Sermon Archive
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May 2020
In The Beginning
Of the four Gospel accounts contained in the New Testament John begins his in a very unique way. Whereas Matthew and Luke, who both begin their Gospels with a genealogy, seem intent on demonstrating the humanity of Jesus, and Mark opens his Gospel by describing the ministry of John the Baptist who preceded Jesus, but John in his Gospel goes all the way back to the beginning. Not just the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, but that mysterious time before the foundations of the earth wer…
Filled
In this message we finish our series through the prison prayers of Paul by studying Colossians 1:9-14. I invite you to join me in praying this beautiful prayer over your brothers and sisters in Christ this week as the Spirit brings them to your mind. If you like a challenge try committing this prayer to memory. Then you would have it in your arsenal when you find yourself tongue tied and searching for words to pray over a friend from church.
I pray that (__________) would be filled w…
Excellence
Pastor and author, John MacArthur posed the following exercise:
Imagine that you are granted the amazing opportunity to build a new church from the ground up in a community that needs a good church. From the following list you can pick three things to start with, which three things would you choose? Rank them by putting a “1” next to the one you think would be most important, a “2” by the next most important, and “3” by the third. Think big!
_____ a brand new, state-of…
Weak Man
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, once said, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people.” Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” Thomas Jefferson said, “Religions are all alike…founded upon fables and mythologies.” You can find similar quotes from others like Larry Flynt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ted Turner, Christopher Hitchens, Karl Marx and others. The view being ex…
April 2020
Don’t Beg A Dime
This Sunday we will continue our study through the prison prayers of Paul by doing a deep dive into Ephesians 3:14-21. Much like the previous prayer that we studied in Ephesians 1, a major emphasis of this prayer is focused on the idea of “power.” It contains the famous line, “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.” I pray that the Holy Spirit will use this study to expand our horizons to catch a glimpse of what is possible if we, God’s people, turn to Him in prayer.
Faith and Love
In James 5:17-18 we find a short but very instructive passage about prayer. It says, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” It seems to me that James is communicating two important truths in these verses. One, Elijah wasn’t anything special. James says he was a man with a nature like ours. IN oth…
Palm Sunday
Matthew 26 begins with Jesus telling His disciples, including Judas presumably, “The Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified,” and just a dozen verses later we read, “Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the Chief Priests and said, ‘What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?”
I think that Judas may have been the only one of the twelve who understood that Jesus intended to literally die on a cross. Perhaps the others thought that Je…
March 2020
Where Is Your Refuge
Once there were just a handful of people who were infected and they were all congregated in one city. That represented the best chance to completely isolate and eliminate this new contagion before it could spread. The Government tried to do just that, but they botched the whole operation and their bumbling efforts only caused it to spread further afield. Infected people fled into other cities and neighboring regions causing the number of exposures to multiply exponentially. Soon it was raci…
Don’t Waste Our Time Apart
During the past week the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19, both in Maine and across the country, has continued to rise and in response the state and federal government have offered stronger recommendations for social distancing. This past Wednesday morning Governor Mills issued an order that, in part, prohibited groups of 10 or more from gathering. As part of a coordinated regional effort to slow the spread of this virus it is our intention to comply with this order. As such, we will b…
David’s Strength in Crisis
Lots of times when I read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, it makes me wish that I could peek through the veil of time and share in the story, or at least witness it with my own eyes. However, as I read 1 Samuel 30 this week, the very thought made me feel soft and unprepared. Like a lap dog running with wolves, I think I would be too spoiled by the age in which I live to even think of going toe to toe with the kind of people we encounter in this chapter.
Imagine the scene, I …
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