Sermons from March 2020

Sermons from March 2020

Glorifying God

John 11:1-45 The messenger arrived where Jesus and his disciples were staying with the kind of news no one wants to receive. “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.” It was a simple statement of fact, but an unspoken hope hovered in the silence that followed. An expectation that Jesus, who had healed countless strangers, would surely rush to cure his good friend Lazarus. Jesus, though, seemed remarkably nonchalant about his friend’s condition. He said, “This illness does not…

How Coveting Toilet Paper Became a Thing

Psalm 46 I’ve seen enough apocalyptic disaster movies to know that the plots of most of them follow a predictable formula. Most revolve around humanity’s struggle to avoid extinction in the face of a global catastrophic shortage of some resource. In “The Road” it was a shortage of food. In “Waterworld” melting ice caps covered the continents with oceans, creating a scarcity of dry land for people to live on. In “Mad Max” it was water that there was not…

If You Only Knew

John 4:5-42 Back in 2004, a guy named Frank Warren had an interesting idea for an art project. He made up some postcards that were blank on one side and on the other side were printed with his address and a simple invitation. The invitation was this: “You are invited to anonymously share a secret. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything—as long as it is true and you have never shared…

Trick Answers

John 3:1-17 A random group of people on the street were asked to solve this word problem: “At a wedding, there were seventy-five guests and sixty-eight pieces of cake. How many didn’t” Everyone was confused because the question didn’t logically follow the information given. That’s because the question set them up to make a false assumption about what was being asked by using something called a homophone. In case you don’t remember your grammar school grammar lessons, homophones are words…

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11 I have a sister-in-law who runs her own interior decorating business, and the transformations she performs on people’s homes are borderline miraculous. But, if you have toddlers who treat freshly painted walls like coloring books, cats who like to push delicate objects off of shelves or puppies who are still learning the difference between chair legs and chew toys, you might want to consider waiting awhile before investing in her talents. The apartments my…