Sermon and Worship Resources

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John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Sermon

Frank Ramirez

... only cost is the overpriced floofy coffee you bought from that boutique coffee bar — what? $5 or $6. Reading John 13 and living like Jesus — priceless! Post-Civil-War America was a country anxious to read about how the other half lived. There was a great appetite for reading, and the many periodicals of the era filled their pages with breathless accounts of what other people were doing. Phebe Gibbons was a well-known writer for women's magazines, and her series on The Plain People, describing groups ...

2. The Glorious Interpolation

John 7:45--8:11

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... little cat-and-mouse game to help them get rid of this rabble-rousing rabbi from Nazareth. This entire story seems to be a prelude to John 8:15 where Jesus is recorded as having said, “I judge no one.” Now, that is not strictly true. There is a judgment which springs ... from Dr. Thomas Bowdler who, in the 18th century, produced expurgated versions of Shakespeare’s works and even Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” omitting any “expressions which cannot with propriety be read aloud in ...

3. Mountaintop Experience

Luke 9:28-36 (37-43a)

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... top of the world ― king of the mountain! It was truly a mountaintop experience. It certainly seemed that way for Peter, James, and John as they scaled the upper altitudes of earth’s crust that day, beckoned by Jesus to rise beyond this world into the ... welfare of the poor and the disabled and the oppressed! There is a marvelous little story tucked away in the pages of Edward Gibbon’s seven-volume work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It tells of a humble little monk named Telemachus living out ...

4. Laborers Needed for the Harvest

Matthew 9:35-38, Matthew 10:1-42

Sermon

Dennis Kastens

... , Christianity would have been overthrown long ago. Where can infidels be found more powerful than Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, and Rousseau? Where can one find persecutors more violent than bloody Nero or Domitian? If Christians were ... talent; nevertheless they took our Lord at his word. When he said, "Go," they went! Tradition tells us that Peter died in Rome, John in Ephesus, Andrew in Greece, and Thomas in India. Virtually all of the disciples gave their lives carrying Christ’s mission to the ...

5. Shepherding One Another in a Collapsing World

Romans 9:1-29

Sermon

Robert G. Tuttle

... did not stop with the Jews, it overflowed to the Gentiles. Thus Jesus’ compassion reached out to the whole world. Falling in step, John Wesley cried out, "The world is my parish." Where is our compassion and our sense of urgency? Sadly for us, The Christian ... of life is collapsing? Do we really care for those caught in this collapse - even those helping to speed the collapse? Gibbon tells us something about ourselves when he declares: "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate ...

6. Full Barns--empty Souls

Luke 12:13-21

Sermon

King Duncan

... through-the-motions existence right now? It's a terrible thing when your barns are full and your soul is empty. The historian, Gibbon, tells about a man named Abdulrahman. Abdulrahman was one of the Muslim Caliphs of Spain. He built for his pleasure the city, ... and forgetting what they are running after. 1. With John Hoover, (Hawthorne, N.J.: Career Press, 1994). 2. Billy Graham, Hope for the Troubled Heart (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991), pp. 41. 3. John Timmer, God of Weakness (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan ...

7. If Christ Had Not Come

John 15:18--16:4

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

... and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:1-3) But I stop short. All of this is absurd and foolish, if Christ never came. Regretfully, I tell him that the secular government ... the remaining one-tenth might live in luxurious indulgence. Human life was cheap, and slavery was universally practiced. The historian Gibbon writes of one mansion in Rome that required 400 slaves. Another Roman owned 20,000 slaves. At the Palace of ...

8. A Portion of Thyself

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... as peaceful and as prosperous as the days of Antonius Pious (138-161 AD), who ruled Rome in the second century. Edward Gibbon, in his magnificent treatise The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said that the times of Antonius Pious were the “ ... by our aged to grab for all the gusto we can get and not to deprive ourselves of anything for the sake of others. John Bright, a British politician of the nineteenth century, was walking down a street one day when a fellow was seriously injured in an accident. ...

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