Brian's Sermons

This week we will be kicking off a Lenten Sermon series, using Kyle Idleman's Not a Fan . Because I am using his sermons for this series, I will not be posting them to the sermon blog or the church website. If you want more information about the series, go to  http://www.notafan.com/ .

Ezekiel 36:22-32 At the end of last year, I preached a sermon called “Because of Jesus” and went through all of the things that are true because of Jesus. Because of Jesus, I am hopeful, I am found, I am free, I am able, I am loved, I am saved, and I am new. One comment I received after the final sermon was “there was so much in there – you could have preached a sermon on every one of those scriptures you used.” So ever since then, I have been preaching from the scriptures I used in that sermon. Kind of like a spin-off series. In Christ, we have the hope of heaven, where God makes all things new. This can give us comfort when we face sorrow and struggle in this life – we’ve seen plenty of that around here recently. We are told to set our hearts on things above; when we set our hearts on things above, when everything is Holy-Spirit oriented and initiated, we see transformation. But there are times when God’s people are God’s people in name only. When we are not known by our ...

John 13:34-35 As young adults, my brother and sister and I invented a new card game that we always liked to play at family gatherings. The notable feature of this game was that whenever you won a hand, you got to create a new rule. Sometimes the new rules made the game more fun, and other times you’d hope to win a hand so you could overrule the old rule with a new one. We would usually have to write down all of the rules so we could keep straight what to do when a particular card was played. Whenever there are new rules, there are bound to be rule breakers. Sometimes it’s just because of plain ignorance of the rules, but other times it’s because people just don’t like the new rules. Someone does not necessarily have to be a rule-breaker to not like new rules – it sometimes just happens. Jesus had just served the Last Supper to his disciples, and Judas had gone to betray Jesus. Jesus was telling the remaining eleven that the time had come for God to glorify Him, and that h...

Isaiah 65:17-25  Have you ever had an experience where you thought you knew what you were getting into because you had done something similar before, yet when you got there, it was a whole lot different than you had ever expected? I was a picky eater as a kid but I found out that I was missing out on a lot of good stuff by being so picky. But the fact is, we are only used to the things that we are used to, and we tend to see things in terms of what we know. As we talked about the desert last week, it became clear that many of us are way-too-familiar with the desert. It got me thinking about the Israelites who left Egypt – could they really have been so short-sighted that they really forgot how bad the slavery in Egypt, or did they have expectations that their trip out of Egypt would be instantaneous? Did they think that immediately after they walked through the dry Red Sea, that they would be all set? Instead they found a place of testing and purification.  If ...