Tag: Sermons

How to Be Happy

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It’s graduation season and this past Sunday we honored our graduates and scholarship recipients. With that in mind, the sermon this week was aimed right in their direction. We live in a culture that prioritizes happiness above just about everything else. We live in a culture that also tells us all the time that the best way to find that happiness is to follow our heart. But is that really how we get there? King Solomon didn’t think so. Let’s take a look at one of his more famous proverbs and talk about how to experience real happiness.

How to Be Happy

A couple of weeks ago, our youth participated in a kickball tournament. Actually, let’s correct that: they won a kickball tournament. The event was a fundraiser for a great local ministry called Faith Alive Ministries. They are driven by the idea that when Jesus’ brother, James, said that true religion is to take care of orphans and widows, that he meant it. Jordan and Taylor do an awesome job seeking out opportunities to do just that in practical ways both locally and globally. 

In any event, a few weeks before the tournament, they emailed out a set of rules by which the games were going to be governed. The morning of the tournament, they had a meeting with all of the coaches to go over the rules one last time and emphasize that they would be followed carefully. The reason was pretty obvious: they wanted the whole thing to run smoothly instead of devolving into little more than an endless series of arguments about rules. That’s how kickball worked on the playground when I was in elementary school. We’d spent 20 minutes debating the rules, and about five minutes playing most days because while there were a few broadly agreed upon basics, everything else was choose-your-own-adventure…and we all tended to choose the adventure that worked best for us rather than working to make sure we had all chosen the same adventure. As long as we were committed to living as we pleased, chaos tended to be the result. The Faith Alive folks understood this and planned accordingly. On the playground…not so much. In life more generally, the same basic principle is in operation. Today, I want to reflect for just a few minutes with you on what this means for us, and how we can avoid the chaos. 

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He Cares for You

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This past Sunday we celebrated Mother’s Day. Moms are a gift from God that keeps the world running far more smoothly than it would without them. But being a mom is tough these days. With that in mind, this week we are looking at a story in the Scriptures about a mom seeking to take care of her kids in a terrible situation. In this story we can find several points of encouragement and challenge for moms and all the rest of us too. Let’s dive in.

He Cares for You

Let’s get started this morning with a bit of confession time. I hope you are sitting down for this one…okay, good. I am…not a good mom. I know dads are supposed to be pretty awesome, but try as I might, I just can’t seem to hit that mark. Okay, well, if I’m being totally honest, I haven’t actually tried all that hard to hit it. When my boys need something that Lisa, my beautiful bride and their amazing mom, can do as a mom, they go to her. Every time. They don’t even give me a second thought when they need a mom thing. They just skip right past me and go to her. And get this: she does it for them. Really well (because she’s a great mom). You know, I’d almost be offended by all of this but for this one thing: I’m a dad. And dads don’t mom very well. But that’s an okay thing because God made moms. And moms are a good thing. 

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The Reason Why

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It all comes down to this. The whole of the Christian faith hangs on a single peg: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Today, as we celebrate our risen Savior and wrap up our series, All Signs Point to Jesus, we are talking about the resurrection, what it means, and why it matters so much. Let’s dive right in!

The Reason Why

When you live in a houseful of boys (including the turtle), you build stuff. It’s just what you do. I’ve long since lost count of the number of Lego sets that have been built in my house, but that is far from the only construction medium our boys have used. We went through a season when they were really into Keva blocks. The name sounds fancy, but they’re basically over-sized Jenga blocks that you can use to build all sorts of things. Because of their shape and size, though, while you can build some pretty elaborate creations, most of them wind up sitting on a really tiny foundation point. In fact, for most of the coolest things we built, there was usually a single block or maybe two that was holding up the whole thing. If you were to take out that one point, the whole structure would noisily collapse in a great heap. Well, while Christianity is a bit sturdier of a structure than anything we ever built with Keva blocks, it nonetheless rests on a single foundation point. This morning, I want to talk with you about what that is and why it matters. 

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Where Is Your Sting?

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Over the course of his Gospel, the apostle John presents us with seven signs pointing to who Jesus is. These were all miracles Jesus performed (although they are far from the total of His miraculous deeds) whose weight and import went well beyond the miracles themselves to the things they revealed about Jesus. On our journey so far, we have examined six of them. Today we are looking at the last: the raising from the dead of Lazarus. Like all the others, this one revealed something crucial about Jesus. Let’s talk about what that was and why it matters.

Where Is Your Sting?

The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is an incredible one. It is one that has inspired countless other stories since. The idea that someone actually defeated death and returned to tell about it has given hope to untold millions over the course of the 2,000 years since it happened. We’ll talk more about all of that this Friday and next Sunday as we give all of our attention to the resurrection itself. For the moment, I want to draw your attention very briefly to one part of it. 

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See

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We have spent the past six weeks looking at different miracles Jesus performed over the course of His ministry. Some of the miracles have been pretty dramatic. Others fairly easily blend into the background of all the other miracles Jesus did. Some were directly beneficial to a particular individual or group. At least one didn’t seem like it really helped anyone. For all of the variety among these miracles, the one thing the apostle John notes that draws them all together is the fact that they were all really signs intended to point beyond the miracles themselves to something deeper and richer lying behind them: a vision of God’s kingdom and who Jesus really was. This next miraculous sign brings attention and emphasis to Jesus’ efforts to help us see. Let’s talk about His healing a man born blind.

See

For someone accustomed to sight, being blindfolded can be a disorienting experience. I remember once our youth minister did an activity to teach us about trusting Jesus where they had us all put on blindfolds, loaded us in the church van, and took us to a park across town, but didn’t tell us where we were going. If you can believe it, I was the smart-alecky kid who kept up with all the turns the van made and knew exactly where we were the whole time. That’s not totally my fault though, as the driver took all the main roads and didn’t try to disguise the route at all. It so happened that I had a pretty thorough map of the city firmly rooted in my memory then. Without that, though, I would have been sorely tempted to peek through the blindfold just so I knew where I was. Being able to see is essential to getting through life.

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