Rural Rev

My congregation and I continued our Advent preparation today with a message drawn from Matthew 3:1-12. Because we celebrated the baptism of one of our youth in worship today, the text couldn’t have been more fitting. It allowed us to focus on the way that the message of John “The Baptizer” calls all of us [...]

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Advent is a season intended to help all of us prepare our hearts so that we can experience anew the wonderful gift that comes to us in the Child of Bethlehem. But as I told my congregation this past Sunday, it seems that more and more these days the things I do to get ready for [...]

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Today marked the conclusion of my Fall message series: And Then Add…Recipe for a Godly Life. In order to be ready for Advent next Sunday, we had to squeeze two of the virtues mentioned in 2 Peter 1:3-8 into this Sunday: brotherly kindness and love. Compared to some earlier sermons in this series, it was a lot [...]

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Today, my congregation and I drew near to the end of our Fall message series rooted in 2 Peter 1:3-8–And Then Add…Recipe for a Godly Life. For me, at least, this study of key virtues that keep us from being “ineffective and unproductive in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus” has been thought-provoking and energizing. But today–sandwiched [...]

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Today’s message marked the mid-way point in the 7 virtues that my congregation and I are examining as part of our Fall message series. Appropriately, our virtue du jour was “perseverance”–just the virtue one needs when you’re halfway home but still have a long way to go. As I’m sure is true of most churches, [...]

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Since this Sunday happened to fall on Halloween, it seemed more than just a little providential that our Fall message series (“And Then Add – Recipe for a Godly Life’) brought us today to the virtue of self-control. In my experience, at least, Halloween is not a holiday associated with exercising restraint. Instead, the whole [...]

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Today’s sermon on “Knowledge” represented Step 3 in our Fall message series: And Then Add…Recipe for a Godly Life. For most of my adult life, I’ve been an ‘acedemically-oriented’ person (I believe that “study geek” is the alternate term), so this message had a real ‘hook’ for me. I care a lot (sometimes too much?) [...]

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Our fall message series on 2 Peter 1:3-8 continued today with a focus on “goodness.” As I indicated in my sermon, goodness is something of a ‘weak word’ in our culture these days. We want to look good and feel good. On occasion, we may even make the choice to do some good. But God [...]

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After taking a Sunday off for a little vacation (it’s amazing how exciting AND how exhausting moving into a new church facility can be), I was back in the pulpit this week with the first installment in a new message series: And Then Add: Recipe for Godly Living. Taking its cue from 2 Peter 1:3-8, [...]

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About a month ago, my congregation started the process of moving into a new church home. Although there are still things that remain to be moved, adjusted and figured out; I feel like we can say that this transition is now complete. We’ve had three Sundays in our new building, and–while not everything has been [...]

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