Brian's Sermons

(*Note: This is my first sermon at Wellston Hope UMC) Romans 5:1-5 It’s been quite a journey for me and my family, and I imagine you are in some ways right in the same boat as we are. Except that most of you don’t have all of your earthly possessions in boxes all over the place. But you are definitely in the “who is going to be our new pastor?” mode, and being in that mode for the last four months hasn’t been all that fun, has it? I invite you to take the time to get to know us. What I know definitively about Wellston Hope UMC, I can sum up in a few statements. I know that the West Ohio Conference and the Shawnee Valley District believe in this church. Word has spread about your generosity in the midst of a difficult economic landscape. You have been pegged as having the potential to be a hub of ministry, a vibrant disciple-making station for hope in a city that has been described to me as having no hope. I have been sent here because there is hope. I have sp...

(Judges 16:1-22) The book of Judges follows a pretty sad course. Israel starts out serving the Lord. Then they fall into sin and idol worship. They are then enslaved, and finally they cry out to the Lord. God raises up a judge who delivers them, and they serve the Lord again, for a time. Samson was one of those judges. In Judges 13, we read that an angel commanded that the boy would be a Nazirite, set aside for the Lord, as described in Numbers 6. Not every Bible hero is a priest or a king. Samson was a lay person, specially dedicated to God. The angel told Samson’s parents that he would become a Nazarite and would begin the deliverance of Israel from the hands of the Philistines (Judges 13:5b). The important characteristic of a Nazirite is that she or he is holy, set apart for God, marked for God’s service. Their vows required non-conformity from them; they were not supposed to act like the people around them. They totally abstained from wine – to the point that they wouldn’t ev...