Sermons

In need of some inspiration or motivation? Read or watch a sermon by Pastor Kubke!

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Faith that Works

A 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!

“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!