Brian's Sermons

1st in the series: Putting the Pieces Together: a Journey towa rd mature discipleship* In 1950, Bob Pierce founded what has become World Vision, the world’s largest Christian relief and development agency. Today that organization serves more than fifty million people a year in 103 countries. Bob Pierce was passionate for Jesus and for stamping out hunger and disease. His friends said, "He is restless to win souls." "I have never met a person with greater compassion." "He is a true Christian Samaritan who literally laid down his life for the needy ‘little’ people of the world." Bob’s passion led him around the world, marked by his desire to meet spiritual and physical needs wherever he saw them. Bob was a picture of mature Christianity, but the tragic reality is that his work was done at the expense of his family. A family friend said of Bob’s wife, "she knew a deprivation of a different kind than those to whom her husband was ministering." Bob Pi...

I’ve been giving a lot of attention to our UMC mission statement: making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world , because it is important. It is important to remember that transformation is what God’s all about. I want you to think about yourself for a moment. Could God use you for transformation? If you’re like me, you can probably find lots of excuses as to why God wouldn’t or couldn’t use you for radical transformation. This morning, we’re going to look at a nobody. But first, some background. It was the days of the judges who led Israel. But Israel had stopped obeying God, and the Midianites had overrun Israel, so badly that the Israelites were hiding in caves in the mountains. Whenever they planted crops, the Midianites would invade, ruining the crops and fields. Finally Israel cried out to the Lord for help. Judges 6:11 The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wh...

It’s easy to rush through Communion without giving much of a thought to what we are doing. For many of us, this has been a regular part of our church life for years, and because of that, it can be easy to forget how radical it really is. Today I want to try to remind us what we are doing when we take Communion. We often look at when Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples, which is logical, because it is when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. Instead, today, we are going to look at John 6:25-69 . This chapter starts with the remarkable account of Jesus feeding five thousand people with five small barley loaves and two small fish. Then the disciples left and went across the lake, and Jesus met them halfway, walking on the water. If that’s not enough to freak you out, I don’t know what is. You see, Jesus is always blowing away preconceived notions and doing things that we would think are impossible. The next day, the crowd has realized that only the boat full of disciples had left...