The Good Ship Savior: A Parable
A long, long time ago there were frequent shipwrecks up and down the East coast of this country. The coastline wasn’t entirely mapped and charted and there were uncertainties regarding the strange and unpredictable weather. Even though there were established cities and commerce, there seemed to always be one tragedy or another happening somewhere not too far out to sea.
The End of the Jacob Series
What I find most comforting about the biblical person of Jacob is that though Jacob makes great strides in his faith and wisdom, he never quite gets all the way there.
Professor Laban
God lets Jacob learn through the School of Hard Knocks. Professor Laban is an excellent teacher if you want to learn first-hand how unfair life can be when you live among amoral and self-centered people. Jacob learned some important lessons about himself as well...
Understanding God's Unconditional Love
Sunday, I talked about how Jacob was someone who couldn’t take "Yes" for an answer. The question that came out of that observation, which we didn’t have time to talk about it in the sermon, is this: Why do we insist on earning and deserving what is freely given us?
Archived Posts
Not Just for Parents
Our current sermon series is about How To Talk Parent, but it doesn’t require any of us to be parents to appreciate the bits of wisdom OUR parents shared with us growing up.
If Not Higher
Here’s a story I wanted to use when talking about ‘what you do when no one is looking’ yesterday. It’s a wonderful illustration of what Jesus was saying in Matthew 6:1-6—do what you do because of who you want to be, not so that others will take notice and praise you.
The Perfect Church
There is an old joke about the perfect church. We talked just a little about the perfect pastor, but turnabout is fair play. It goes like this:
The Clothes You Wear
Sunday I talked about Joshua the High Priest having his filthy clothing replaced by a cleaned and beautiful garments. I also used the illustration of a boy becomes a dragon—who ‘wears’ dragon scales—and is stripped of those scales in order to be restored to a boy. In fact, I could have done the whole sermon around all the clothing imagery in scripture.
What just missed the cut for Sunday’s Sermon
Naaman’s servants may actually become one of the hidden gems of the sermon. They say, essentially: “If the prophet had told you to do something difficult, you would have done it.”