Our sermons are only a part of our Sunday morning, but they are an important part – they are the Word of God presented to us in our context so that we can repent, seek to amend our lives, and receive God’s grace through the power of the Gospel.
Starting with the Gospel reading and Jesus’ statement that wisdom is justified by her children, we examine what the wisdom of the Reformation was. In Romans, we find that this wisdom is the full justification of the human being with God through nothing but God’s own grace. We revel together in this wisdom and continue…
Some love songs are just about our praise to our beloved. Love songs that describe the attributes of the beloved are often this way. We hear “the way your blue eyes sparkle” and we think of the way that our lover’s green eyes sparkle. Pslam 96 engages in this kind of love song showing attributes…
It’s hard to get around the familiarity we all have with Psalm 23 and view it in a new light, but that the first lines of the Psalm, “…I shall not want…” reveal a similarity to love songs that talk about how the sun and the moon rise and set and the lover may be…
Pslam 25 cries out to God with the tenor of a lover who fails to know how to show his/her love to the Beloved. David cries, “make me to know Your ways, O Lord” with the same feeling as someone who feels inadequate to their love. So often, when we don’t know how to show…
Psalm 27 is about declaring that God is “the one for me”, a theme found in many different love songs. In these love songs, often the author of the love song sings about how he or she looked to others, but in the end, it was about “the one for me”. Jesus is our “the…
This week’s Gospel involves several vignettes that all lead to the same end, the idea that Jesus’ disciples are to be humble in their approach to each other and to the world. When we fail to embrace humility, we fail to follow Jesus’ example of searching for the one sheep over the 99. Our poise…
This Sunday gives us the first sense of “poise” in the Christian life, which is taking up our own cross in a sacrificial life. Sacrificing our own lives, denying ourselves, puts us in the poise to receive God’s love on His own terms instead of ours, as well as allowing us to put our own…
This week we start our Poised to Love series and look at the idea of being “poised” Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others…
We end our Book of Love series on the “spooky” note of the Revelation to John and other apocalyptic works such as Daniel and Ezekiel. In the midst of these revelations, we look to “find” a God who is mysterious, but whose greatest mystery is His love for mankind, and how he chosen the…
We look this week at the Catholic/General Epistles (the Epistles not written by Paul). In these Epistles we generally find a sense of the impending return of Christ and how churches are to behave in the last days. They also seek to further explain the true nature and true love of God, and how that…