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Brother Steve's weekly sermons will now be provided online for those who were not in attendance on a certain Sunday or for those that were in attendance and would like to take notes on it or just relive it. The sermons will not be available online until after the Sunday Brother Steve preaches it. Unfortunately, the online sermons will not include any adlibbing that could occur on Sunday morning. So, try to make it to Sunday School and Worship each Sunday to witness it first-hand. Brother Steve's sermons, just like the newsletters, are presented in two different formats. You can simply read the sermon online by scrolling down this page past the links. The sermon is also offered through Adobe Acrobat reader. If you don't have Acrobat Reader, simply click on the icon below to download it. NOTE: I put new sermons out on a weekly basis and take prior Sunday's services offline. However, I do house them all in an online storage facility. So if you would like to have a sermon from a few weeks back, just e-mail me and let me know. To view the sermon in Acrobat format, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader.
FOLLOW ME On this Second Sunday of the New Year I want to lift up two words of his that are so profound and so relevant, and simply these two words, “FOLLOW ME.” Have you heard about the animals out in the jungle who got together one day and decided to play a football game? They chose up sides and one side realized pretty quickly that they had a huge problem, because the rhinosaurus was on the other team, they could not tackle him but when they tried to tackle the rhinosaurus they would just bounce off of him, every time the rhinosaurus got the ball and he would just go right down the middle of the field scoring a touch down. In the first quarter he scored a touch down, another in the second
quarter, then again in the third quarter. With only a few minutes left in the fourth quarter, the rhinocaurus caught the ball one more time and started up the field, and suddenly out of no where he was brought down with a magnificent bone jarring tackle. When the animals un- piled, it was discovered that the centipede had for the first time proudly had come into the game and it was indeed the centipede that had made that magnificent tackle. It was fantastic shouted his teammates. A great tackle, great hit, but it is the fourth quarter, the game is almost over, where on earth have you been all this time? And the centipede answered “I have been putting on my shoes.” Now many people are like that and worse, they just go through life putting on their shoes but never getting out to the fields, getting ready to do something but are procrasancting, they get the travel folders but never take the trip, they are thinking about going back to college but never enroll, they think about a better job but don’t ever get one, they want to have a better family life but they don’t do anything about it. In our SR for today in Mark 1 as Jesus says these two powerful
words “follow me” Now the word “follow” is a powerful word in the scriptures.
So you see this is serious business here when Jesus says “follow me”, he does not mean lets jog around the block together, he doesn’t mean let us walk back to town together, he is calling and asking for our devotion, our trust, our service, our loyalty, he is asking for our hearts, ours souls, our minds, he is asking for our lives. He is calling us to be his disciples. “Follow me”
he says, these ancient stirring, time honored, universal, provocative,
challenging, relevant words. Actually Jesus said these words “follow me,” not once but many times to Peter and Andrew by the sea, to Levi and the tax collection table, and to a hesitate would be disciple out on the roadside, to the rich young ruler and now this morning, to you, to you, and to you, and to me. Can you hear him, if you listen real close, if you will be real quiet and listen very carefully, you can hear Jesus speaking, and he is saying to you and to me “deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me, put on your shoes, and let me get you into the game? Now this morning I want to mention three things about these words that I have thought about in recent day which I believe are important to you and me. First when Jesus says these words, “follow me” he is calling us to new direction. Anybody who says these words is going somewhere and they want us to follow them. It is really these same words Jesus spoke early in our SR but spoke a different way when he said “repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words go in the direction God wants your life to go, not away from God. And how this is really good news for us, for oh how we all need a sense of direction. Do you remember the story about the people on the airplane, they are soaring along, everything was uneventful, they were flying 20,000 feet, a pleasant flight. All of sudden the P A crackles and they hear this voice, this is your captain speaking, I have good news and bad news.
