Category: Sermons

A Simple Conversation

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Everybody prays. Every single religion has some version of prayer. Even people who don’t have any particular religion to which they subscribe still report praying at least on occasion. Looking up physically or at least mentally is an incredible natural gesture. Our inherent awareness that there is something bigger than us in this world to which we can turn for help when we need has proven remarkably hard to shake. But as much as everyone prays, one of the main requests pastors get from their members is instruction on how to pray better, how to pray more effectively. Today we are kicking off a brand-new, three-part teaching series aimed at addressing that concern. Let’s talk about prayer, what it is, what it does, and how to get it right.

A Simple Conversation

When kids are little one of the most natural motions for them to make is to reach up. Your kids did it. They may still do it. My kids all did it when they were the right size. Two of them look me in the eye now, so that season has passed, but it wasn’t all that long ago that their reaching up was a normal thing. Why is it that they reached up like they did? Because they wanted up. They wanted to get somewhere higher than they currently were, and into the comfort and safety of your arms. So, they reached up. 

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Digging in Deeper: Character Counts

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“And he said, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A week ago, I was invited to share a devotional thought with our local high school football team. For something a little different today, here’s some of what I had to say.

Character Counts 

Hey guys! Thanks for letting me have a few minutes with you this afternoon. I know there’s food to be enjoyed and football to be played, so I want to quickly do three things. I want to ask you a question, I want to tell you a couple of stories, and I want to talk with you for just a second about what they might mean for us. 

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How to Be Rich

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Everyone wants to be rich. Unfortunately, most people aren’t very good at it. We make the assumption of consumption with frightening ease, and things gradually fall apart from there. Things don’t have to be this way, though. In his first letter to his protege Timothy, Paul offered some counsel on how to be good at being rich. As we wrap up our teaching series, How Big Is Your World, we are talking today about the secret to keeping the world-shrinking assumption of consumption at bay, and living fully in the big world God has for those who trust in Him.

How to Be Rich

If you are someone who still watches major network TV series, we’re in that awkward, in-between season. All of the shows that run on the normal fall/spring cycle have been done for a couple of months now. But it’s not time for the new seasons to start just yet. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing except there aren’t really any sports to watch right now either. Football season hasn’t started. There isn’t any basketball to speak of. And baseball hasn’t gotten in the mid-September playoff chase excitement. Making things even worse is that these days when the competition is exceedingly high among the various networks and streaming services to attract and retain viewers in order to get the advertising revenue that is their lifeblood, while most series wrap up a plotline or two at the end of the season, they’ll also leave the viewers with a cliffhanger of some sort in hopes of drawing them back to find out what happens next. 

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The Assumption of Consumption

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When you get some stuff, what is your first thought about it? Do you start planning how you can use it? Save it? Give it? Where does your mind go? How we think about our stuff says a lot about us and where we are in our relationship with Jesus. It can also have a big impact on the size of the world we live in. During His ministry, Jesus was confronted with one particular man’s attitude during a teaching episode and chose to address it directly. Let’s see what Jesus had to say to Him and what it might have to do with us.

The Assumption of Consumption

Kids crack me up. If I think about it, though, kids make me a little sad too. Let me explain. Kids, and especially little kids, offer us the clearest picture we have of what people look like in our rawest form. If you have ever wondered what people are really like, spend some time watching kids. Now, this doesn’t hold universally true because some kids get messed up by their circumstances really early on, but for kids in even relatively healthy situations, they offer a window into the human soul. The reason for this is that kids really don’t have a filter. Whatever they are currently feeling is what comes out. And social conventions don’t mean a thing to them. 

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Big Living

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Living in God’s big world requires us to be generous. But what does that actually look like? Today, as we continue our series, How Big Is Your World?, we are talking about the secret to living as big as we possibly can. The key here is found in a practice that often seems like little more than a religious exercise, but has the potential to be much, much more than that if we get it right. Read on to find out what it is and how to do it.

Big Living

When I was in high school, I was in the marching band. Now, at some schools, the marching band is where all the band nerds hang out, and everybody else pretty much ignores them because they’re all really weird. At my school this was kind of the case, but not entirely. I say “not entirely” because there were 250 of us, and 250 people out of a total school population of around 2,000 is pretty hard to ignore. There were band nerds everywhere. I mean, everywhere. We came from every class and group in the school too. There were jocks, cheerleaders, traditional nerds, Goth kids, pretty kids, Christians, atheists, math nerds, the weird scholar’s bowl kids (I was one of those too), drama kids, choir kids, debaters, rednecks, preppy kids, the kids who didn’t really fit into a single category because they tended to be all over the place, and so on and so forth. The band was really the melting pot of the school, and we all got along pretty well. It didn’t hurt that my sophomore year we went to Hawaii. Things got pretty popular after that. 

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