Archives: Sermons
Doing Life Together (Ecclesiastes 4:7-12)
I want you to think back to when you were a child, and try to recall what it is that you wanted out of life. What did you want to be when you grew up? What were your hopes and dreams? What did you think life was all about? If you were to ask me as a child what my hopes and dreams were, I would have told you that I hoped to be a famous actor, or a famous baseball player, and I dreamt of making lots and lots of money, so…continue reading →
Climbing the Ladder to Nowhere (Ecclesiastes 4:1-6, 13-16)
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. As she talked with them, she heard them express the same regrets over and over again, and the top 2 regrets that people had as they were nearing the of their lives were these: 1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And I think these two…continue reading →
I Am With You Always (Matthew 28:16-20)
Lord Jesus, thank You for going to the cross to pay the price for our sins. And thank You for the new life that we have because of Your body broken and blood shed. Help us to rest in You and proclaim You to all the world. In Your precious name we pray, Amen. So that’s what happened on Thursday, the day before Good Friday. The day before Jesus was crucified, He told His disciples it would happen. Then that very night, Judas betrayed Jesus, Jesus was arrested for no reason, and they…continue reading →
How to Fear Without Being Afraid (Matthew 28:1-8)
This is the day in which we celebrate not only that Jesus came, not only that He died for our sins, but that He lives. And because Jesus lives, we have joyful, abundant, eternal life in Him. There are so many things in life that attempt to steal our joy. The darkness of this world can sometimes seem to be so overwhelming, and sometimes we can be so scared to death about life that we take our eyes off Jesus, which is sin. But the resurrection of Jesus reminds us of God’s power…continue reading →
Twas the Week Before Easter (John 12:12-13)
Twas the week before Easter And as Jesus came, The people rejoiced, And sang out his name. He rode in on a donkey, And the people in town, Had large palm branches, Which they waved all around. I thought about preaching my whole sermon in poem form this morning, but I’m just not that clever. But what I will do is this: being the week before Easter, which is referred to as Passion Week according to the church calendar, I thought it would be good to look at several of the events that…continue reading →
Learning to Love Good (Ecclesiastes 3:16-22)
I want to briefly summarize the sermon this morning before I preach. Life isn’t fair. We all seem to know that to be true, and yet we fight against it. We try to make life fair through legislation and the court system, which we call justice. And those can certainly be good and necessary tools to strive for fairness in our broken world. But I want to ask the question: why isn’t life fair? We know that God is good, fair, and just, and God created life, so why isn’t life fair? Of…continue reading →
Where Time Meets Eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:9-15)
An article in Business Insider from 2014 made these observations: Most human beings get about 75 years of existence. That's about 3,900 weeks. Or 27,000 days. Or 648,000 hours. We spend about a third of those hours sleeping, a number that hasn't changed much over the centuries. What has changed is what we do with the remaining time. There are 168 hours in a week. 56 go to sleeping, which leaves 112 for everything else. 150 years ago, we spent about 70 of those 112 waking hours working. [Chart of Working Hours over…continue reading →
A Time for Everything, and Everything in Its Time (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
Two of the greatest movies ever made, in my opinion, are also two of the most difficult movies to watch. Both of them take place during World War II and specifically focus on aspects dealing with how hard life was in the concentration camps, and how various people coped during those times. [Picture of movie posters] One is called Schindler’s List, and the other is called Life is Beautiful. And while both of these films contain some of the most horrifying reminders of what happened during the World War II, they also contain…continue reading →