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.
The first Sunday in Advent is a sort of “alarm clock” that rings the bells that it is time for us to prepare for the coming of gift – or if we are found ill prepared, the gift might pass us by. Thinking about this question vocationally, we are given new tasks within our vocations…
God has redeemed us and has given us gifts, and the parable of the sheep and goats shows us that there is a way to mishandle these gifts. God’s people are marked by lives of generosity that are not always conscious of their generosity. However, Jesus is clearly calling us to be mindful of our…
Last week we talked about having the capital that we need, this week, we talk about the growth of that capital in our lives. In our culture, we are used to spending our capital, but not necessarily used to the ideas that surround the investment of our capital. We’ll talk about investing our Finances, Intellects,…
Do you have what you need in the areas of Financial, Intellectual, Physical, Relational, and Spiritual capital? Or have you allowed your gifts to burn down to the nub? How do we show ourselves as ready for the Bridegrooms return, even if we don’t feel like we have all that we need right now? What…
In the next week, we will begin to our last series in the “I Love U” focus year. This week we take some time to imagine what many lives of love might look like in the Resurrection and what things will be like when Jesus comes again to inaugurate an eternity of Love. What will…
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…