Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

I generally have a very bad memory, so trying to remember what I need to do and when is almost always impossible. So when I first got a smartphone with a calendar app, it was the most awesome thing. I would refer to it as my brain, because I no longer needed to try to remember anything. I tap a few buttons, put it in my calendar, and I wouldn’t have to remember it anymore, because my phone would remember it for me. So I heavily rely on my calendar to schedule when…continue reading →

Guest Preacher Micah Slifer shared about our freedom in Christ.continue reading →

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you may have heard about this website called ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence to chat with you, so that you can ask it all kinds of questions, and it will give you an answer in a conversational way. It doesn’t always give you a correct answer, but it does try to give you an answer. So I asked ChatGPT to write me a funny story about hating your job, and this is what it told me: Once upon a time, there was a hardworking and diligent…continue reading →

Ecclesiastes 2:12-17. Then I turned to consider wisdom, madness, and folly, for what will the king’s successor be like? He will do what has already been done. And I realized that there is an advantage to wisdom over folly, like the advantage of light over darkness. The wise person has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. Yet I also knew that one fate comes to them both. So I said to myself, “What happens to the fool will also happen to me. Why then have I been overly wise?”…continue reading →

As we begin this morning, I want you to imagine for yourself what success looks like for you. Maybe success looks like a certain income, or a certain lifestyle. Maybe you can picture it clearly, because you’ve thought about it a lot, and you think it's just within your grasp, or maybe it's really hard for you to picture because while you can kind of define what success is, you feel like it's never going to happen, and it's just wishful thinking. When you ask many people what success means to them, they'll…continue reading →

I want you to think for a second about your favorite thing to do. Maybe your favorite thing is to play video games, or watch movies, or spend time with your family. Try to think of your absolute favorite activity. Now, I want you to imagine that God told you to stop doing that thing. How would you feel? Would you obey? And, perhaps an even more important question would be: what would you think about God at that point? Is God mean? Does He just want to keep us from having fun?…continue reading →

Correct me if I’m wrong, mom, but I started going to preschool when I was 4 years old. Is that right? Then after going through Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, and High School, I graduated from High School when I was 18 years old. After that, I attended college for four years, and then seminary for six years, and I graduated with a Masters in Divinity when I was 28 years old, so that I was in school for a total of 24 years of my life. The average lifespan of a male…continue reading →

Turn in your Bibles to the book of Ecclesiastes. I’m really looking forward to the next several months of preaching, because this is a book that I’ve been wanting to preach for a while. Ecclesiastes is incredibly relatable, because it addresses in very simple terms a question that we’ve probably all struggled with at times in our lives. Out of all the theological arguments and religious questions that people have, there’s one question that’s in a sense more relevant and practical than the others. We can debate the existence of God, and we…continue reading →

It’s interesting that almost everyone in our culture today celebrates Christmas, whether they believe in Jesus or not. A poll taken in 2019 showed that 93% of Americans celebrate Christmas, but only 71% of them say that they celebrate it in any way as a religious holiday. In other words, many people have come to incorporate the traditions of Christmas without observing the true meaning of Christmas. For many today, Christmas isn’t sacred, it’s just a normal part of the year. And I don’t know if it’s because of commercialism, or just because…continue reading →

Our sermon today is about how God works all things together – whether joys, or pains, or sorrows, even death – He works all things together for the good of those who love Him, whom He calls according to His purpose. And there are so many ways that I could introduce this sermon that it was difficult to pick just one. There are billions of illustrations about this just about everywhere we look: in nature, movies, music, art, sports, and of course even our own personal experiences. Over and over again, in everything,…continue reading →