Brian's Sermons

I don’t like shopping.  When it comes to clothes, I’m generally hard to fit, which, coupled with the fact that I usually balk at paying full price on anything, means it takes a long time.  The kids don’t enjoy it either, even when they get to go to the toy section, because they don’t like waiting while we try to find the exact right thing.  And babysitters cost enough that we don’t like to “waste” our date nights on shopping. Sometimes we still shop, but mostly we shop online.  Anyone else caught this bug?  My mom loves Christmas shopping online – she said it’s like she gets two Christmases. One is when the packages come in the mail, and the other is when she gets to give them out. Unfortunately, sometimes when you receive your package, you open it up, just to find that the product doesn’t fit, or worse, is broken.  Once I received a CD that was shattered into about 1000 pieces.  When that happened, I immediately e-mailed and asked for a replacement.  Why?  Because a broken CD wouldn

Do you want to live a life that matters?  Of course you do.  That is one of our greatest needs.  To live a life that matters.  Over the next several weeks leading into Christmas, we are going to look at some things we can do that will matter, not just for today, but for eternity. We live in an anxious, uneasy world.  We wonder how long our good health will hold out. H1N1 is still out there, there seems to be more and more cases of cancer, and of course, none of us is getting any younger.  And what about health care? Insurance prices?  Government run? We worry about our money – will we have enough to retire?  And will our jobs survive? Is our country going to hell in a hand basket? And that doesn’t even take into account the things that keep each of us awake at night, those so personal details that we don’t dare share out loud. In the midst of all of this turmoil, we’re asking, “Do you want to live a life that matters?”  Of course we want to live a life that matters.  When you com

Galatians 5:22-23 A few years ago I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving.  Their church was going through a sermon series on the seven deadly sins, and one of the associate pastors was given the task of preaching, on Thanksgiving weekend, on the topic of gluttony.  That was no easy task, talking to a crowd, many of whom were still wearing elastic waistbands three days after their gluttonous meal on Thanksgiving.  That was a really awkward 45 minutes.  Why?  Because most of the crowd was guilty of the infraction.  Most of us had overeaten on Thanksgiving.  As well as other days.  Think about it: can you imagine someone in Darfur saying, “I ate way too much today” or “I’d better just sit here for a while; I am too stuffed to move”?   One of the issues is that we as a culture have no self-control.  Today we are on the final aspect of the Fruit of the Spirit: Self-control.  This is a concept absolutely foreign to most of our culture.  I have generally begun by defining the aspec

I was in 7th grade, and I made our town’s all-star soccer team. This year we’d be playing against a team from Detroit - they played good soccer in Detroit. So we practiced hard in anticipation for our big game. On game day, we were disappointed to find out that instead of a high-powered Detroit soccer team, our opponent was a rag-tag group of inner city kids. We were to follow the older age group’s game, and that game wasn’t pretty. Our coaches offered us a choice; we could split up and play: ½ of them with ½ of us, or play as a team. If we chose option 2, we had to keep the game close. We chose to play as a team; after all, we’d trained together for this game, the only chance we would have to play together. We could have scored as many goals as we wanted to that day and blown them out, but instead we kept the score close. When Paul was talking about gentleness as an aspect of the Fruit of the Spirit, this is what he was talking about. He wasn’t talking about the visitors fro