[Propertalk] Fw: Sermon Resources for February 21

[Joe Parrish]

Sermons for Lent 1:

     Luke 4:1-13 - "Would You Take the Crown Without the Cross?"
     Luke 4:1-13 - "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda" by Leonard Sweet

Luke 4, the sermon titled "Would You Take the Crown
Without The Cross?"

The local sheriff was looking for a deputy, and one of the applicants -
who was not known to be the brightest academically, was called in for an
interview. "Okay," began the sheriff, "What is 1 and 1?" "Eleven," came
the reply. The sheriff thought to himself, "That's not what I meant, but
he's right."

Then the sheriff asked, "What two days of the week start with the letter
'T'?" "Today & tomorrow." Replied the applicant. The sheriff was again
surprised over the answer, one that he had never thought of himself.

"Now, listen carefully, who killed Abraham Lincoln?", asked the sheriff.
The job seeker seemed a little surprised, then thought really hard for a
minute and finally admitted, "I don't know." The sheriff replied, "Well,
why don't you go home and work on that one for a while?" The applicant
left and wandered over to his pals who were waiting to hear the results of
the interview. He greeted them with a cheery smile, "The job is mine! The
interview went great! First day on the job and I'm already working on a
murder case!"

In our Gospel reading this morning in Luke 4 it is Jesus' first day on the
job. Immediately he is confronted with three major temptations. And he is
confronted with this basic question: Would he take the crown without the
cross?

These are the most basic temptations in life and they form the foundation
for all other temptations. I would propose that when temptation comes our
way; if we will pause and classify the temptation, we would be able to
identify it with one of the three temptations Jesus faced. We will also be
better equipped to answer Satan with the words and obedience of Christ.

This is the first Sunday in Lent. It is a time of in-depth reflection upon
the passion and death of Jesus, as well as a period of repentance for both
the church and for us personally. Our Lenten journey begins this year with
a review of the temptation of Christ. At the beginning of his ministry,
Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the Wilderness, to be in
communion with God and to reflect upon his upcoming ministry. While there,
Satan confronts Jesus. It is reminder to us that goodness is not
synonymous with innocence. True goodness comes only after a struggle with
evil.

Let's look at the three temptations:

1. Stone into Bread
2. Fall on the Rocks
3. Serve the Wrong Master

The rest of this sermon following the outline above can be obtained by
joining www.eSermons.com.
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Luke 4, the sermon titled "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda"

Jesus was unrelenting in his forward thinking. Consider how much time he
spent teaching about the kingdom of God, which was both now and not-yet.
What pleasures from God are being poisoned in our lives because we cannot
escape a life of constant regret - the "if onlys," "wrong turns,"
"yes-buts," and "sour notes" of woulda/coulda/shoulda thinking?

We've all done it: enraged or insulted, frightened or confused at someone
or some situation, we have stood there sputtering and fuming or have fled
in tears and tatters. Then, anywhere from five minutes to five days later,
the positively perfect response, the slickest sarcasm or the healing
message, floats effortlessly into our heads. There, in the privacy of our
cars or offices or homes, we conduct a flawlessly executed, logically
organized, stunningly articulate conversation with no one but ourselves to
appreciate it.
"I coulda said...," "I shoulda said...," "I woulda said...," can be some
of the bitterest phrases ever spoken.

Cognitive therapists Arthur Freeman and Rose DeWolf, have examined the
power behind these frustrated feelings in their recent book Woulda,
Coulda, Shoulda: Overcoming Regrets, Mistakes and Missed Opportunities
(New York: Morrow, 1989). Freeman and DeWolf look at two questions: First,
what prevents us from doing what we would, could, and should do; secondly,
how do we deal with those woulda, coulda, shoulda feelings of guilt and
despair, those woulda, coulda, shoulda moments in our lives? The trap most
people must learn to avoid is letting past coulds, woulds and shoulds so
overwhelm us that it becomes impossible to act with an eye toward a future
full of "cans," "wills" and "shalls." Missed opportunities or bad
decisions from long ago keep us from taking any chances or making any
choices in our present for our future. Freeman and DeWolf sum up the
pitfall of this failure-fixation as a good thing taken to a harmful
extreme,

"Thinking about what you did is a valuable learning experience. That is
how we learn to be tactful, to be careful, to be civilized...But although
it is no doubt...a good idea to look back and reflect on your mistakes
from time to time, it is not a good idea to continue to review those
mistakes over and over and over again." (28)

