Brian's Sermons

One thing that makes humans unique is our ability to dream.  No, I’m not talking about the kind of recurring dream where you’re at school and you can’t remember your locker combination or you look down and figure out you forgot to put on clothes…  I’m talking about the dreams where you think of the future, your plans, and where you’d like to be in five years, ten years…  I remember sitting in a hot tub with my best friend – talking about the future, about where we’d be.  Lucrative jobs, money flowing in, fast cars…  Guess what?  Neither of us is living that dream.  I’ve talked to a bunch of brides who don’t have any affiliation with a church (or, for that matter, a real belief system at all), but they want to have a “church wedding” because they’ve always dreamed of walking down that aisle. Many of us have dreams. What kind of dreams do you have?  What is your goal?  Where are you heading?  Now understand that the reason we have d...

1 Samuel 3:1-10 Back when Tara was pregnant with Jonathan, she was traveling a lot to play her violin. Because she would be gone for extended periods of time, we bought a prepaid cell phone. Unfortunately for us, most of the places she traveled were in southern Ohio and West Virginia, where cell phone reception was spotty at best, ruining the whole purpose for having gotten that phone. Then we moved to New Knoxville, where our particular carrier didn’t have reception either. I got pretty annoyed at that guy who would go around on commercials asking, “Can you hear me now?” As hard as it is to believe in this 3G world, there are times and places where we don’t get cell phone reception. It’s really amazing not only how helpful these things are, but also how addicting they are and how upset we sometimes get when someone isn’t answering their cell phone. I remember when I was the associate pastor at Stonybrook UMC; pretty much weekly I would go back to the senior pastor’s office and we ...