Sermon Blog

Dennis Newton was on trial for the armed robbery of a convenience store in a district court…when he fired his lawyer. Assistant district attorney Larry Jones said Newton, 47, was doing a fair job of defending himself until the store manager testified that Newton was the robber. Newton jumped up, accused the woman of lying and then said, "I should of blown your [expletive] head off." The defendant paused, then quickly added, "-if I'd been the one that was there." The jury took 20 minutes to convict Newton and recommended a 30-year sentence. Dennis Newton is just one of many criminals whose lack of intellect have led to their arrest and/or convictions.   There are books and web sites completely dedicated to telling the stories of these would be criminal not-so-masterminds.   Many of these stories account of how they were arrested…this story, though, takes us into the courtroom. Our Scripture today, takes us into a courtroom of sorts.   However, before we get into ...

Look up in the sky!  It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s Superman!  This famous phrase came out of the 1950’s Adventures of Superman , as folks pointed up to the sky, seeing an unfamiliar form, trying to figure out exactly what it was…only recognizing the form as it grew closer.  It was their hero, their rescuer, their savior… Imagine the folks reading or hearing John’s vision for the first time:  “Then I saw heaven opened and there was a white horse!”  Many early Christians on their first take balked at that sentence, they had encountered a white horse before.  It was the one that had come conquering and to conquer, and led the riders of the red, black, and greenish-grey horses back in a different visionary unit, in chapter six with the opening of the seven seals.  That white horse rider had not been a Lone Ranger kind of hero…it had represented the conquering forces of the Roman Empire…because in apocalyptic literature white does not necessar...

  Almost everybody loves a wedding.  I would have been sexist and said that almost every woman loves a wedding, but when the William and Catherine’s huge wedding took place in England last month, I read Facebook status updates about the wedding from almost as many guys as I did gals. When you think of weddings, what is one of the primary concerns during the preparation for the bride? For many, it's the dress. It is easy to see that those wedding dresses come in all kinds of designs and lengths.  One thing that many dresses have in common, though, is their color.  While some brides do not, many brides do choose to wear the traditional white. What is the reason behind the tradition of the bride wearing white? Well, there are a couple of ways to look at it. A little girl at a wedding asked, “Mommy, why do brides always wear white?”  The mom replied, “Because they’re happy, dear.” Halfway through the wedding the girl whispered, “Mommy, if brides wear white because ...

A teacher had been working with her seventh-grade students on information about World War II.   On the test she asked the question, “What was the largest amphibious assault of all time?”   Of course she expected to see the answer, “the D-Day invasion” on all the test papers.   However, there was one particular one that caught her eye, that student answered, “Moses and the plague of frogs.” Before World War II, and well after Moses and the Plague of frogs came a different war.   Tension had been building between the European empires, and then, with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in June of 1914, almost all of Europe and the colonies of the empires, found themselves at war.   It has been called the Great War, World War I, and the First World War.   However, in August of 1914, years before Woodrow Wilson would use the phrase, British author H. G. Wells, released a series of articles that gave another name for this massive conflict: “The Wa...