All the Sermons

1 Corinthians 13 How many of you have been at a wedding in which this text was read as part of the ceremony? This text is very popular among fiancées and wedding planners.  As a definition or description of love, it’s a classic.  And it’s classy.  It is one of the best-written, most poetic and beautifully written pieces of literature on the topic.  Bur Paul didn’t write it for a wedding! It is very appropriately included right here, smack dab in the middle of talking about the unity of the Body of Christ, the variety of spiritual gifts, and how that all works together. It’s not really about marital love. It is about how all of us in the community of Christ should be able to get along in spite of our wide degree of differences. He wrote it for the church.  Just to collect up the last couple of weeks again, before chapter 13 we have chapter 12 in which Paul wrote about one body many parts, one Spirit, many gifts.  He was helping the Corinthians understand how the community calle

Now you can listen too!   http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw 1 Cor. 12:11-26   I’m sure many of you have been through some sort of surgery in which they put you out. So you don’t really know what’s going on while you are in the operating room. I mean those doctors and nurses could be talking about anything. Well I want you to listen to this scenario…(Operating room setting.  A patient is on the gurney being operated on.  Behind are a doctor and a nurse.  The sound of the heart monitor is in the background, definitely loud enough for the audience to hear.) Doctor:  Scalpel? Nurse:  Scalpel Doctor:  Suction? Nurse:  There’s a bleeder here doctor. Doctor:  Suction?  (slurping sound)  Cautery?  Thank you. Nurse:  You’re welcome sir. Doctor:  Clamp?  Suture?   Mayo scissors? Nurse:  That’s pretty good work doctor.  Doctor:  Well, That should do it for his appendix.  Nurse:  Would you like me to close him up? Doctor:  No, No!  Let’s take a loo

1 Corinthians 12:1-11 Smile!  <click> This is a special camera. The camera before this one got stolen. So I went without a camera for almost a year. But when I learned that God had opened the door for me to go to the Dominican Republic, Kathy said, “Greg, I want you to have a new camera so you can take lots of pictures during your trip. I want that to be my Christmas present to you.” So that’s what’s special about this camera. It is a gift that was given to me, specifically to be used for missionary work, and ministry work after that. That’s what a spiritual gift is like. It is a gift given, for you to enjoy using in a way that blesses others, much like I enjoyed sharing all my pictures with you when I got back from the DR. In today’s culture, some of us may be concerned about what it means when we are going to talk about spiritual gifts. Probably the first thing that comes to mind is “speaking in tongues.” Is that weird? Well guess what? They actually had the same proble

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 In the great spiritual battle that engages our lives when we begin to follow Christ, probably one of the main battlegrounds is the sacred space of the Christian family. The marriage relationship between a man and a woman, as we know from Ephesians and other of Paul’s writings, is intended by God to be a beautiful picture of the covenant relationship between God and his people. Satan knows this too, and therefore he has tried to destroy marriages and one of his most effective methods has been to distort what Christians think the Bible teaches about marriage. Today we come to one of the more controversial passages of Scripture. You have just heard it. If there was ever a day that your pastor needed prayer, perhaps this is the one. Perhaps just by hearing it read you ladies are thinking, “Oh no. Here we go.” And perhaps some of the men are thinking, “Finally, I will get some help from the pastor to get her under control!” You would both be wrong. Let us first

1 Cor. 10:14-22 How can we take this ancient text and make it come alive for us and for our needs? We don’t know anyone who kneels before golden statues or bows down before carved images. So hasn’t idolatry gone the way of leisure suits, shoulder pads and jelly shoes? Aren’t we past all that? What if it’s not about statues? What if the gods of here and now are not known as cosmic deities with strange names? What if the demons fighting for our souls have taken more ordinary forms so that we don’t recognize them as gods at all? What if we do our “kneeling” and our “bowing” with our imaginations, our checkbooks, our search engines and our calendars? What if I told you that every sin you are struggling with, every discouragement you are dealing with—even the lack of purpose you may be living with—is because of idolatry? 1 There is a war on. The demons who pretend to be gods are at war with the one True God but they attack us, and their strength is not to be underestimated. These gods