you were darkness, but now in th...

16. Looking Down on God

John 13:1-17

Sermon

David O. Bales

One of the most interesting accounts of a creative and surprising story was of a father and his three-year-old daughter. During a long winter the little girl had enjoyed more and more using the sparse living room for her gymnasium and for the center of her imaginary world. All the room had in it was a large pillow. So the father set out to tell her a story about a pillow. He made up a story about ...

17. Nicodemus: A Young Old Man

John 3:1-21

Sermon

David O. Bales

Sermon Note: This story sermon is best read with a “special” voice reserved for the scripture included in the story. Read the scripture with a lower and slower voice so that the congregation realizes that all the rest is the story is “commentary” on the scripture. When the last farmer from the most distant field arrived home to his family and the temple police were tromping their patrols around J...

18. Oddballs for God

1 Peter 1:17-23

Sermon

David O. Bales

Immigration reform swirls around us. Immigrants, documented and undocumented, live among us. All of us, even Native Americans, are offspring of immigrants. No matter how far you have to trace back, your ancestors experienced being strangers and newcomers on the American continent. Many of them experienced being aliens. Probably many of them felt they were exiles or even considered themselves banis...

19. On the Road with Jesus

Luke 24:13-35

Sermon

David O. Bales

Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove is about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in about 1880. The novel includes the preparations for this 1,000-mile journey and a myriad of adventures along the way. A woman is taken on the drive: Lorena. This isn’t just out of the ordinary. It’s unique. She’s brought along by a man who abandons her. She’s then kidnapped and terribly abu...

20. Power Sharing

Ephesians 1:15-23

Sermon

David O. Bales

Modern people are fascinated with power. We fiddle with a switch on the wall and it delivers the results from dynamos in dams and atomic reactors. We domesticate nature's powers in order to light the den, vacuum the carpet, and brew the coffee. Power is at our fingertips. Technology has opened endless possibilities, chugging along from wood and coal fired steam, converting to petroleum, accelerati...

21. Praying In Jesus' Name

John 14:5-14

Sermon

David O. Bales

It’s good to be with you in worship. I appreciate the invitation to preach. I especially appreciate having a worship leader directing me around the chancel, because worship is done differently in different denominations — even within denominations. When you visit a different church, you don’t always know what to expect. My wife and I visited here two years ago. I, ever eager to hear the sermon, ch...

22. Putting the World Back Together

John 20:1-9

Sermon

David O. Bales

It’s too soon after the murder to mention the names of the people involved; so, the following names are changed. In a small town, Janice, a young grade school teacher, had tried to break off a dating relationship with a young man. The young man had serious mental illness. He shot and killed Janice; then committed suicide. Her parents, Jack and Maxine, were friends with the young man’s parents. In ...

23. Remembering Jesus

Matthew 26:17-30

Sermon

David O. Bales

The novel The Ugly American is based upon facts of how Americans related to people in Southeast Asia. The insensitivity and arrogance of American government officials was generally depressing. One chapter of the novel, however, is particularly inspiring. An American woman, Emma Atkins, has come with her engineer husband to the fictional nation of Sarkhan. Emma is a curious, good-hearted person and...

24. Rock Bottom

1 Peter 3:13-22

Sermon

David O. Bales

Peter begins a new paragraph here by asking, "Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?" The answer is: lots of people everywhere. Everyone who's attended a school with other than one's own family, or who's read the newspaper, let alone if they've read even a smidgen of history, everyone knows that people who are zealous to do good are abused. An example is Ignaz Semmelweis, not ...

25. Seeing Jesus

John 9:1-12

Sermon

David O. Bales

Josiah Harlan was the first American to enter Afghanistan. He did so as a doctor with British Forces. We’re not talking about the 1990s, but the 1830s. Harlan was a brilliant, self-absorbed adventurer who’d read a few medical books and passed a cursory exam to be an army surgeon. He later attempted to become an Afghan prince, leading his own army. No matter his extreme self-importance and self-ce...

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