Sermon Archive
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September 2021
By This We Know Love
Here at State Road we talk a lot about becoming a people who love God, love others and love in action, but those statements rest on an implied assumption that we know what love is. In our culture, love is a notoriously difficult word to define. This is owing, at least in part, to the limitations of the English language. For example in Greek there are perhaps as many as 7 different words for love, four of which we find in o…
Loving God, Loving Others, Love in Action
When I was a boy growing up in Vermont I used to make a little extra money in late spring and early summer by gathering morel mushrooms in the woods and selling them to a local restaurant called “The Countryman’s Pleasure.” For whatever reason morels can’t be farmed or grown commercially, and so they have to be gathered in the wild. That’s why they bring such a high price. Today the going rate for fresh morels is about $30-35/pound.
It all felt slightly clandestine when …
August 2021
Prejudice
I don’t know about you, but along the way I have related to Jonah’s mistakes.
When he tried to quit his job as prophet and run away from the Lord’s calling on his life, I thought of times when I’ve been out of the Lord’s will and resisted doing the things that He wanted me to do.
When Jonah was on the ship and the sailors were terrified because the storm was threatening to break the boat up, I thought of times when my disobedience has affected others.
As he was sinkin…
Fitting the Messenger
What do the biblical accounts of Noah’s ark, the destruction of Sodom and Gommorha, and Jonah all have in common? In all three we find a wicked people living under the imminent threat of divine judgment, and we also find a servant of God who goes out with foreknowledge to warn the wicked to flee the coming day of wrath. But Jonah differs from these other two in that Unlike Noah and Lott, whose warnings landed on deaf ears, Jonah’s one-sentence sermon results in what was likely the great…
From A Dark Place
One of the interesting things about the book of Jonah is that, unlike other prophetic books, it focuses on the prophet rather than on the prophet’s message. Throughout Jonah is the object of God’s concern rather than the mouthpiece through whom God speaks His concerns as would normally befit a prophet. This Sunday we will be covering the second chapter of Jonah which is brief and filled almost entirely with the prayer that Jonah offered from the belly of the great fish. It is one of many ir…
Go On Back
Have you ever heard of Roy “Wrong Way” Riegels? He was an All-American center from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1929, his team, the “Golden Bears,” were facing the Georgia Tech “Yellow Jackets,” in the Rose Bowl. Riegels was playing both on both sides of the ball, offense and defense, that game. It was toward the end of the first half when a Tech player fumbled the ball. Roy picked it up and started running toward the goal some 65 yards away. There was only one pro…
July 2021
Mind the Gap
My wife hates it when I go grocery shopping with her. I always thought it would be a good time of fellowship and connection as we sauntered down the aisles looking for things to buy to eat for the week. Inevitably though, the grocery bill is often much more than it would be if she went on her own. My wife is a planner. She thinks about the meals we will eat, snacks, what days we are home or away, who we might be inviting over and often strikes a near perfect balance come the end of the week…
Exalted Humility
Pride and humility both have the same motto, “Look out for #1.” The difference is that pride and humility have different ideas about who precisely is numero uno. So in a sense both Orpah and Ruth were looking out for #1 when they made their respective decisions in the first chapter of Ruth. In the second chapter we are treated to another display of amazing humility as Ruth heads out to glean among the workers in the barley harvest. That Ruth would set out to glean indicates the extreme …
Steely Resolve
Verses 16-17 of the first chapter of Ruth are undoubtedly the most famous lines of the entire book. They contain Ruth’s determined vow to remain with her mother-in-law no matter what forces tried to separate them. She said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more…
June 2021
Bitter
Down through the years people had some interesting reasons for changing their names. For example, in 2015 a young man named Adam Armstrong legally changed his name to Adam West because it was cheaper to change his name than to change his flight booking which had been made under the wrong name by his girlfriend’s stepfather.
Fashion designer, Ralph Lauren, was born with the name Ralph Lifshitz, but he changed it because kids used to make fun of him.
A man named Tim Price legally …
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