>From another age comes Soren Kierkegaard's observation that most people
"are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others,
terribly objective sometimes." We are tender with ourselves, tough toward
others. "But the real task," Kierkegaard added, "is in fact to be
objective toward oneself - and subjective toward all others." Coulda,
woulda, shoulda thinking has gone overboard the other direction.
Subjectivity towards the self is replaced by hypercritical, impossibly
perfectionist standards that guarantee our inability to measure up.
0thers, meanwhile, are viewed as problem-free and successful in each and
every way that we are not. Coulda, woulda, shoulda thinkers have taken to
the extreme the words of a church bulletin board sign: "Make peace with
one's neighbors; make quarrels with one's faults."

When we are confronted by people or situations or relationships that stir
up our psyche, we instinctively revert back to a response pattern
programmed into us since birth. There are basically three different
avenues of response open to each of us. Either we react emotionally,
cognitively or behaviorally - we cry, talk or punch. Those given to
over-simplification and generalization might insist that women cry, men
punch, and over-educated preachers talk!

In this week's gospel lesson we can see Jesus being tested by the devil on
all three of these response levels.

The rest of Leonard Sweet's sermon can be obtained by joining 
www.Sermons.com
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The Power of Temptation

We laugh when Professor Harold Hill in the musical Music Man warns that
the boy who buckles his knickers below the knees is "on the road to
degradation," but despite the laughter there is a truth here. There's no
harm, directly, in most of life's little misdemeanors, but they grow. An
ancient rabbi said, "Sin begins as a spider's web and becomes a ship's
rope." You and I add those strands that change the spider's web into a
rope; but because we add just one strand at a time, and because each one
is usually so small, we don't realize what we're constructing. Sometimes,
on the other hand, the growth seems to happen almost of its own accord. It
is as if we planted a seed in the soil of the soul by some small act of
sin and, without our seeming to attend it or care for it, it develops into
a full-grown tree. Sometimes, verily, a forest!

J. Ellesworth Kalas, If Experience Is Such A Good Teacher Why Do I Keep
Repeating The Course?, p. 80.

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Lead Us Not Into Temptation

I recently read a story about a little boy named Bobby who desperately
wanted a new bicycle. His plan was to save his nickels, dimes and quarters
until he finally had enough to buy a new 10-speed. Each night he asked God
to help him save his money. Kneeling beside his bed, he prayed, "Dear
Lord, please help me save my money for a new bike, and please, Lord, don't
let the ice cream man come down the street again tomorrow."

Jim Grant in Reader's Digest told about someone else who faced temptation.
An overweight businessman decided it was time to shed some excess pounds.
He took his new diet seriously, even changing his driving route to avoid
his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he showed up at work with a
gigantic coffee cake. Everyone in the office scolded him, but his smile
remained nonetheless. "This is a special coffee cake," he explained. "I
accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and there in the window was
a host of goodies. I felt it was no accident, so I prayed, 'Lord, if you
want me to have one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a
parking spot open right in front.' And sure enough, the eighth time around
the block, there it was!"

All of us know what it is to enter the wilderness of temptation.
Temptation is part and parcel of the human condition.

Lee Griess, Taking The Risk Out Of Dying, CSS Publishing Company
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I Am Baptized

In some churches when babies are baptized they are given a candle; it is
to be lit each year on the anniversary of their baptism. Those candles are
given as a visual reminder to them, and to others in the family, that he
or she is a child of God. It's a sign of assurance of who we are - or
better, whose we are. Maybe there isn't anything more important that we
can do for our children than to keep reminding them of who they are, and
whose they are. They belong to Jesus. He chose them. And he chose you.

And glory of glories, he chose me. Me! Christ claims that you and I are
worthy of being one of his dearly beloved - worth dying for, and worth
returning for, in order that we might be his ... forever.

When Martin Luther became depressed, he saw it as a temptation of Satan
and he would turn to his ancient foe and cry out, "I am baptized. I am
baptized." He needed the assurance of his identity, that he belonged to
Jesus. If he were going to carry out the great work God had given him to
do he needed to be sure that even though his faith might waver, God's
all-encompassing love would not. He needed the assurance that he was held,
held firmly in that mighty grip of mercy.

John M. Braaten, The Greatest Wonder of All, CSS Publishing Co.

