All the Sermons

Isaiah 2:1-5 ‘Tis the season. The Advent season. The whole world is getting ready for Christmas. Many people are looking for the magic of Christmas. A lot of the preparation focuses on getting the best shopping deals at sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Getting ready for Christmas means getting all the shopping done, the presents wrapped, the lights and trees up, and the decisions about where the families will gather and who’s doing the cooking and baking. Some despise the commercialization of Christmas and yet they are also caught up in the expectations of others to celebrate Christmas. But the Church has historically and traditionally had quite a different perspective on what it means to get ready for Christmas. We can escape the oppressive forces of the commercialization of Christmas when we find the magic of Christmas in the miracle of the gospel. Christmas as you know, is all about celebrating the first time Jesus came into our world. That first time, he came as a bab

Luke 17:11-19 As soon as we got through Halloween, the Christmas decorations came out, right? Where are all the shelves and shelves of decorations for Thanksgiving Day? Deer Day gets more press than Thanksgiving! We don’t exactly skip Thanksgiving. Most of us will spend the day with family and extended family. We’ll have a good time talking and eating and maybe watching football on TV. But how much of that time will really be focused sincerely on giving thanks to the Father God? Our Bible says, in James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” We owe him everything. And he gives us everything we need, all freely from his gracious hand, without obligation and knowing we can’t pay him back because anything we would offer to him came from him. The only thing we really have to offer him is our gratitude, expressed in worship of him and obedience to him. When we come together for

Luke 19:1-10 Today we’re going to look at what happened to Zacchaeus when he met Jesus. Zacchaeus ends up being an example of what it looks like when a person loves the Lord their God with all their strength. But first he had to get saved. We get to see his life on both sides of his relationship with Christ. We get to see who he was before he became a believer, what God did and who he became as a result of faith in Jesus. It’s interesting. We can relate to most of the people Jesus talked to in the gospels because they were either ordinary, decent people or people who had great need for some kind of physical healing or deliverance from demon possession. It looks like Jesus came to give people meaning and purpose or to relieve them from suffering. We like that. It’s nice. Jesus likes to help people out. In the gospels we don’t meet many really bad people who aren’t demon possessed. If they are possessed, we see them as helpless prisoners of spirits. We assume they can’t help being

John 9:1-41 Once again, use your imagination to explore another perspective. You are sitting on the hard ground, wrapped in a tattered cloak that feels drafty in the cool nights, but you’ve got nothing better. You’re a blind man and so, nobody thinks you’re worth anything. You can’t get a job. Nobody believes you can do anything. Even your parents are embarrassed by your existence. And it’s funny how people don’t mind talking about you as if you’re not there. Just because you’re blind they think you can’t hear either. You can hear pretty good though. That’s why you know what everybody thinks. You hear a crowd coming along the road you’re sitting beside. The men are talking. They seem to have a lot of questions for a man they are calling Jesus. They keep talking to him and asking him questions as if he is the center of all the attention. Then suddenly one of them mentions you. Not by name of course, they don’t know your name. To them you are just the subject matter for a theologica