Brian's Sermons

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory We have spent months studying the Lord’s Prayer. We begin by recognizing and acknowledging who God is. God is the Almighty in Heaven, but he has chosen us as his children, so we can address him as “our Father.” We worship him and lift up his name as holy. This must always be our context for prayer. We do not lift up our prayers to someone who is just one of us. God is love; he cares for us. But he is also all powerful; he can answer our prayers.  We begin our petitions of God by asking for his kingdom to come and for his will to be done; in asking this, we also humble ourselves and bend our will to his. We call upon Jehovah Jireh - God our Provider - to give us this day our daily bread. We entrust ourselves fully to his provision.  We continue our prayer by asking for forgiveness and for the power and grace to forgive others, and we ask for the power to resist temptation and deliverance from Satan and his tricks. As we com...

Psalm 96 There is something about music that captures us. I have been in nursing homes where there are residents who hardly recognize their own family members, yet they can sing every word of their old favorite hymns. Nothing melts my heart like hearing my own son singing “How Great Thou Art” – isn’t there something precious about a child singing? When we sing the old songs of the faith, many of our hearts are moved; we remember the context in which we learned the song or a particular time that song was sung. One Sunday, a family was in tears leaving church, and I was mystified. There hadn’t been anything really emotional about the service, not that I could tell, anyway. But at the back door they told me that this particular day was the anniversary of burying their son, and that the song we’d just finished singing was one that had been sung at his funeral. The song brought back all of the memories of that day and all of the emotion immediately welled back to the surface. Not all ...