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Dante's View

In Death Valley there is a place known as Dante's View. There, you can
look down to the lowest spot in the United States, a depression in the
earth 200 feet below sea level called Bad Water. But from that same spot,
you can also look up to the highest peak in the United States, Mount
Whitney, rising to a height of 14,500 feet. One way leads to the lowest
and the other way to the highest. From that point, called Dante's View,
any movement must be in one or the other direction.

There are many times in life when we stand where the ways part and where
choices must be made. It is often easier to trip along downhill than to
walk the steady, or maybe rocky, uphill path. But the path uphill leads to
a cross -- an empty cross. And the one that walks beside us is the one who
hung there and defeated it.

Glenn E. Ludwig, Walking To.Walking With .Walking Through., CSS Publishing
Company

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The Savior Is There

I think of Mother Teresa, ministering to those often left by others to
die. I think of the press coverage on Mother Teresa's long dark night of
the soul, as she wrote with weary familiarity of an arid landscape from
which, seemingly, the Deity had disappeared.

Is that the more convenient time? Or is it the senior years, when the
reality of age rudely intrudes into your personal fantasyland? When the
temporary exuberance of youth has surrendered to the inexorable advance of
old age with its cynicism, if not possible disillusionment? When the fumes
of yesterday's zeal and vision may be all that is left in an empty
spiritual tank?

As I sort through all that, I arrive at the inescapable conclusion, to
know that opportune time might be helpful, but what you and I really need
to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is not the "when." The focus of our
attention ought to be, whenever the enemy's opportune time-despondency,
sickness, failure, waning stages of life, whenever-the victorious Savior
is there.

Benjamin Reaves, What You Need to Know
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Raised In The 16th and Kicked Out In The 21st

The complaint is sometimes made about clergy or parochial school children
that they don't live in the "real" world. Often there is the attempt to
protect people from the "real" world -- the world of evil and temptation,
gangs and death, alcoholics and addicts. I had a 20-something lady tell
me, "My mother raised me in the sixteenth century and then kicked me out
in the 20th -- and I wasn't ready for it." Jesus knows this "real" world
of temptations, and undeserved suffering and death.

Brian Stoffregen

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We Haven't Been Up To Bat Yet

Temptation tries to blind us to other possibilities. A business man
driving home from work one day, saw a little league baseball game in
progress. He decided to stop and watch. He sat down in the bleachers and
asked a kid what the score was. "We're behind 14 to nothing," he answered
with a smile.

"Really," he responded. "I have to say you don't look very discouraged."

"Discouraged?" the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face. "Why should
we be discouraged? We haven't been up to bat yet."

Brett Blair, www.eSermons.com.

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Lent: Spring Training For Christians

When I was a boy, I was told, "Baptists don't do Lent." No one knew why. I
suspect that it was an anti-Catholic thing which I pray we are over. It
was the old argument, "whatever they do, we don't!" - a curiously
convoluted, twisted and unhealthy way to decide on religious practices.

Whatever the reason for "not doing Lent," I think it is a great loss for
any Christian not to prepare for Good Friday and Easter. Every spring the
baseball players prepare for the season with spring training; every spring
ordinary people prepare for summer by doing "spring cleaning." So why
shouldn't Christians prepare for the most important events in Jesus'
ministry - what he did for us on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, what he
did for us on Golgotha's cross and at the empty tomb?

If it helps you, think of Lent as a kind of Christian spring training and
spring cleaning.

John Ewing Roberts, Remembering and Forgetting

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Who Is the King?

Have you heard the story about the lion who was stalking through the
jungle?  He thought he was really something. The king of the jungle. The
greatest beast of the wild. And he wanted to make sure everyone else
thought that as well.

He grabbed a tiger who was passing by. The lion put a strangle-hold on the
tiger. The lion growled ferociously and said, "Who's the king of the
jungle?" And the tiger, trembling and shaking, said, "You are, o lion. You
are the king of the jungle!" Then there was a bear that passed by. And
again the lion grabbed him, and put a strangle hold on him and growled
ferociously, and said, "Who's the king of the jungle?" And the bear too,
trembling like the tiger, said, "You are, o lion. No question about it.
You are the king of the jungle!"

And then the lion came upon a mighty elephant, huge, massive, towering
many feet above the lion! And once more he asked with a ferocious growl,
"Who's the king of the jungle? Who's the greatest beast of the wild?" And
the elephant.

The conclusion to this illustration and for many additional illustrations
and sermons for the Lent 1 can be accessed at www.Sermons.com.