All the Sermons

Scripture Reading: Hebrews 13:10-16 Listen link: https://www.lcepc.org/blogger If you wanted to live a perfect life, healthy, wealthy and wise, you could keep the whole law and do pretty well, much like that rich young ruler that Jesus met. But if you want to be saved and go to heaven, well, keeping the Law won’t get you that far. By the time you make a willful decision that you are going to keep the whole law, it’s already too late because of things that you did before that decision, unless you got a real early start and never sinned, never showed even an ounce of selfishness, even when you were a baby. And today, even if you become a Jew, now it really is impossible to keep all of God’s Law. There is no temple, no legal way to make animals sacrifices, not even in Jerusalem, because there is no God ordained place to bring your offerings. So, if we can’t or won’t perfectly obey, and keeping the law once we get the idea won’t erase the sins we did before anyway, then what’s the us...

Scripture: 1 John 4:7-8 I don't have a transcript for this week because I was away on business. However, our guest speaker, Ron McIntyre, was recorded. So you can listen here: https://www.lcepc.org/blogger

Scripture: Exodus 20:1-17 Listen link:  https://www.lcepc.org/blogger    NASA astronauts take great care to go out in to space. If they don't dress properly and take special precautions with special preparations for space travel, they can't survive out there for even a minute! Full contact with outer space means instant death. Ordinary humans are not fit for outer space.  In the same way, we may say that ordinary humans are not fit for contact with God. But God longs to be with us, to close the gap and make it possible for us to dwell with him in peace and joy. So, God shows us how it can be done. That’s the point of all the rules and regulations of the sacrificial system and the Ten Commandments in Exodus. But we have a hard time believing it. People are so fickle. And since we are people, I suppose it’s only fair to lay that on ourselves and confess, “we are so fickle.” We have a hard time living by the faith that saves. Those Israelites had it so easy! The...

Scripture: Exodus 12:1-14 Listen link:  https://www.lcepc.org/Sermons   We all know the story of Moses, right? Haven’t we all watched the Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston? So, this week we read the first 12 chapters of Exodus. That covers just about the first half of the Ten Commandments movie, right up to just before all the Israelites actually left Egypt. It’s tempting to focus on the story of Moses, do a character study, or a leadership analysis. But the real focus of the Biblical story is God. What do we learn about him here? What kind of leader is he? This is God’s Revelation. These things really happened in history. But they happened the way they did because God was using events we could see, to teach us about the nature and character of an invisible person, himself. Our reading ended this morning on the First Passover night, the one that became Israel’s first national holiday, their Independence Day, that commemorates being set free from slavery in Egy...