Brian's Sermons

The Ten Commandments: Exodus 20:4-6 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.   One of the things I love to do is to play games. I especially love strategy games. But one of the hardest things about strategy games is learning the rules. Once you know the rules, you can figure out how to play the game. God gave his people rules to live by. We call them the Ten Commandments. The first five of the Ten Commandments help us know how to love God. The final five help us know how to love one another.   We are now on the third sermon in our series o...

Exodus 3:1-6 1 Samuel 3:1-10 Isaiah 6:1-8 Jeremiah 1:4-10 I read you four call stories from the Bible: Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. They are amazing stories. Moses already had an awesome start to life, being saved from death by his mother putting him in a basket in the reeds in the Nile, and he was saved by the Pharaoh’s daughter, of all people. But here he is, years later, toiling away in Midian, tending sheep, when God speaks to him through a burning bush. Then there is Samuel, whose mother prayed fervently for a child, and when her child was born, she brought him into the sanctuary of the Lord to be raised there. Though the word of the Lord was rare in those times and people just weren’t having visions, God spoke to the boy Samuel in an audible voice. Isaiah had an awesome vision in which God spoke to him, asking, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answered, “Here I am, send me.” And as for Jeremiah, we simply read that “the word of the Lord came to...

Matthew 7:24-29 It is our final installment in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus starts out this section with a “therefore.” I learned as a kid that whenever your verse starts with a “therefore” you’ve got to go back and see what the “therefore” is there for. Immediately before this section was the section about false prophets and about those who say, “Lord, Lord, I did all this in your name!” but to whom Jesus says, “I don’t even know you.” Jesus is making it clear that those who truly are his disciples are those who are all his – inside and out. Not the hypocrite who makes sure to follow the letter of the Law but ignores its intent. Not the one who makes a big show of their so-called righteous acts. Not the one who chases after the things of this world. And not the one who purports to speak for God but speaks on their own authority. These are those to whom Jesus proclaims, “Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matthew 7:23) ...

When we started lighting the Advent candles three weeks ago, we started with Hope. We then lit the candle of Love, and last week we lit the candle of Joy. The fourth candle of our Advent wreath is the candle of Peace. It might be a shock to some of you to be reminded that our country is a country at war. Operation Enduring Freedom, or the war in Afghanistan, has been going on for over twelve years (since October 7, 2001) with an American death toll of 1098 with an additional 2379 wounded. Yet we can be blissfully ignorant of this fact as we go about our lives. We can even pretend to live at peace, all the while having no peace in our lives. I don’t have the time to cover this topic completely this morning, but please understand that peace is not simply the absence of conflict. Just because you’re not at war doesn’t mean you have peace. And, in fact, Jesus comes, bringing peace in the face of war. The world says: peace is when we stop fighting. Jesus says, in John 14:27 “Pe...

Matthew 6:19-34 When I was a little boy, I always loved going on a treasure hunt. One of my favorite moments was when I was hiking at my aunt and uncle’s house in Missouri along a dry creek bed, and I found a huge geode. But I loved poking around my grandma’s old barn where I would find other cool treasures (I loved finding feathers and coal – remember, I am from a generation that never used coal to heat the house). My grandma would give me a paper bag to keep my coal and feathers and I would take them home and put them in my trunk with my other treasures. Most of us have some treasures of some kind. In fact, people in our culture seem to really treasure material possessions. What are your treasures? If your house was on fire and you could only rescue the things you could carry in your hands, what would you save? Those things might be your top treasures. But most of us have more than just that. Some people treasure different things. Family heirlooms. Photo albums. Jewelry. Ele...

Matthew 5:13-16: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Who remembers the old Mission Impossible show? One recurring theme was the mission: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” Over the past couple of months, we’ve been studying Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, more specifically, the Beatitudes, where Jesus pronounces the blessings of his Kingdom. He has been teaching his disciples a radically different way to live. There is a paragraph break here, and Jesus goes on from his “blessed are” formula but this is real...

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. Matthew 5:9 When I visit in the nursing home or hospital, I like to ask if there are any prayer requests – besides the obvious. I would visit Betty Hammond at Jenkins, and her prayer request was always the same. She would ask me to pray for peace. I knew she wasn’t being flippant or casual by asking – this wasn’t a Miss America contestant saying, “What I really want is world peace.” Betty truly wanted to see peace on earth. I think in our inner core, we all want peace. The difficulty is how we define peace. With everything going on in the news, you might have missed that last week marked the twelfth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Would there be peace if we somehow “won” there? What about if we immediately withdrew our troops? Or, perhaps a more legitimate question – will there ever be peace in the middle east? Is peace simply the absence of fighting, or, as someone once said, is peace simply when both s...