Now that’s a parable for our time, because we have a lot of people who live like that. They are rushing about but they are not going anywhere but they are making good time. They are lost but they are making good time. On a recent vacation I saw a young teenager walking along with
a tee shirt on with these words on the back, “DON”T
FOLLOW ME I AM LOST.” Now this young man was wearing this
tee shirt as a joke but listen being lost is really no joke. Let me ask you something, have you ever felt like that, do you feel like that right now. Like you are spinning your wheels and your life is going no where. I wonder if Simon and Andrew, and James and John were feeling like that that day on the seashore when Jesus came along. Every one of us needs a reason to give up out of bed in the morning, let me ask you, what is yours? What is that makes you spring up out of the bed it the morning with energy, excitement and enthusiasm, anxious to get at it. As human beings we hunger for direction, meaning and purpose in our lives and at the very core of our lives, we need to feel that our lives make a difference. If you feel empty inside, lost or mixed up, then let me invite you this morning with all the feeling that I have in my heart to Follow Jesus, he is the way, the truth and the life. Remember the old story of about the man who hired a native guide to lead him through the jungles of Africa. As the wilderness became more and more dense, the man got more and more nervous, and finally he said to the guide, “are you sure you know where we are going, you don’t have a map, a compass and there is no path anymore. The guide said “sir in this jungle I am the path. Stay
close and follow me. When Jesus says, “follow me”
what he is saying to us, is that in this jungle wilderness, I
am the way, the truth, and the life, I am the path. I will bring
you in a new direction In recent years a new approach to psychotherapy has emerged called “reality therapy. Its founding mentor was a man name William Glaser. The approach is a little tough, a little stark, a little blunt, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Reality therapists you see will not let us spend a lot of time rummaging around in the past feeling sorry for ourselves. Rather they say, so you had a problem, so you’ve failed, so you’ve messed up, so somebody has hurt you, so what. Everybody has problems but the question is what are you going to do about it, to move and go forward with your life. It is interesting to note how little time Jesus spent talking to people about their past, he was not interested in that. When the woman was taken in adultery was brought to him, he did fussed at her, he did not criticize her, he did ask how all of this happen, he just took her by the hand, and said neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. When Nicodemus came to him under the cover of night, shackled by legalism, Jesus did not ask him how he got that way, he did not criticize him, he just said “if you want to have real life, you must be born again. And no where is this more beautifully depicted than in the parable
Jesus tells about The Prodigal Son. The prodigal comes home feeling
guilty, wanting to confess that he messed up but the father doesn’t
even want to hear him. This too is the good news of our faith. We don’t have to be defeated by the hurts, failings and the sins of the past. We can be forgiven, we can start over, we can make a new beginning, and the Savior comes forgiving us calling us to a new direction of life and to a new future. And thirdly when Jesus says the words “follow me, he is calling to a new lifestyle, he is calling us away from egoism, away from selfishness, from self-centeredness to the spirit of Christ like love. This is the lifestyle Jesus calls us too to emulate everyday, the spirit of self giving and sacrificial love. A well respected African American pastor who died a few years
ago but was served in the Watts area of Los Angles during the
riots of looting and burnings. He had to stand tall in his pulpit and say to them that must stop destroying property and stop stealing from area merchants during the worst time of the riots. That kind of preaching was not popular. You could feel the tension everywhere. One night his telephone rang and he picked up the phone and after a few minutes he hung up the phone. His wife notices after he hung up the phone how serious and solemn he was. What was that about, she asked? He said I don’t want you to worry. She said it was a threat wasn’t it. He took a deep breath; they have threatened to blow up my car with me in it. She ran over to him, they hugged each, they cried, and they prayed. But they realized that there was no way they could guard his
