All the Sermons

Scripture: Ephesians 1:3-11 Listen here:  https://www.lcepc.org/blogger  It is the season of Thanksgiving. We give thanks for family, and health and all kinds of blessings. We can try to count our blessing as the song says, but we know there’s always way more than we can really count. We give thanks for good and loving relationships among family and friends, gainful employment, economic security and political and religious freedom. We give thanks for our national security and all our armed forces that protect our liberties and prosperity. It is good to give thanks! And we give thanks to God for making it all possible.  That’s good too, even commanded of us. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says, “Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.” That’s command language! It’s kind of a funny thought for parents, thinking about how much they do for their children and wanting to tell them, “You ought to thank me!” But we tend to refrain from commandin

Scriptures:  John 1:35-37, John 1:40-42, John 1:43-46, John 4:25-26, 28-30, John 12:20-22, Matthew 19:13-15, Matthew 9:1-7. Listen here:  https://www.lcepc.org/blogger    What do all of these passages have in common?  Bringing! In each one, somebody brings a new person to meet Jesus! All of them “walked with” the people they brought. And among them we see a variety of reasons that they were motivated to do so, all good reasons. In summary: 1.    They brought because of being pointed in the right direction. 2.    They brought because of enthusiasm. 3.    They brought because age, physical and spiritual condition were no obstacle to the friend or neighbor of faith who cared about the friend or neighbor in need. To look at the ones who brought others after having been pointed in the right direction, first of all we see John, the Baptist himself, the last great prophet of the Old Testament style. He knew his important role as the one who would herald the coming Messiah. But he di

Scripture: 2 Cor. 5:14-21 you can listen here: https://www.lcepc.org/blogger Once while I was working in a furniture factory in Grand Rapids, I was busy with a stack of wooden frame members for office cubicle partitions. All I was doing was filling holes with glue and then pushing a short little dowel in each hole to get them ready for the next step in the assembly process. So, while I was standing there with another guy, him on the other end of the stack doing the same mindless task, the foreman comes over and says, “I don’t know guys, sometimes I wonder, what’s the point? I work hard all day and all week to get a paycheck that I spend on food, housing and bills just so I can stay alive and go to work again to earn more money that keeps me alive and healthy to keep on working.” I said to him, “Carl, the way you describe it, if that is really all there is to life, you are right, there is no point. It is pointless. You’re on the hamster wheel, running all day and going nowhere.”