Category: Sermons

Standing on Giants

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This Memorial Weekend, we are talking about the church. Specifically, we are talking about the kind of church that we are and how we came to be this church. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t all because of those in this current generation. We are the result of much hard work and dedication by those who came before us. If we stand, we stand on their shoulders. Celebrate all of this with me and spend some time reflecting on where you are with the church and where perhaps you should be.

Standing on Giants

I am a pastor. I hope that doesn’t come as a shock to very many of you. That’s my job. It’s my calling. A job and a calling, though, are somewhat different from a passion. Hopefully they all intersect in a beautiful harmony that brings joy and fulfillment to your life, but bills tend to demand payment whether we’ve hit that mark or not, so they don’t always. Now, as it turns out, I’m also pretty passionate about many of the parts of pastoring, but the two that fire me up more than anything else are teaching and writing. As such, I’m always on the lookout for an idea. The thing about ideas, though, is that you find them all over the place. Sometimes they are in the places you expect, but sometimes you stumble across them where you would have never thought to look before. And then there are the times when they just hit you totally out of the blue. A little over a week ago, an idea hit me completely out of the blue, and I knew that I needed to write about it. I’d like to share some of that with you this morning. 

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Mother and daughter hugging on a chair with a Mother's Day card and flowers nearby

Honor for Honorable Commitments

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Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and we took the occasion to celebrate moms and all the godly women in our lives. Moms, you play a pretty special role in the economy of God’s advancing kingdom in this world. None of it would work the way it does without you. But your work is hard. Some days it’s really hard. This message is to offer you a bit of hope and encouragement. Your labor in the Lord will never be in vain. Blessings to you!

Honor for Honorable Commitments

Have you ever felt like the work you were doing didn’t really matter? You were trying your best, but you weren’t seeing anything you felt like were meaningful results. There are days that it takes a lot to get up and get moving. This isn’t primarily because we are physically tired, but because we are emotionally and mentally and even spiritually exhausted. We are in such a state because we have been getting up and going over and over again every day without much in the way of rest. But worse than that, we have been doing all of that without much in the way of a sense that we are really making any difference, that our efforts matter. 

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Learning to Trust

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This week we are wrapping up our short series, When I Am Afraid. For the last three weeks we have been talking about how to deal with times of fear and anxiety in our lives. Ultimately, the way we are going to get through that particular storm is through our willingness to trust in God. But what if we don’t trust in God? What if someone we know who is struggling under the weight of life doesn’t trust in God? What then? Well, we have to learn how and why trusting Him is the best decision we’ll ever make. In this last part of our journey, unpacking that truth is what we are talking about with the help of something Jesus said that reveals a great deal about His character. Let’s dive right in.

Learning to Trust

I want you to think for a second about someone you just don’t trust. My guess is that you have at least one person in your life who fits that particular bill. I’m not as concerned with the precise reason for the mistrust right now as I am with the presence of the mistrust itself. Do you have that person in mind? Now, imagine that you are struggling with something fairly significant and this person comes and offers you help. Are you going to accept it? Probably not, right? Maybe if you are sufficiently desperate you’ll give it some consideration, but absent that, you’ll keep on struggling on your own rather than take help from this person. Why? Because you don’t trust them. You don’t trust they are really going to be there when you need them. You don’t trust they aren’t offering with insincere or ulterior motives. You don’t trust they aren’t going to let you down in the end. You don’t trust them. And when you don’t trust someone, it’s hard to receive much of anything from them. 

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More Than Meets the Eye

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Sometimes we feel alone. We feel alone when we are all by ourselves. We feel alone when we are surrounded by people. Isolation isn’t a function of the proximity of other people. It’s more often first a mental state. When our circumstances get hard, or when we get into sin of some kind, we start to feel disconnected from the people around us, the people who love us. When this happens, our anxiety starts to grow. Then we start to feel disconnected from God. We struggle to see His help in our situation, and things just get worse. Elijah understood this feeling. He felt isolated and alone and terribly anxious because of it. Today as we continue our series, we are going to look at God’s encouragement to him and what that means for us. Let’s dive right in.

More Than Meets the Eye

I finally finished watching the Cobra Kai series on Netflix recently. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a modern continuation of the Karate Kid story from the trio of excellent movies in the 1980s and early 1990s. To say the whole thing is a remarkable story of redemption and restoration is an understatement. It was fantastic. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch—very little out of Hollywood is these days—but it got Gospel redemption right in some really profound ways. There’s something else it got right as well. 

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