All the Sermons

1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Our friend Neil Wolf likes to tell the story of one of his patients who was very cheerful. The man was so full of joy, and from the things he was saying, the doctor asked him, are you a Christian? The patient smiled with joy and said, “Oh, I’ve been a Christian all my life. But I was born again three years ago!” How do you explain that kind of talk? Last Thursday I listened to my friend Don Hoitenga tell of his brother-in-law. The man is seventy years old. And after his wife survived cancer, with some miraculous intervention, the man called Don last Wednesday to say, “Don, I gave my heart to the Lord last night. I know I’ve been in church all my life and maybe you thought I was a Christian. But I’ve really been a hypocrite, until now.” But the Don said it’s the same for him. He didn’t meet Jesus until he was fifty. And he had been in church all his life. How do you explain that kind of talk? The faith we live, isn’t just the way we were raised, a philosoph

1 Corinthians 14:26-33 I love potluck dinner!  Everybody brings something and you never know what you’re going to get but you know it is going to be good! There’s pasta dishes, chili dishes, salad dishes, jello dishes. I am getting hungry! The neat thing is I can try all these different foods and I didn’t even have to prepare them first, they are just there, except maybe for the dish I brought. But Kathy made that one. The reason I am talking about this is because I noticed in this part of chapter 14 that the worship service in Corinth sounds a lot like a potluck of the heart. Paul says, “When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or a word of interpretation.” Everybody has something to offer, some kind of message related to God’s Word and to the life they were living in Christ. It’s potluck worship. That is a spirit filled church. I wonder if modern congregations have lost something by having too much structure. What would

Scripture:        1 Cor. 14:1-25  I am going to do something a little different today. As you can see, this is a rather long passage. And it really pretty straightforward and easy to understand. So, instead of reading it all and then going back through it, I have decided to break up the reading into the smaller paragraphs and sections, making comments and giving illustrations along the way to clarify and highlight the message I believe God wants us to hear today. “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.”  That sentence is Paul’s transition from a teaching about the greatest gift of all, the gift of love, to his teaching about how to use that gift as the foundation from which to speak to one another. We have heard this maxim many times, speak the truth in love. As Paul said early in chapter 13, if Godly Christian love is not the obvious motivation for what you think you have to say then if you do speak, you’re just a wind bag of empty noi