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Showing posts with the label Trinity XXI

Sermon - Trinity IX, 2026 - Luke 16:1-13

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The Parable of the Unjust Steward , Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1540 Christian Wisdom Seeks Eternal Dwellings Wisdom is forward thinking and focused on the goal Christian wisdom employs every treasure, heavenly and worldly, for the sake of reaching the goal If there is a hardest parable, it might be this one; throws people off every time. The parable presents a rich man with a steward who was found wasting the rich man’s possessions. The job of a steward is to be faithful with someone else’s possessions, and this guy wasn’t cutting it. So obviously, he got fired. What’s crazy is the rich man lets the steward hand in the books, and he doesn’t hunt them down and take them from him immediately. The steward does exactly what you don’t want the steward to do, which is why normally the books get taken from the steward: the steward cooks the books. He meets some of the rich man’s debtors, probably tenant farmers, and in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors he adjusts how much they owe, ...
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Sermon - Trinity XXI 2021 - Ephesians 6:10-17

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Man in Armor,  Rembrandt, 1655 We are living in some tumultuous times. Here in America we were spared most of the major tumult of the 20th century, at least on our own land. Certainly there was Pearl Harbor and many riots and demonstrations, but nothing like our Civil War in the 19th century or what much of Europe faced in the 20th century. But now some fissures and chips are starting to appear in the shiny facade of our highly decadent society. Like the Cold War era, people are starting to get the impression that something isn’t quite right. In that era they built bomb shelters, today the risks are different so people are trying to live more sustainably. Gardening, raising small livestock, canning and preserving foods, these are becoming incredibly popular especially with the younger generation and in some places finding supplies is getting difficult. Similarly, with threats of banning guns and fears of civil war or meat shortages, the sale of firearms and archery is through the r...
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Sermon - Trinity XXI 2019 - John 4:46-54

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Faith in the heart of even a true believer can be a rather fickle thing. For some people, the fact that they have a weak faith can be a real issue for them. Perhaps the reason it’s such an issue is because of a misunderstanding of what faith is. For many American  Evangelicals, they believe that faith is a work which they must accomplish in order for them to be saved. For them, their faith is the object of their salvation, and so they would say that they’re saved by their faith. But nowhere do the scriptures teach us that we’re saved by our faith. It’s just not in the Bible! Search with a fine toothed comb, but nowhere in the Bible will you find that you’re saved because of your faith! Yet we act as though our faith were the object of our salvation as exemplified by our choices to decorate our homes and our bodies with words like “faith” or “believe.”  So instead of teaching that we’re saved by our faith, the scriptures teach us that we’re saved through our faith. The go...
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Sermon - Trinity XXI 2018 - John 4:46-54

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“ At Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. ” Why does God permit such terrible things to happen? Why does He allow hurricanes to kill and injure so many and destroy so many people’s homes and jobs? Why does God let us suffer so greatly and watch our loved ones die? October is breast cancer awareness month and miscarriage and infant loss awareness month. Why does God allow such terrible tragedies to befall our mothers, daughters, fathers, and children?  If God is so good and perfectly benevolent and loving, then why does He let evil happen? Does God care? Is God actually good? Does God even exist? How can He exist when there are such evil things that take place in this world?  Those questions are commonly referred to as the problem of evil. To sum it up in one question: How can God who is perfectly good co...
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