Brian's Sermons

When I was a little boy, I learned at church that the plan of salvation included recognizing our sin, confessing, repenting, being baptized, and living the Christian life. It was presented as something easy, and for the most part, it looked to me like the adult Christians around me never struggled. We even sang a song that went “I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time. Since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heard from sin, I’m in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time.” I often wondered why living the Christian life was so much more difficult than I thought it would be.   Part of the problem, I found, was not a problem with the Christian life. The problem was within. We have been looking at the root causes of poverty. Poverty is not about not having enough money. Poverty is at its core, about broken relationship. Last week we looked at broken relationship with God. Today we are looking at another relationship, one that w...

Last week we introduced an important and difficult concept. Poverty. We often think of poverty only in financial terms, but in reality, poverty is based in broken relationship. Broken relationship with God, broken relationship in ourself, broken relationship with others, and broken relationship with all creation. In the beginning, God created humanity to be in perfect relationship with him. But very quickly, we find Adam and Eve disobeying God. The response, as found in Genesis 3:23-25 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life . Now, instead of living in the Garden of Eden in perfect relationship with God, they have been banished, never to return. Never to walk together in the cool of the morning. Never again to speak face to face. Our relations...

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races? Matthew 16:13-17  When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.   I love reading mystery books. I have some personal rules about mystery books. One is that the bad guy can’t be someone newly introduced at the end of the book; there have to be clues all along.   My biggest ru...

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...

A quote attributed to Zig Ziglar says, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” As Christians, we have an unfortunate problem that sometimes, in our attempt to be (as the Apostle Paul put it) “all things for all people,” we end up aiming at nothing and thus that’s what we hit. In its roots, the Methodist movement has always had holiness as its goal. Last week we looked at the difficulty for us; holiness is not so easily achieved because of our sin problem. We have so corrupted God’s image within us that we cannot even approach him… Thankfully, because of God’s character, he bestows grace upon us when we least deserve it. The Holy Spirit extends Prevenient Grace, the grace that goes before us, and woos us, calls us, invites us to him. But if this was where God’s grace stopped, we would be in trouble. It would get us to the door but no farther. It would be cruel, for God to show us our sin but to leave us in it. But that’s not what God does. God finds us in our sin and...

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, ...

Matthew 5:17-48 Have you ever had a conversation or a disagreement about something and after some discussion, you realize that what the person was saying was not what they were talking about at all? Maybe it was a totally different subject, but more likely, there was something deeper. When we get to this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is, but isn’t, talking about what he is talking about. I have heard sermons about all of these paragraphs in the rest of Matthew 5, sermons on anger, adultery, divorce, revenge, and so forth, but each of these vignettes is simply one of Jesus’ examples to make his point.  The key verses that tell me this are verses 20 and 48. Jesus uses a literary device called inclusio which bookends or brackets the material to add emphasis to it and to help the audience see how it holds together. So how does it hold together? He starts and ends with a similar concept: perfection. The unasked question that Jesus is addressing is similar to one tha...