car 24 hours a day to protect it from some wiring bombing. Where you have been, he asked. And she said, “I drove the car around the block to make sure that it would be safe for you to drive to work this morning.” (Repeat) He said from that day forward he never ever asked his wife again if she loved him. He saw that day as never before her love in action. And you know what that is what the world needs from us. The world needs to see our love in action. As the hymn writer put it, they will know we are Christians by our love, they will know we are followers of Jesus Christ by our love. More than ever before the world needs to see us follow Jesus Christ to a new direction, second to a new future, and thirdly and finally to new lifestyle of unselfish Christ like love. Will you bow your heads with me, O God we ask this morning that you would help us at the beginning of a new year to make up minds to follow Jesus and never before, we pray in his strong name. Amen Jaanuary 15th A Cynic’s Search for the Secrets of Life If you are familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes, then you know that it’s not a very positive book. Instead, it’s mostly cynical and negative. However, in the midst of pessimism, Ecclesiastes shares some extremely positive, life-giving insights. In the end Ecclesiastes discovers some of life’s secrets, and shares them with his readers. However, before telling us how to live a good life, he first tells us how NOT to live a good life. In Ecclesiastes chapter 2 verses 1-11 he shares three popular
but ultimately dead end paths that people often travel in their
quest for a good life. The writer of Ecclesiastes in these verses
confesses that he spent most of his adult life walking down these
three paths. They were the paths of pleasure, the path of possessions
and the path of production, our work, our career. These experiences of the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds me of an old story about a man who went for a walk in the forest. After walking for awhile, he got hopelessly lost. He wandered around for hours, going down one path, and then the other, but none of them led out of the forest. Then abruptly, he came across another hiker walking through the forest. He cried out, “Thank God for another human being. Can you
show me the path The other man replied, “No, I’m lost too. But we
can help each other in this way. We can tell each other which
paths we have walked down that led nowhere, and through the process
of elimination, we can figure out the path that leads home.”
Over the next two weeks we’ll turn our attention to those three right paths. But this morning we will heed his wisdom and warning about the wrong paths and look at the first path that leads us to having a life of contentment. For he learned that each of these wrong paths promised far more than it could deliver. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that these three things are unimportant—because they are. Everyone needs some pleasure in life, everyone needs at least some possessions and everyone needs to be productive in some way; we all need to work. These three paths are all important, but they are not ultimate; they are not the secrets to a meaningful and contented liife. In our scripture reading this morning the writer of Ecclesiastes lays out a one key essential for living a good life. However, in keeping with his overall pessimistic and cynical tone he once again begins on a negative note before moving to a positive one. Please hear with me again: “Again, I saw vanity under the sun: the case of solitary individuals, without sons or brothers; yet there is no end to all their toil, and their eyes are never satisfied with riches. ‘For whom am I toiling,’ they ask, ‘and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is vanity and an unhappy business.” (4:7-8) What a sad passage. Ecclesiastes speaks here about people who work hard, make good money, but have no meaningful relationships. They are all alone; they are “solitary individuals”. Several years ago I meet one of these solitary individuals a few weeks ago. As a volunteer hospital chaplain I was called to the emergency room one night when a woman was brought to the ER by ambulance. She and her husband had been eating dinner at a restaurant, and while she was eating, she suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. While the doctors worked with the woman, I stayed with her husband, trying to support him during this scary time. A few minutes later a doctor approached the man and the me and announced that, in spite of their best work, the man’s wife had died. The doctor handed me an envelope that contained the woman’s
wedding ring, necklace, and eyeglasses. Obviously the man was
stunned with grief. The man did not have a pastor because he and his wife did not attend church. I asked if he could call a family member to come take him home, but the man explained that his family was scattered across the country, living hundreds of miles away. I asked if he could call a coworker to be with him, but the man said he had retired several years earlier and had no work relationships anymore. So I said to the man, “What about a neighbor? Can I call one of your neighbors to come and take you home?” The man replied that he and his wife did not know any of their neighbors in their apartment complex. I helped the man with the hospital paperwork, then prayed for him. He handed the man the envelope that contained his wife’s
