Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Laying on your back taking in the stars. Sitting wrapped in a blanket watching the sunrise against the earth. Moments like that are filled with wonder and awe. Moments in which words are few and the experience in which emotions are more ample than thoughts. Creation speaks forth…
Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘labor of love’? Did you know that it is a biblical phrase? From 1Thessalonians 1:3, “Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father.” And Hebrews 6:10, “For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and…
This is our last Sunday in the series of Psalms as the songbook of Israel and our summer songs pointing to the character of God. I hope you have had as much fun as I have looking at some modern summer songs alongside the psalms. Like the psalms, we have learned about the character of God and the circumstances of God’s people. …
This month, we have been exploring some popular summer hits alongside the songs of the psalms. The book of psalms was the songbook for ancient Israel, long before it was passed around in written form. It was sung from home to home and as they were traveling from place to place. The psalm songs taught the people about the character of God…
This morning is the third in our series about psalms and the summer songbook, taking popular summer songs and psalms to tell us about the character of God. We looked at the beginning of the month at the Dancing in the Street as we examined the worthiness of God to be praised. Last week, Jamie preached on the faithfulness of God in…
1994. 21 years ago. Some of you may remember that year or years around that year. Some of you were not even born yet. Some of us were graduating from High School that year. In fact, that was the year I graduated from High School. 1994 was the year that Tonya Harding, (remember her?) won the national figure skating championship only to…
Today, we begin a new series of sermons entitled the Summer Soundtrack. We will be looking at summer music and the power of music in the psalms to reveal the character of God to us. When I was growing up, we had a house down in Bethany Beach, in Delaware. We would often spend much of the summer down at the beach…
Over the last month, we have been talking about forgiveness. We began with a look at forgiving and remembering and looked at a modern application by the Truth and Reconciliation Council of South Africa. Next, we move to the habitual nature of forgiveness and its daily impact on our life, examining the hard work of forgiving even the most egregious offenses, like…
We have been talking this July about radical forgiveness. This is the third in a series of four sermons on the topic. First, we explored the idea that forgiving is not forgetting and used the wisdom of the Truth and Reconciliation Council from South Africa to guide us. Last week, we looked at the difficult and repetitive nature of forgiveness using the…
There are very few things as unnerving as dishes, laundry, and mowing the lawn. There are tasks that are never fully accomplished. The very act of being human requires eating, dressing, and maintaining. We find ourselves doing again and again these acts. Every time, it seems as though the sink might sit empty for a period of time, meals are eaten and…