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Have you procrastinated yourself into guilt? |
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Faith that WorksA sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke September 27, 2009 James 2:8-10
There was a little item of news late in the spring that is something that you hear about every now and then. In this case, it happened in Montreal, but I remember hearing about similar incidents from many different parts of the country.
The news was about a letter carrier who found a way to make life easier for himself. Instead of distributing the mail like he was supposed to, he would simply pick up his mail bags, bring them home and pile them up in the basement. He did this for a number of months, collecting his full pay without doing any work at all. Of course, he was discovered when the inefficient postal system finally figured out that a number of complaints about missing mail had his particular postal route in common. If it was just about the man not doing his job, it wouldn’t have made it into the news, but it is actually a crime in Canada to get in the way between people and their mail, and the crime made this man’s refusal to do his job right newsworthy.
There is a similar thing that happens quite commonly when it comes to our relationship with God. You don’t have to look far to find people whose spiritual basement is filled, not with clutter, but with the very important things that God had given them to do. There are calls to worship that went unheeded. There are challenges to repent that were ignored. There is sack afer sack full of opportunities to show kindness or charity or make lonely people feel welcome in the name of Christ that simply have gone unmet. Sure, there are times that you were so busy doing other good things that you couldn’t do it all, but what about all those times that you simply didn’t care? What about the times when you were annoyed, or frustrated, or you thought it wasn’t fair for God to put something in front of you when you had other plans? What about those times when you though that you could custom build your relationship with God and decided that doing the Will of God in any biblical sense doesn’t have to count?
Just like that postal worker ended up in trouble with the law, there are times when get into trouble with God’s spiritual law. It is actually against God’s Law to stuff God’s Will into the basement and feel entitled to the pay cheque of God’s blessings anyway. There are times when God has to shake us up to understand that we are not just declining some kind of suggestion when faith is just about talk and not about action. We are breaking the law; we are endangering our very place in the family of God. Faith without works is not just weak or immature. Faith without works is dead. May God preserve us so that we don’t stuff our spiritual basements so full that it kills us!
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Isaiah 35:4-7 “Is it the Right Kind of Anger?” A sermon by the Rev. Roland Kubke September 20, 2009
See also James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:31-37
One beautiful fall afternoon, there were two friends, each driving his own pickup truck with his girlfriend beside him. They were impressing their girlfriends by racing around the neighbourhood near their high school in Calgary. They drove around and around the school at reckless speeds, one following the other.
As they passed the front of the school during one of their laps, a squirrel ran across the road. The driver in front braked for the little critter, but the driver behind him was not quite as fast with his foot to the brake pedal. There was a soft thump as he bumped the bumper of the truck in front.
This is where things became quite interesting. The driver in the front truck jumped out and slammed his hand onto the hood of his friend’s truck in anger. The friend paid him back by jumping out of his own truck and slamming the other truck’s hood with a text book. In retaliation, the first driver ran back to his truck and pulled out a hammer and started hammering the hood of the second truck. The second driver then ran to the first truck with some kind of tool and smashed in the windshield.
That was about the time when the two ended up pulling punches right there in the middle of the street while their girlfriends screamed for them to stop. Their anger had turned a fender bender into a catastrophe when it came to their trucks, and it probably didn’t do much good for their friendship or their love life, either!
Anger can be a very scary thing, especially if you lose control of that anger. It can be so scary that it seems that anger must be a sin. Is anger really a sin? If anger were a sin, how would you make sense out of the words of our sermon text in the title above? Isaiah wrote, “Your God will come. He will come with vengeance; with divine retribution He will come to save you.” If God Himself can be angry, then anger must not be all bad. Thank God that He directs our anger by His Word so that even anger can be a blessing! |
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Greatness is tied to the people who support you!! |
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Deuteronomy 4:6-8 "Are You Great Yet?" A sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke September 13, 2009
Read the following: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Ephesians 6:10-20; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15; 21-23
I've got a question for you: Do have great grandchildren? Do you possibly have great grandchildren? Do you at least know of someone who does? That leads me to wonder, by the way. Just what is it that makes those children great?
The "great" in "great grandchild" is a wonderful picture of what really makes you great, no matter how many Grandmas or Grandpas or Omas or Opas or Nannas or Babbas you have or don't have. What puts the "great" in great grandchild is the fact that God has blessed such a child with many grandmas and grandpas to love them and pray for them and boast about them and tell them they are special. It's not really a matter of how great the child is as it is how great the blessings of parents or grandparents are for them!
In a similar way, you have received very great blessings from God. You have a God who is near to you whenever you pray to Him in faith. You have a God whose love for you is so great that He has made sure that this love has come down to you through all the generations. You have a God who gave you His Son, Jesus Christ so that He would not just love you, but that He would pray for you and be so proud of you that He talks to all the angels in heaven about you! That is what makes you great. It's not who you are, but who you have. You have Jesus Christ as your Lord and your Saviour. Thank God that He has given you Jesus. In Jesus, we are all great as great can be! |
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Saving faith: A gift to you and a gift to others |
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Speak for Yourself? A sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke September 6, 2009
Read the following: Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18; Ephesians 5:21-31; John 6:60-69
“Speak for yourself!” Has anyone ever said that to you? We live at a time in history when it seems that everything is supposed to be about you, yourself. If you have an opinion, then that’s your own opinion. If you believe in something, then that’s your own belief. If you understand something, then that has to be your own understanding. If you promise something, then that has to be your own personal promise. Nobody could blame you if you get the idea that you are supposed to live for yourself, make decisions for yourself, think for yourself, and yes, of course, speak for yourself. How could you not get that idea when you find it all around you day after day after day?
It is interesting, though, that this concept doesn’t fit into the way the Bible looks at things. In our reading from the Book of Joshua, Joshua said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” He didn’t speak for himself, but also for everyone in his entire household. In our lesson from the Book of John, Peter said, “Lord, we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Peter wasn’t speaking for himself, either. Even our reason from the Book of Ephesians is like that. Paul, in speaking about the proper relationship between a husband and a wife said, “For we are members of Christ’s body'', making it clear that, as members of one body, we are not on our own.
There is so much of this “we” stuff going on in the Bible that we people who are so very much surrounded by the word, “I”, can’t ignore a very important point. God’s gift of salvation is so wonderful that it can’t possibly be just about you. The life of faith is for everyone who believes; it is for all of us together! Thank God that He blesses us so that we don’t just speak for ourselves. Thank God that He blesses us so that we can speak for God’s Word!
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