Sermon text: Psalm 25:1-10

Download Sermon: pdf / doc

This year for Advent our sermon series is Advent Conspiracy. At some point in our culture we have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.

And I know that many people probably discuss this every year. We mention our consumerist culture and how it distracts us and in a way sucks us into thinking that we need more and more stuff. My goal is not to get us all not to celebrate Christmas . . . to give up buying gifts for each other and to stop spending time with family and traveling . . . that is not the goal. The goal is to help us to find some ways to reprogram our Christmas traditions around the reason for the season.

Sermon text: Matthew 18:15-22

Download Sermon: pdf / doc

So this week has been an interesting week. I believe that God changes us. And when I say that - I don't just mean that one day we are doing drugs, drinking beer by the gallons, lying, cheating, stealing, worshiping movie stars, our wallets . . . and everything else . . . and then we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior . . . and bam, life is perfect. We stop all of that and now sit in our houses for hours reading the Bible, praying and sipping decaffeinated coffee.

No, when I say that I believe that God changes us . . . I mean that God never stops changing us. I really mean this. You should know what God is working on inside of you right now. No one is there. We don't figure it all out at some point. I don't care if you are at the beginning of your spiritual journey or the end . . . God is still trying to change you. To mold you more and more into who he created you to be.

Sermon text: Ephesians 4:25-32 & James 1:19-21

When I was in high school I had a dirt bike that I used to ride around our horse farm. It couldn't be licensed for the road, but it was great. I would just ride around the farm and try to jump things and run through the creek. Well one evening the motorcycle was not running well so myself and some friends pulled it down the street behind the three-wheeler to a friend's house. We worked on it for a couple hours, got it back going, and then decided after dark, to ride it back to the farm. I rode the three-wheeler and went directly back to the farm which was less than a mile from my friend's house. One of my friends rode the motorcycle and instead of going straight back to the farm decided that it would be a good idea to race up and down the road to make sure everything was running fine. That's when things began to go badly.

My friend did not know that down the street was the local chief of police's house. And as anyone that has spent time with motorcycle's knows, there is a very different sound that a dirt bike makes than a regular motorcycle that is licensed to be ridden on the road. And so that night the chief of police was watching television and heard a dirt bike in the neighborhood and called into the police station to report it.

Sermon text: John 16:5-15

Download Sermon: pdf / doc

Today we begin 4 weeks dealing with several of the questions that you put in the sermon suggestion box over the past several weeks. There is no way we can get to all of the questions, but where possible I have combined the topics to cover most of them in one of these 4 sermons. The reality is that some of the questions or suggested topics are so large that it would be impossible to address them adequately in 30 minutes, so for the next 4 weeks each sermon will be 3 hours long. Just kidding. We simply won’t be able to get into the deep details of some of the topics, but I keep all the suggestions and hopefully we will use them as a basis for choosing sermon series and Discovery Hour classes in the future.

This week we are going to discuss the Holy Spirit. There were several questions in the suggestion box concerning the Holy Spirit and then Dave Timmerman’s small group stuffed the box full of questions about the Trinity. No big deal, in 30 minutes or so I am going to rehash 2,000 years of discussion.