Sermons I am Proud Of-Pt2

Today marks the second installment of sermons I am proud of. This sermon is one that I have had the opportunity to refine and reuse a few times over the past 3 years. I first wrote it hastily when my intern-pastor walked in to my office and asked me to write a sermon for a trip to St. Vincent's nursing home.

We were leaving in two hours.

Our area Baptist churches share the responsibility of conducting a Baptist service at that facility and my pastor had forgotten that it was our turn. He was busy, so the responsibility fell to me. I am proud of this sermon for two reasons. One I have never written one so quickly. And second a mentor of mine, my former now mostly retired pastor asked for a copy so he could add it to his repertoire of sermons for nursing home visits. Since he more then anyone I personally know is my preaching 'role model' that was a high honour. Without further ado here is my sermon first given in June of 2008 refined twice and last used in 2010.

Sermons I am Proud Of-Pt1

Call me lazy. Or call me boastful. Maybe you can all me lazyful. I don't know. Either way I am one blog behind my normal posting schedule (which is bothering me a lot) and I am looking forward to what will prove to be a long full week. So in that vain I would like to share with you today, Wednesday and Friday some sermons I have done over the years that I have an extra level of fondness for.

Please allow me to introduce you to my sermons on Isaiah 1:10-20 given on March 18th 2007, at West End Baptist.

The 100th! My Potential Big Idea

First let me say I am excited to have made it to 100 posts. I am grateful for everyone who has read even one word of this blog. I know I am still learning how to do this. I still am working on catching all my typos and grammatical errors. I am still figuring out backgrounds and fonts and all the other things that come with working on a blog. Generally speaking this has been a joy. I love your comments, and feedback. Please keep them coming.

But on to business.

I started this blog for a reason. I am trying to sort out an idea that I have. It may well be THE idea that I have. You know what I mean, that one or two really good ideas that person gets in their lifetime. I think I may have had mine. Right now I am trying to figure it all out.

Let me tell you the story thus far.

A Little Slice Of Heaven

My Sister sent me this e-mail yesterday and I needed to share and comment;

A friend from work just came up to me after lunch and said:

"Soo... your brother.. he preaches about heaven and stuff right?"

"You should tell him, that you can find heaven in all sorts of different places, please tell him I found a little piece of heaven hiding in the Great Canadian bagel shop"

To this preacher/blogger this was just to good of an invitation to ignore. So why don't we talk about, 'Heaven and stuff'.

Metamorphosis

Not that long ago I along with another youth leader and some teens entered into a unplanned and rather intense conversation with someone. While we searched a thrift store for bargains we ran into a man selling books. Me being interested in local authors stopped to take a peak.

As it turned out in the course of our conversation we discovered that he had been well on his way into a life of organized crime under the banner of the Hell's Angel's until Jesus changed his life. This book was his semi-factious chronicle of people in very difficult situations that turned to God.

A few moments in the conversation left the youth with me a little rattled. One such moment was that the author  stared each one of us down, eye to eye asking if we were saved. Three people passed with flying colours the other 2, he seemed less sure of.

Relevance Is No Longer Relevant

Spend enough time with 'next gen' leaders and you will inevitably hear the word 'relevant'...a lot. Relevance seems to be the great quest right now. There is good reason of it; many if not most churches are graying and shrinking. By on large the church has not been successfully reaching youth and young adults on mass. And what is equally troubling is that the few youth we have are leave faster and in larger numbers than ever before.

Given these facts, a common observation is made; the church is stuck in its old ways. Old music, old seating, old style of dress, old buildings, old vernacular, old technology, old style of meetings, old patterns of ministry. The list can go on but you get the idea. Many believe that the church is too stuffy, and too old. That it needs a face lift, a good dose of new energy, new ideas and fresh perspectives.

In short the argument goes that the church must update and remove all of the 'old's' and replace them with 'new's'. The church has to go from being irrelevant to relevant.

I disagree.

Too Busy For Discipleship

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada. Right now we are dealing with an issue the news here has deemed #scandalpalooza on twitter. The long and short of it has to to with the Mayor trying to run concerts off of the city coffers. A few months ago the concert promotion group, 'Power Promotions' went bankrupt, taking with it some 400k in loans from the city. The city council was shocked. The public was shocked. The media was shocked. And now we are trying to figure out what happened.

As I was listening to the news I heard an interesting commentary. They were comparing the goals of the city council verses the goals of a private concert promoter. The city wants to create lots of excitement and make people happy to live in Halifax. The business' goal on the other hand is to make money, the method to do so just happens to be the concert. The commentator's point was that these goals are not exclusive of each other, but that it was better to private business to run concerts because they will figure out how to do so without losing money.

This conversation quickly lead me to think about the church.

Let's Talk About Sex

I have only been a pastor now for a few years. However before that I was just a regular person. Some of my friends from the time I was just a regular person (eg those from Jr, High, High School and my Undergrad) every now and then surface via Facebook or some other medium to ask a question. Sometimes it is theological, sometimes practical, sometimes it is about Jesus and sometimes just general religious wondering.

The question below came the other day from a teacher friend of mine who is now living in Calgary. The following blog was my attempt to answer her.

A Tame Spiritual World

The other day I had a conversation that made me a little uneasy. We were talking about ghosts, demons and devils. In of itself that is not unusual. If one spends anytime in the gospels they inviability need to talk about demons and the devil. Jesus simply spends to much time dealing with them to ignore them completely.

But that was not the kind of conversation I was having. Instead we were talking about this individuals supposed real experience with a demonic attack. This person while living and working in Canada now, originally comes from India. Which holds to a pattern I have gotten used to. I only tend to have this kind of conversation with people if that are not from the so called Western World.

It seems that for the most part here in the West we like our spiritual world nice and tame.