Category: Sermons

Trust When All Else Fails

Leave a comment

We live in a world awash in anxiety. We hear all the time about just how anxious everyone around us is. Kids are anxious. Teens are especially anxious. Women are anxious. Men are anxious. Young adults are anxious. Older adults are anxious. Everyone is anxious. And we’re miserable because of it. It seems like this is not how things should be. Well, that’s because they shouldn’t be like this. In the Scriptures we can find all sorts of wisdom and counsel for dealing with anxiety in our lives and in the world around us. For this and the next three weeks, we are going to be talking about just like. We’ll start today with the very first thing we should do when fear and anxiety make a play for our hearts.

Trust When All Else Fails

Let’s start with an informal survey this morning. By a show of hands, who in here likes to be scared? Okay, for all the rest of the normal people in the room, who doesn’t like to be scared? There are some folks—as indicated by our little survey—who enjoy being scared. These are the kinds of people who love scary movies or going to Scarowinds in the fall. Personally, I do not count myself among their number. I don’t typically watch scary movies, and I generally avoid the horror genre. I love you guys who do. I admire you. But I am perfectly content watching you intentionally put yourself in situations that will leave you losing your mind and looking really silly while you do it from the sidelines. I will give you two guarantees: I will support you, and I will also laugh at you. 

Read the rest…

Too Good Not to Share

Leave a comment

It’s common to get to the other side of a major event and wonder a bit about what we are supposed to do now. Easter is kind of like that. There’s all this build up and then…what now? What are we supposed to do in light of this incredible news that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day? As we wrap up our journey through Luke’s Passion Narrative, we are going to be talking about that very thing because that’s the very thing we find Jesus pointing the disciples to in the final conversation Luke records them having. Let’s take a look together at the “now what” of Easter.

Too Good Not to Share (Luke 24:36-53)
April 12, 2026 

Can I meddle just a bit this morning? Most college basketball observers figured that Duke was going to be the National Champion this season. But they didn’t. They actually wound up only making it to the Elite Eight. This is because UConn–who, of course, wound up getting smashed by Michigan in the championship this past Monday—had one of the most incredible, last-second, upset wins of the season. With just four seconds to go, Duke had a 2-point lead and the ball. All they had to do was inbounds the ball and hold it. But instead, a freshman UConn player intercepted an attempted pass at halfcourt. With time quickly ticking away, he frantically passed it to a teammate closer to the basket, but unable to do anything, he threw it back, and from near the halfcourt line, with under a second to go, this freshman threw up a prayer. The whole thing felt like one of those slow-motion moments at the climax of a sports movie even though, again, the whole thing played out in less than five seconds. With just four-tenths of a second remaining on the clock, the ball swished through the hoop and the game was essentially over. 

Read the rest…

Seeing What’s True

Leave a comment

Yesterday was Resurrection Sunday! I hope you were able to celebrate with joy and gladness with fellow brothers and sisters in the church. I hope you were able to give some time to reflecting on the incredible news that Jesus is alive. In this second-to-last part of our series, we are talking about the topic du jour. When Jesus’ followers started learning of the incredible news of His resurrection, they were slow to believe it. It took Jesus’ helping them to finally see them come around to it. The same is true of us today. Let’s explore how together as we talk about seeing what’s true.

Seeing What’s True

Did you ever have one of those Magic Eye books when you were a kid? We only ever had one, but I remember looking through it all the time. Could you ever actually see what was hidden in those strange images? For the longest time, I never could. I would look from every angle and try every trick, I’d try every strategy that was supposed to work, but nothing ever made a difference. Then I finally learned the secret that started working for me pretty consistently. You have to cross your eyes and slowly uncross them. Once I learned that, I was good to go. 

Read the rest…

It Was Always on Purpose

Leave a comment

The idea of something being the beginning of the end seems odd. Endings should just be endings, not beginnings. And yet, the sequence of things that lead to that end have to begin somewhere. The final beginning of Jesus’ end in this life started with dinner. It unfolded from there into a series of events that looked from the outside-in like they were all spiraling out of control, making Jesus a helpless victim of His circumstances. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing Jesus did ever happened by accident. The things that happened to Him weren’t an accident either. As we continue our journey through Luke’s Story of Sacrifice this week, we are talking about just how in command Jesus really was. Let’s dive right in.

It Was Always on Purpose

In the late 1500s, an English Protestant preacher and scholar named John Foxe wrote a book that quickly became an enduring spiritual and devotional classic. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs sought to tell the stories of believers who had been persecuted for their faith, many of whom paid the ultimate price in that persecution. His goal was to encourage other believers with these powerful stories to perform great acts of faith and faithfulness in their own lives. These kinds of stories are indeed powerful. They are inspiring. Hearing gripping stories about incredible acts of devotion has a way of motivating copycats in the best possible sense. It can encourage those who are facing similar troubles in their own lives. It can grow the church in remarkable ways. As the early church father, Tertullian, once wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” 

Read the rest…

Doomsday Prepping

Leave a comment

Jesus had a lot to say about the end of the world. He spoke of judgment as often as the prophets of old. That makes sense given that He was a prophet. He was far more than that, of course, but He wasn’t less than that. As we move forward with Luke in his story of sacrifice, we find Jesus having a conversation with the disciples about the future and judgment that was coming to Jerusalem itself and the world as a whole. It’s a wild picture. Let’s take a look at what He has to say and what it might mean for us with Easter in view.

Doomsday Prepping

Everybody knows the world is going to end at some point in the future. It’s not a matter of if; only of when. And I don’t say that simply as a Bible-believing follower of Jesus. Secular scientists tell us that at some point in the hopefully distant future the sun is going to go supernova, explode, and that’ll be the end of our solar system. Fun fact: that was not always the “common knowledge” that it is today. Used to be, all of the smartest people in the world “knew” the universe was eternal. It has always been here and would always be here. Christians with their beliefs about the end of the world with the return of Christ were so quaint and primitive. Albert Einstein famously introduced a made up fudge factor into some complicated equations he discovered that let physicists describe the universe in very mathematical terms that resulted in their showing the universe was eternal because if you solved them without that, they pointed to a finite beginning point of the universe, and he “knew” that wasn’t correct. Then science caught up with theology at about the same time that we invented weapons capable of utterly destroying the world several times over, and since then, everybody has known the world is going to end at some point in the future. 

Read the rest…