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Showing posts from July, 2016

Message: God helps those who help themselves?

Psalm 10:14 But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless. 17 You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, 18 defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror. Psalm 18:6 In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry came before him, into his ears. 16 He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. Psalm 121:1-2, I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. The judge was talking to the thief. He had been caught stealing, finally caught, after a long career, years of getting away with it and living a pretty good life as a result. The man was a professional. He had a wife and k

Everything Happens for a Reason?

Deuteronomy 30:19-20 Listen Link:   http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw SMASH! (I had a small mirror, about 8” X 8”, in a baggie and I smashed it with a hammer.) What was that about? Why did I do that? Does the destruction of this mirror make you wonder about me? Are you feeling any shock or dismay about the loss of a good mirror or the senseless destruction? Multiply that about a hundred times to sense the shock and dismay and horror of what people have lived through and lost in Dallas, TX, and other places recently where violence has taken human lives. If you can sympathize with that, now multiply it a gazillion times and you still can’t even imagine what God must feel like, and how he felt the moment it all started when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. When our ancestors, in the Garden of Eden, Heaven on Earth, decided to believe the satanic lie and try for something they thought might be even better than what God had already given them, i

Soldier Strength

2 Timothy 2:1-4 In honor of Independence Day and the celebrations surrounding us, we give thanks for soldiers who gave their all in the fight for freedom from tyranny and oppression. But I am talking about more than American soldiers. We owe our American armed forces an awful lot to be sure, for the fact that we can stand here and with loud speakers proclaim the gospel out in the streets without fear of rebuke, arrest or persecution. But also, there have been Christian soldiers down through the ages, waging war in a spiritual battle against the forces of darkness. And to be sure, every Christian ought to consider himself or herself as enlisted in that army and called up for active duty. I mean, why else would you be here? So today I want to focus on the Bible’s call to arms. We just read it. “Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” In addition, when Paul wrote to Philemon about a runaway slave he addressed his letter as follows, Paul, a prisoner of Chr