All the Sermons

Luke 19:28-40 Have you ever felt small and insignificant, as if you have nothing to offer, no reason for being and unable to make a difference of any lasting value? Perhaps you can look back over a life lived and lost, now you’re retired, or at least old enough to know you haven’t already made the best of it, or made the most of it, or enjoyed the kind of success you dreamed about when younger. Maybe you never did have high aspirations or ambitions and you are content to be what other people would call “a nobody.” You’ve lived a quiet, happy life, focused on family and community. But, even you, as happy as you are, do you ever wonder if maybe something passed you by, or you missed an opportunity to make a difference? Jesus sure made a difference didn’t he? But He is God right? And what are we compared to that? We are his servants. And we never know what or where or how God might choose to use us one day, but one day, even in the future that is yet to be, when and if the Lord needs...

2 Cor. 5:14-21 Almost everybody has or has had a job of some sort. In today’s economy, you have to work to pay the bills. Money is a basic need. It enables us to buy food and clothes and other basic necessities as such as the internet and cable TV. Some people experience the blessing of really loving their work. I count myself among them. They are getting paid to do what they really love doing. But most people, at least I think most people, see work as a necessary burden. They are glad for the money they earn. But when they think about the actual work they are doing to earn that money, the attitude for many is, “Eh, it’s a living.” Once while I was working in a furniture factory in Grand Rapids, MI, 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,...

Romans 1:14-17 I really believe that most of the people in our neighborhood who do not go to church probably have at least heard about it, or were even in Sunday School when they were kids. For a lot of them the reason they are not in church today is because they wonder, “What’s the point?” To them church is a burden of rules and additional responsibilities. They think all we want is their time and their money to do what we want to do, or get them to do what we want them to do. They think other things are more important, like having fun with the family, or being in school sports programs, or just having a real day off from work. They think our morals and commandments are too uptight for modern life anyway. They think we are way behind and need to learn how to relax and just let people be whatever they want to be and do what they feel is right.   Think of the person you have been praying for these last few weeks. What do they think of church? How much do you know about their ...

2 Corinthians 1:3-11 Ahh, comfort. We love to be comfortable and we love to be comforted when we are uncomfortable. But when trouble strikes, what is your primary source of comfort? Will you be uncomfortable until everything settles down again? Or can you find peace in the midst of the storm? Can you comfort yourself? Can you engage in some sort of stoic self-discipline, in which we attempt to conquer suffering by controlling our emotions? Can you use will power? How about the power of positive thinking, in which we try to psyche ourselves up into believing that things are really not as bad as they seem? Can we overcome our circumstances if we only put our mind to it? Certainly, Paul is thought not talking about some “new age” conviction that all we have to do is get in touch with the “god within us.” In stark contrast to all such self-help strategies, by “endurance” Paul means that trust in God’s power and purposes in the midst of adversity that expresses itself in a steady no...

Ezekiel 37:1-14 for a pretty good dramatization of this text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB9lIPCssos There he was in the middle of a grotesque scene of the aftermath of a war zone. He stood in the midst of a vast collection of dry bones. They covered the floor of the valley as far as he could see. It had been a slaughter. Hundreds of dead Israelites laid out unburied, their bones picked clean by birds, animals and weather. They must have been dead for quite a while. Now they lay in a hopeless jumble, all disconnected and scattered, like a horrifying jig saw puzzle. Those bones in that valley lay there in a condition that can be called excarnation. Excarnation is a real old word that describes exactly what we see here. In the ancient war zones, if the king had fallen while he was away from home, his loyal subjects would want to bring him back home for a proper burial. But they didn’t have refrigerator cars to preserve the body from rotting. And they didn’t have...