Brian's Sermons

According to the grace given to you, will you remain faithful members of Christ’s holy church and serve as Christ’s representatives in the world? An older couple came to me for marriage counseling. She told me, “I want a divorce. He doesn’t love me.” I turned to him and asked, “Is this true?” He replied, “We have been married for fifty years. At our wedding, the pastor asked if I loved her. I   As continue to we look at the membership vows of the United Methodist Church, we now turn to our responsibilities. We recognize again that our salvation is a gift of God’s grace. Remember that Grace is God’s unmerited favor. We didn’t do anything to deserve it; it’s all about what God did for us. While we were still sinners, Jesus died for us. That proves God’s love for us. There has often been raised the issue about our good works. In fact, there are some who seem to think that our good works are what save us. Apart from God’s grace, Isaiah 64:6 reminds us, that “when we d...

When I was a little boy, we learned that the way of salvation involved confession, repentance, baptism, and a final step, live-the-Christian-life. I don’t think this was intentional, but the way I heard it, it seemed like adults never had any trouble with this last step. It sounded like living out the Christian life was easy. Last week, as we looked at the Methodist way of salvation, we specifically looked at the end goal of Christianity, which is holiness, Christ-likeness, or Christian perfection. The last two weeks I have made the comparison of living the Christian life with riding the GoBus from Athens to Cincinnati. We have the choice to get off the bus at any time. But how do we stay on the bus? How do we live the Christian life? John Wesley was very methodical; this is where the term “Methodist” came from. He and his Holy Club figured out what helped keep them “on the Go Bus” and regularly, even religiously did it. From studying the Bible to fasting to caring for the hu...

e are in the second week of our series Y.U.M. – as we discover what is unique and special about United Methodism. For a denomination that came about partially through the methodical nature of John and Charles Wesley, United Methodist doctrine is a slippery subject. Slippery because, if you ask 100 United Methodists, clergy and lay, we will probably have 200 descriptions of what constitutes our doctrine. And the differences between those descriptions are as different as the Methodists who make up our connection. One of the reasons this has happened is because United Methodist doctrine is primarily practical. Unlike other denominations with their well-designed creeds and affirmations and philosophical underpinnings, the United Methodist movement began as a practical movement within an existing denomination, the Church of England. John Wesley, in his methodical practices and through intense study of scriptures, simply figured out what works. “What works” is a loaded phrase, ...

It’s not my fault. Someone else is to blame. I would never have done that. I’m the victim here. These are not new claims; in fact, they are the oldest excuses in the book – the Bible, that is. They go all the way back to Genesis, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve and Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the snake… It seems like the same thing gets repeated again and again and again and as we repeat it, we get better at it. We even start to believe it ourselves! The more we tell a story, the truer we think it is. And one story we tell a lot is “it isn’t my fault.” If you don’t know the back story behind Psalm 51, in 2 Samuel 11, King David was at the height of his power, but in the Spring, when kings go to war, David was lollygagging around the palace, spying on a neighbor woman bathing. He acted upon his urges, got her pregnant, tried to cover it up by bringing her husband home from war, but when he wouldn’t sleep with her, David had the husband killed in the war. He felt pretty ...