Category: Sermons

The Life of a Servant

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What does it mean to serve the Lord?  Have you ever really thought about that?  Followers of Jesus are told we are to serve Him, but we don’t often think about the details.  As we continue our series, The Characters of Christmas, Mary’s story gives us a pretty comprehensive picture.  Check this out to see what the picture of serving the Lord looks like.  

The Life of a Servant

So, last week we looked at the story of Gabriel’s announcement to Zechariah that his barren wife would conceive and give birth to a son.  In this, we saw that God’s promises are not fulfilled solely by the boldly miraculous or the faith superheroes, but instead, are made manifest when God moves in the lives of people very much like you and me. I have to think that the story of Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel in the Temple would have spread pretty quickly. I mean, as far as we know, God had not spoken in a public way to His people in about 400 years at that point. Let’s be honest: We have trouble imagining 400 years period.  Four hundred years is just about how long there have been permanent, successful colonies of Europeans in North America.  Jamestown isn’t that far from here.  You can go up to Williamsburg and see the remnants of that very first settlement in 1607.  It’s a pretty neat museum and recreation. 

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A Life of Faith

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This week we kick off a new teaching series called, The Characters of Christmas, designed to get us ready to experience the incredible Christmas story as fully as we possibly can.  The Christmas story is a real story filled with real people.  Just like they all had a place in the story, so do we.  Let’s look at what place they had to see what our own might be.  

A Life of Faith

I wish I could have been there at the birth.  It would have been incredible.  Now, I’ll tell you straight up that nothing could even come close to comparing with the births of my own sons, but this one would have come pretty far down that road.  The couple had been trying to have kids for so long they’d stopped counting.  Then, it finally happened.  They finally got there.  They finally got to experience the joy and wonder of delivering a healthy, precious baby into this world.  They were able to hold in their arms this tiny miracle from God.  The shouts of joy in the room would have nearly drowned out the healthily screaming baby.  The mother was crying with wonder and relief as she looked into the face of her infant son. It had not been an easy journey by any stretch of the imagination, but she had made it.  And her husband was standing there with her, silently watching the events unfold just exactly as he had hoped they would. 

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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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