Tag: Sermons

A Cure for Anxiety

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Worry is something all of us encounter from time to time. Our circumstances stances get hard, they start to slip out of our control, and our anxiety level starts rising. The harder we cling to a need for control, the faster our anxiety rises. But what if there was a way to keep this from happening in the first place? As we continue our series, Talking to God, today we are talking about one of the most powerful potential impacts of prayer in our life. This isn’t a clinical solution for anxiety that has grown beyond our ability to manage it, but for much of the everyday, garden variety anxiety we all face, there’s a lot of potential for impact here. Let’s talk about prayer, anxiety, and how one helps with the other.

A Cure for Anxiety

Have you ever had a God-experience that just stuck with you? Not all of them do. But every now and then, you have one that you just can’t shake. Depending on the circumstances, that may be a hard thing, but often these kinds of experiences serve as important markers in our hearts and minds of God’s character. I had one of these when I was in college. I can still vividly remember a great deal of the situation. One spring, I got my schedule for the fall semester. I was going to have a pretty large class load, so I had worked really hard to make sure everything coordinated just right. Then, I got a note from my advisor that one of the classes I signed up for wasn’t going to be available, throwing my entire schedule into chaos. This disruption of my nice, neat, perfectly organized plan wasn’t just a threat to the following semester, but had the potential of moving back my entire graduation date. I quickly went into a tailspin of doubt and anxiety. But it was going to be a couple of days before I could get in with my advisor to work out a solution. Until then, there wasn’t anything I could do. So, I did the only thing I could do: I prayed. 

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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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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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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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The Owner’s Kid

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Having a bunch of stuff is nice. Being able to afford basically whatever you want to do is convenient. But not many have access to that kind of wealth, to those kinds of resources. Thankfully, there’s another way to be rich. This other way doesn’t come with quite as much stuff as the first way, but the benefits are still pretty great. As we continue our conversation about living in God’s big world, this week we are talking about another way we can be sure to do just that. Let’s dig into it together.

The Owner’s Kid

Have you ever been to one of those trampoline parks like Urban Air? Those places are great. We don’t get to them very often, but the kids always have a ball when we do. But they tend to require large places to be able to set up, they’re pretty expensive to visit, and they are usually pretty far away from the country. Several years ago, there was a brief flash of businesses designed to be an answer to this problem: Bouncy House places. They weren’t as big or elaborate, and they tended to be focused on slightly younger, smaller kids, but they could operate much more inexpensively than their bigger cousins, they didn’t need as much space—a simple storefront is fine—and what kid doesn’t love a bouncy house? And if one is good, a whole building full of them is obviously better. 

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