Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 1 to 25 of 25 results

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

Leonard H. Budd

Simon bar Jacob - Simon, son of Jacob - had just finished the pruning of his olive trees, ending with the three old trees farthest from the road. He was pleased with his work and looked at it for some time, complimenting himself with satisfying grunts. "Job well done!" He turned to look out upon the full olive grove of 57 trees. Each one had received his careful work, talents learned through the y...

2. Tilted Haloes

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

James Weekley

And the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, "He is beside himself." And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said. "He is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons. "And he called them to him, and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If...

3. Is Anything Unforgivable?

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

David G. Rogne

One morning I was roused from sleep around 3 a.m. by the ringing of the telephone. The person on the other end of the line was distraught because, she said, she had committed the unforgivable sin. It is interesting to me that such calls often occur at such an hour, after the bars have closed. The woman went on to say that at some point in her life she had really been angry about something, and had...

4. When You Are Wrongly Criticized

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

Anyone here like criticism? How do you respond to criticism? Does being criticized bring you down or fire you up? Do you want to hunker in your bunker or lob your own volley of vitriol back at your critics? Learning how to respond to criticism is a lifetime journey. That’s because critics will be accompanying you from cradle to grave! In every election year there is no shortage of negative, c...

5. Toss Your Cap Over the Wall

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

King Duncan

Even though this is baseball season, I want to begin with a basketball story. It is about Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest professional basketball player of all time. One night he scored sixty-nine points in a single game. In that same game, rookie Stacey King made his inauspicious debut. He shot one free throw and made it. After the final buzzer, a reporter asked King for his thoughts on the...

6. The Unexpected Jesus

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

King Duncan

Have you ever been stuck in traffic behind a really slow moving vehicle? This can be a very frustrating experience, especially when you're running late. In San Diego there is a highway where one exit leads from one highway directly onto another. To make matters worse there is a steep upward hill on the second highway which is used frequently by cement trucks. You can imagine the results as cars le...

7. A House Divided

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

King Duncan

In the darkest hour of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln quoted the words of Jesus of Nazareth: "A house divided against itself cannot stand..." Certain scribes were trying to impugn Jesus' great acts of healing. They were disturbed at his escalating popularity. People were thronging to hear him and to see him everywhere he went. "It is said that he can cast out demons," they declared. Defensively t...

8. Jesus, The Mad Man

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

Erskine White

... they went out to seize Him, for they said, "He is beside Himself." (Mark 3:21) I'm not a big movie-goer and I hardly ever watch the same movie more than once, but there is one film I have seen five or six times, and I'd see it again if I could find it. Evidently, a lot of other people felt the same way about this film, because it ran in one big city movie theater every day for twelve years. T...

9. Build a Bridge and Get Over It

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Leonard Sweet

Jesus built bridges between the divergent unities of his day. The church must do the same. On September 13, 1987, two unemployed young men trying to make a living entered a partly demolished radiation clinic in Goianaia, Brazil, an 18-hour bus ride from Rio. They discovered and then dismantled a cancer therapy machine, the parts of which they peddled to various junk dealers. One junk dealer in pa...

10. The Unforgivable Sin

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

Maxie Dunnam

One of my favorite preachers, Clarence Forsberg, tells a story about a man who realized his life-long ambition by going on a safari in Africa. “He took along his wife, even though she was not the outdoors type. They set up camp in a jungle cleaning, and as he prepared to go out the first day he presented his wife with a little silver bell. He explained, ‘There is really nothing to worry about. I’...

11. Looking A Little Bit Crazy

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

William G. Carter

A photocopied sign was posted inside a church office. It was one of those humorous full-page slogans that people in different offices duplicate and pass among themselves. Most of us have seen this particular message, I suppose, but posted in a church office, the words took on a new meaning. There it was, taped to the cinder blocks behind a secretary's desk. The sign read, "You don't have to be cra...

12. Then He Went Home

Mark 3:20-30

Sermon

Ron Lavin

Sometimes when we go home, things seem strange. For example, if we have been away a long time, things aren’t the same when we get home. Sometimes home looks better when we arrive after being away a long time; sometimes things look worse; usually things look different. We gain a different perspective, having moved to a new area, or just having taken a vacation. Sometimes the relatives back home don...

13. Meet the Rose Family

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

We begin this morning with a brief review of something most of us learned in ninth grade biology and then promptly forgot as soon as the test was over, and that is how science organizes and classifies living things. Maybe these layers of classification will ring a bell: Kingdom Phylum Class Series Family Genus Species Remember? No? Okay, well, now you know. This is how science organizes all l...

