Brian's Sermons

Exodus 20:8-11 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Once I led a game with the young people of the church. They were really excited about the game, but there was one thing I didn’t do. I did not tell them the rules. There was really no way anyone could win without knowing the rules. God doesn’t just give us rules to help us “win” but to point us toward him. God, in his power and love, gave us the boundaries that will help us be in right relationship...

Haggai 2:1-5 When I was in college, Northwestern University had a big observatory on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was really cool – it kind of looked like a giant alien bug. It was right by the intramural soccer fields, where I spent a lot of my time on the weekends, and it was even part of the logo for the college of arts and sciences. There was just one problem. Our proximity to Chicago rendered the observatory ineffective. You couldn’t see much of anything because of the light pollution. So they took out the telescope and sent it to Arizona or somewhere, and they tore down the observatory. Actually, that was a story in itself – the strange design of the observatory ended up causing the demolition team fits trying to destroy it. They tried to implode it with explosive charges, but instead of imploding, it just leaned. Then they tried to pull it over with big tow trucks, but that didn’t work either. They finally got it down and out of there, and a campus landmark was gone. ...