Category: Sermons

Thoughts for a snowy day

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The weather won this Sunday.  The slush and ice piling up on streets and branches kept us home, but technology saved the day.  Here’s what I shared on Facebook Live yesterday morning (click here to watch it).  Enjoy!

Thoughts for a Snowy Day

One of the most magical Christmases I remember happened in 2007. Lisa and I were living in Littleton, CO while I was in seminary and that year both of our families came out at the same time to celebrate the holiday.  I know what you’re thinking: The Christmas miracle was not that we all got along that year.  That Christmas Eve we all went downtown to see the Broadway version of the classic Christmas movie, White Christmas.  It was a terrific show.  Driving home it was about 60 degrees with a big full moon shining brightly.  It made for a beautiful evening, but not the kind of weather as to put you in the mood for the season.  The next morning,Christmas morning, we woke up to a foot of snow; our very own white Christmas.  We scoped out the load Santa left, ate some breakfast, played in the snow, and warmed up afterwards by a crackling fire.  It was about as perfect a Christmas as I could imagine.  The only thing that could have improved it would have been having our boys around for us to experience the wonder through their eyes. 

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Resist Pride

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In this final part of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we talk about the one thing that has the greatest power to throw us off the path to life.  Having this thing in our lives is like having mold in our houses.  It can grow in ways we don’t notice or see until we’re sick from it.  What is it and how do we deal with it?  Keep reading to find out.

Resist Pride

We had a rainy November,didn’t we?  As the rain was falling a couple of weeks ago, I looked out at our swamp and we had more water standing in our yard than we did during Hurricane Florence.  And, given that we had almost as much rain over those few days as we did in the bigger storm, I shouldn’t have been surprised.  It still wasn’t the catastrophic rain they had not all that far east of here.  The real problem from that amount of flooding isn’t just the floodwaters themselves. It’s what comes next.  The North Carolina Baptists have and will continue to have disaster relief crews busily at work for the next 2-3 years to get life restored to where it was before Florence rolled through.  It’ll take that long because the clean-up is hard work. You’ve got to go into these homes and demo and replace everything from the ground up to above wherever the final water line was.  And you have to do all of that because of the threat of mold. 

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Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

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In part five of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we pause to remember.  Along the way of our journeys after Jesus, problems and challenges are going to arise.  When these do, if we’re not careful, we can get so focused on dealing with them that we forget about the God who’s been helping us all along.  Keep reading to see what impact this can have and how we can avoid it.

 

Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

When was the last time you forgot something?  (And if you can’t remember, now counts.)  Forgetting things is frustrating.  For the life of me, I can’t figure out how some things stick, but others don’t.  Usually, it too often seems like the inane, unimportant things stick, while the important ones don’t.  That’s infuriating, isn’t it?  It’s infuriating for us, sure, but it’s infuriating for the people around us who were perhaps counting on us remembering them.  Guys—confession time—we do that more often than our wives do, don’t we?  I know I need to work on that all the time and I’ll bet some of you do too.

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Worship and Surrender

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In this fourth part of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we move in a direction that is perhaps unexpected given the assumptions of our culture.  When Asa and the people were busily moving in the direction of God against the grain of the culture around them they did something most people wouldn’t have done then or now.  As for what this is and what it means for us, keep reading to find out.

 

Worship and Surrender

Have you ever used a Chinese finger trap?  Unless you’ve spent the last 30 minutes stuck in it and are waiting to get loose, grab the one you were handed this morning as you came in.  Go ahead and stick your fingers in it.  Now, try and pull them out.  The natural reaction when you stick your fingers in and can’t immediately slide them back out is to pull harder.  But, as perhaps you have already discovered, pulling harder won’t get your fingers out of the trap.  There are times in life like that, aren’t there?  Times when more pressure isn’t going to get the job done.  There are situations in which we have to learn to stop fighting if we’re going to manage to get anywhere good. Read the rest…

Live Courageously

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This past Sunday we ventured into part three of our teaching series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World.  One of the truths we need to embrace if we’re going to do that is that sometimes it’s hard to do.  So, what do we call it when someone does the right thing even though it’s hard?  Keep reading to find out.

Live Courageously

Our culture loves heroes.  Superhero movies have always been popular, but the last few years have seen their profiles rise to epic proportions.  For many moviegoers, the wait for the next Marvel film is agonizing.  I recently read a quote from Kevin Smith, a director popular among the nerd culture, who said that given the choice, he would rather see the next Avengers movie than direct another movie ever again.  This past Wednesday evening I couldn’t even begin to count how many little superheroes I saw running around here.  Since the year 2,000, sixteen of the 40 highest grossing films have been about super-powered individuals in one way or another.  If you add films about heroes more generally (like Star Wars or Harry Potter) that number goes up 28 and you could probably make a good case for adding a few more to that list. Read the rest…