14. Will the “Real” Jesus Please Stand Up

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Lori Wagner

Who is the “real” Jesus? How hard is it for us to see Jesus as a real person who felt sadness, happiness, grief, joy, who experienced laughter, who joked with his disciplines, who got angry, who could wrestle with his own pain? And yet, if we don’t recognize this Jesus, we lose the gift that God gave to us in the reality of the fully human (not just divine) Son. Watching the way Jesus handles hi...

15. Family Ties And Unties

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

David Coffin

In the 1993 movie Rudy, Sean Astin plays Rudy Rudiger, a young man who grew up in a Roman Catholic working class family that was employed at the steel mills, which is major town economic bedrock. Rudy always wanted to play football for the University of Notre Dame. There were a couple problems. First, he was short, lacked strong talent, and he had difficulty in school due to dyslexia. His family a...

16. Loving Against the Grain

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Lori Wagner

“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are,” said Lewis Carroll in his famous story, Alice in Wonderland. A couple of weeks ago, I took a day trip to Ocean City, NJ. Once there, I looked for some new and different things to do and discovered that the town has a “historical museum” of the shore’s history. Being a lover of history, I walked se...

17. Family Ties and Good-byes

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

Ron Lavin

Jesus experienced family ties and good-byes. So do we. According to Mark 3:20-35, Jesus was about to be confronted by his frustrated and conflicted family as crowds gathered around him to hear his stories, behold his miracles, and observe with great interest the conflicts he had with religious leaders from Jerusalem. Conflict. But there were also good, tender, and beautiful joys in Jesus' family....

18. What’s Going on at Your House?

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

Charles R. Leary

What’s going on at your house? Words like family, house, brother, sister, mother, nation, church ring special in our ears. They are bonding words, words that signify relationship, words that serve as labels for our deepest loyalties personal, familial, national, religious. What did Jesus really say? He said: A family divided into groups that fight will fall apart. A house divided into groups tha...

19. What Makes A Family?

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

King Duncan

It was shocking and hard to believe when one of Hollywood's most handsome and athletic stars, Christopher Reeve, suffered an accident that paralyzed him from the neck down. In one tragic moment, a single centimeter in the wrong direction, he was left a quadriplegic. Ironically, during those years when he was living in a wheelchair, most of us still associated him with his most famous role, that of...

20. Faces of Failure: Jesus’s Family

Mark 3:20-21, 31-35

Sermon

Don Tuttle

Have you ever noticed how some of those who should know Jesus best don’t? Take, for example, the people in his hometown of Nazareth. In Luke’s Gospel, the people who saw him play in their streets and work in his father’s shop are at first impressed with him. But when he returns to speak in the synagogue and suggests there is more faith among the pagans than among them they became furious and tr...

21. Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

George Reed

The gospels are very open in sharing the opposition that Jesus faced in his ministry. They are not afraid to have Jesus himself report that he was accused of being a glutton and a wino or, in this lesson, of his family trying to restrain him when the people thought he was insane. The religious folks accused him of even worse by suggesting that he was actually in league with the prince of demons. A...

22. A Divided Family

Mark 3:20-25

Sermon

King Duncan

There is a wonderful time-honored story that many of you will remember, but I don’t think you’ll mind hearing it again. Some of our young people may not be familiar with it. It’s truly a golden oldie. It’s about a country preacher who announced that on the following Sunday he would preach on the story of Noah and the Ark. He gave the scriptural reference for the congregation to read ahead of time...

23. The Agony And The Ecstasy Of The Family

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Ron Lavin

Jesus experienced conflict in his family. In today's text we hear that his family was so upset by what they saw he was doing and heard he was saying, that they decided to "take charge of him" because they thought "he was out of his mind" (Mark 3:21). Later in our story we hear that Jesus' family arrived while he was debating with the religious leaders about Satan, the prince of demons. Someone tol...

24. Family Reunion

Mark 3:31-35

Sermon

Donald B. Strobe

I. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT FAMILY REUNIONS? My son-in-law calls them “Family Rebellions.” Have you ever visited in a home where they have a photograph on the wall of a family reunion, where 30 or more people, from infants to the aged, are squeezed into an 8 x 10 photograph and frozen on film for all time? The patriarch of the family is usually positioned smack dab in the middle of the first row a...

25. Family Values

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Kristin Borsgard Wee

Last week I was reading a newspaper article on family values. The gist of the article was that everyone wants strong family values but few can agree on what they are. Then I heard Roger Rosenblatt on public radio being cynical about family values. Rosenblatt said that there are plenty of perfect families around like yours and mine. But, there are so many others that fall short, families like the W...

Showing 1 to 25 of 25 results