We don’t know a lot about them as a church. We don’t know how they worshipped; we don’t know what songs they sang, which translation of the bible they preferred, and we don’t know what the preacher was like. What we do know is how they gave. This is week one of our Stewardship Emphasis…
The Language of Love
The Language of Love Last summer Angela and I celebrated our fortieth anniversary with a trip to Europe. During our three weeks there, we had the opportunity to visit twelve countries, and I marvelled at the fact that so many people were either bilingual or multilingual. If you’re wondering, multilingual means that you speak many…
Our Relationship with our Kids
My oldest niece has a philosophy. Actually, she has many philosophies, but I’m only going to share one with you today. Her philosophy on parenting is this: The government should put birth control in the water, and people would have to pass a parenting test in order to get bottled water. Makes sense to me.…
Real Relationships: Child to Parent
RR Our Parents If you’re as old as me, then you remember how TV families we grew up with were often more extended ones than there are now, you know, more families with several generations living under one roof. The Waltons had their Grand Parents living with them. The Beverly Hillbillies had Granny, the Munsters…
Real Relationships: Family
It was Tolstoy who said, “All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Have you ever stopped to think that both the Old Testament and the New Testament start with the story of a family? And the bible itself is a collection of family stories. There are happy…
Forget It!
If you looked at the bulletin this morning, you would notice that up in the corner is a date. It says January 1, 2023. Now, if we wanted to be precise, it would say AD 2023, but what does AD mean? It is short for the Latin phrase Anno Domini which translated into English is:…
This Changes Everything: Simeon
We all know the words; we’ve heard them over and over again. If you close your eyes, you can almost picture the. The Old Testament words that are read each year during Advent. The words of Isaiah, Micah and David which relate to the coming Messiah. They are repeated in sermons and songs and printed…
This Changes Everything: The Second Coming
“I love it when a plan comes together.” Those of you who are older than dirt probably remember this phrase being used by Hannibal Smith in the A-Team. It was first used in the pilot of the show on January 23, 1983. That will be forty years ago in two months. Forty years before that…
Spiritual Disciplines: Scripture Study
Start by reading three random passages from A Fisherman’s Tale. You may have recognized those passages as random paragraphs from my new book, “A Fisherman’s Tale.” And from those three passages, you probably figured out that the book is about Jesus. It is a retelling of the Gospel from Simon Peter’s perspective. But they were…
Spiritual Disciplines, Worship
This ladies and gentlemen is a picture of a paradoxical frog. It is native to the eastern parts of South America. And what makes it a paradox is the fact that while a full-grown specimen is about 7.5 cm in length, when it’s a tadpole it can reach up to 25 cm in length. It…