jewelry and glasses and escorted him to the hospital exit. As tragic as that story is, it’s not an isolated event. The sad fact is that our country, our community is full of “solitary individuals.” Why is that? At least three factors contribute to the rampant loneliness found in our country. First, we live in: 1. A culture of radical individualism. In our effort to lift up the individual, we have lost much of the communal and relational aspect of human life. Second, we live in a culture of extreme mobility. People in our country move a lot. One out of five American families moves every year, cutting themselves off from family and friends. Third, we live in a culture of intense competition. It’s hard to be intimate and close to people when you are in competition with them. I read a story recently about an extremely bright premed student at Stanford University in California. This young premed student fought and clawed and pushed in order to graduate number one in his class. That fall he would begin medical school. To reward him for having done so well in school, his parents gave him a summer trip to the Far East. While he was there, he met a teacher who said to him, “You are poisoning your life with your intense competitiveness, trying to get ahead of everyone else. It is killing your spirit. That’s not how people are supposed to live. Come and live in an atmosphere where there is no competition, where everyone shares and loves.” That sounded good to him, so he called his parents and told him that he was not returning for medical school. Instead, he was going to live in a commune. Six months later his parents received a letter from him. “Dear Mom and Dad, I know you were not happy with the decision I made last summer to quit school and live in a commune, but I want to tell you how happy it has made me. For the first time in my life, I am at peace. Here there is no competing, no hustling, no trying to get ahead of anyone else. Here we are equal, we all share, there is absolutely no competition. This way of life is so much in harmony with the inner essence of my soul that in only six months I have become the number two disciple in the entire commune, and I think I can be number one by June. Well, there are a lot of lonely people today. Our intense competition, extreme mobility, and radical individualism are just a few of the causes. Let us go to our SR the writer of Ecclesiastes where he talks about “solitary individuals,” people who lack significant relationships in their lives, people who are all alone. And he says: “This is not the way God intended life to be. People are not meant to live their lives as solitary individuals. Hard work and financial success are no substitute for being connected
to other human beings.” Indeed, says the writer of Ecclesiastes,
“It’s crazy to toil away at work and miss out on relationships.”
That, says Ecclesiastes, is “unhappy business.” Although
he comes at it from a negative point of view, the writer of Ecclesiastes
says that one of the primary keys to contentment is being connected
with other persons and “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Thought one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (4:9-12 NIV)] Let’s look closely at the passage. Read verse 9 with me. Although this passage is often read at weddings, it’s about relationships and friendships in general. Ecclesiastes is affirming that if we want to live a good life, we must highly value the people in our lives. Two are better than one. He then points out some of the benefits of connecting with others. Read verse 10 with me. One of the benefits of relationships is that they give us support when we fall. And we fall a lot. Next in verse 11 read with me, he says that relationships give us warmth. And that’s not just true physically but also emotionally. Our lives are warmed by having relationships with others. Read verse 12 with me. He says another benefit of relationships is that they give us strength for facing life’s battles. Life is a battleground, we are often attacked, and family and friends help us fight and win those battles. In short, Ecclesiastes says, if we want a meaningful and contented life, then we must prioritize relationships. Of course, doing so takes a lot of effort. Maintaining good relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and fellow church members is hard work. It takes a lot of time and effort and energy to prioritize the relationships in our life. Relationships are often messy. They require enormous effort to maintain. But, in the end, relationships, with God and with others, is what matters most. When we get to the end of our life, it’s not going to matter how big our stocks and bonds portfolio are, or how many diplomas are hanging on our wall, or how many career awards we’ve won. No, when we get to the end of our life, what’s going to matter is our relationships with God and with the people we love. One of my favorite stories is shared by one of my favorite authors Max Lucado one day while he was on the beach for vacation. He was sitting on the beach one summer day, watching two children playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sandcastle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. He expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised him. Instead of crying, they held each other’s hand, laughed a big belly laugh, and sat down to build another castle. He said he learned an important lesson from those children that day. All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spent so much time and energy creating, are build on sand. Sooner or later a wave will come along and knock down what we
have worked so hard to build up. And when that happens, only the
person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh
and rebuild. Let us pray.
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