Sermon Blog

    Isaiah 11:6 reads, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” My friends, as we enter the third week of our series, we are trying to let a little child, or actually, let children in general lead us, as we are striving to grow up in childlike maturity, responding to Jesus words, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” [i] We know that like children we are growing.  We have to choose to grow in our faith…seeking out opportunities for learning and stretching (such as Sunday School and Bible Study), refusing to be satisfied to remain infants in the faith, and realizing that the moment we stop growing, we start dying. We know that like children we are dependent.  Just as children are dependent on their parents, grandparents, or some other adult for life, sustenance, and shelte...

Now some of you may be like her and come to her defense later on, but I accuse my wife of being a somewhat OCD.  Anita has a thing about locks, in particular about locks on the doors that go in and out of a house.  If a door has a lock, it needs to be locked, especially at bedtime.  Very often Anita’s nighttime pre-bed ritual is to go around to all the doors and make sure that all the locks are locked.  It doesn’t matter if we haven’t used that door during the day, she needs to make sure that it is locked.  If somehow we make it to bed without her checking, she will ask me, “Did you check the doors?” or “Are all the doors locked?”  Unless I can answer with 100% certainty that I did, one of the two of us has to get up and go check (I’ll let y’all guess which of the two has to get up).  I will admit, she has never asked me to install additional locks on any parsonage doors, but if it has any type of lock, it has to be locked…the doorknob, the dead bolt...

I guess I can thank Joshua’s meteorological abilities for this morning’s illustration.  It has happened twice this summer.  Joshua, out of the clear blue, has said, “It’s fixing to storm.”  The second time was yesterday, while we were at the zoo.  Anita, Natalie, and I had already seen the clouds, but they looked to be miles away and going around us.  Joshua made his comment, and I looked at Anita and we said to Natalie, “Did you hear what Joshua said? Remember last time, we better get going if we’re going to see anything else.” What was last time, it was July 6 th at Wrightsville Beach.  We had driven down to Wrightsville Beach for a simple day trip and had been enjoying a beautiful day and the beach.  There had not been a cloud in the sky.  We had taken our lunch so we didn’t have to worry about anything but sitting, swimming, and playing.  A couple of us had gotten a little burnt on places that simply were missed with the sunscreen ...

How often ate we challenged by the gifts of another? We often think of children as being selfish, of being self-focused, our self-absorbed, and there may be a few spoiled children out there who are like that. However,  given the chance, I think that many children would surprise and challenge us. I remember back in 2009, Davey had been saving up his money to buy his own iPod Touch.  Many off his friends had one, and he really wanted one. He had saved birthday money and Christmas money, and was slowly but surely making progress towards his goal.  I don't remember exactly what the call went out for but I remember that we were responding to something that had happened. I am figuring that Davey heard my appeals in church for giving in response to the disaster.  After worship one of those Sundays where an appeal was made for UMCOR, Davey asked me how much money he had saved up.  " Why," I asked him. His response was not that he wanted to go to the store that...

You have heard it said, “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.”  I mean that is why they invented pacifiers isn’t it.  We like looking at little babies, but when they start crying or just babbling incessantly when we want some peace and quiet, we have pacifiers to stick in their mouths and get them quiet.  Nowadays doctors (or at least dentists) want toddlers off of their pacifiers by the time they are six months old, no later than a year old.  Some of us parents, though, probably wish that wasn’t the case, because there comes a time some 12 to 15 years later, where we wish there was a pacifier for teenagers when they begin to try and assert their independence which almost always leads to occasions of non-stop arguing, begging, and pleading.  Those are the days where we wish that pacy was still in place that we could just stick in their mouths and get them to be quiet.  Well, actually maybe we do have a pacifier for our teenagers, but it is not the...

Do you know how many hairs are on your head?  How about your spouse’s head?  Your child’s head?  Your grandchild’s head?  I’ll be the first to say, I have no idea.  Imagine how much you would love someone and how well you would truly know them, to know how many hairs are on that person’s head!  Our Scripture reading from Luke this morning tells us that is exactly how much God loves us…that is exactly how intimate God’s knowledge is of each of us.  Now mind you, for some of us, that knowledge that God has is a pretty difficult task…for others…not so hard.  Of course, I have been told that God only made a few perfect heads, and on all the rest he put hair. For God to know the number of hairs on our head…that’s almost unimaginable.  We are not used to people knowing us that completely (though the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media where many people offer what could be considered way too much information).  We are more...