For the New Year

With 2010 just around the corner, I was thinking about how we look at the new year as a fresh start and a chance to renew commitments or challenge ourselves to do the things that we want or need to do. Hopefully this message serves as a jumping-off point for a Christian perspective on the year ahead.

Sermon, December 27

Anticipation

Today's message is really about the difference between our perspective and God's perspective when it comes to doing things. It seems sometimes that God moves very slowly, and it's hard to understand His ways. But, there are reasons, and He does keep His promises. It may not be in our lifetime, or in several lifetimes, but God desires to show people His long-suffering goodness. Christmas, the coming of the Christ-child, is an example of that, and it looks ahead to the time when Jesus will return. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not, but He will return.

Sermon, December 20

And, don't forget to check out the new links to the right!

New Links

I'm trying to add a few helpful elements to the blog, and you can see on the right a new little area with useful links. The top one is a church calendar, where you can see what events are coming up as well as see regularly scheduled items. Also, I threw on a few of my favorite Christian websites, and hope that they will be of value to you.

Feel free to pass the blog along to others if they are interested. And, if you have any questions, please feel free to get a hold of me!

A Poor Christmas

With Christmas right around the corner, I wanted to do some kind of Christmas message. However, I'm pretty non-traditional in some ways, so this isn't exactly a traditional Christmas message. It is a challenge to care for the poor, which we are often insulated from in our middle-class culture. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone, and I'm working to change some ways in which I think about the poor and needy.

When we start to focus on others more and ourselves less, I think we find God's blessings to be greater. And we can find real joy in doing things that may have eternal value, rather than the temporary happiness of the trappings of the season.

Sermon, December 13

How to be Useful

This is a continuation from last weeks message, and explores what we need to do to truly be useful to God. Hopefully it makes sense. :-) It's nothing profound, but definitely some things that I've been thinking about as of late.

Sermon, December 6

Used or Useful?

I'm taking a little break in between Thanksgiving and Christmas from the Thessalonians Series. This message was something brewing in my mind here recently as I reflected on my own life and Christianity. Sometimes we are being used by God, but are we always seeking to be useful, available to Him in whatever capacity He decides? That's what I wanted to try and explain and for the next couple of weeks examine what it means to be useful.

Sermon, November 29

Being Thankful for Others

Okay, since we're headed right in to Thanksgiving this week, here's another message about being thankful, this time for people, specifically. Some people are easy to be thankful for, but that doesn't mean we don't have to be thankful for others.

Hope you all have a wonderful holiday and are filled with joy and thanksgiving!

Sermon, November 22

Thanksgiving

It seemed fitting to go ahead and do a message or two relating to the Thanksgiving holiday. Part of it was my wife's (good) suggestion, and part was that I had to come up with something to preach on.

Okay, so maybe there's more to it than that! :-) At any rate, I do think Thanksgiving is a fitting holiday for Christians, and hopefully this message fits not only the season, but also explains some about our need to be thankful and why we have to learn it.

One other thing: someone had emailed me with some questions regarding the sermon download after they had trouble with it. If you have any problems, please let me know so that I can try and track down what might be happening. There are two ways to get the sermon. One is to download the file directly to your own computer and play it from there. The big blue button on the 4shared page will allow you to save the mp3 file on your computer and listen to it whenever you want to.

The other way to listen is to stream it right from the download page itself. When you click the link from the blog here, the page that it takes you to has an embedded media player. It might take a second or two to appear, but it's located right above the blue download button and you can click the play button and it will play it right there. Give it a few seconds to buffer after you hit play, depending on the speed of your connection, but this is an alternative to the download. Try both ways if you have any issues with either one.

Sermon, November 15

Catching up...

Last week ended up as more of a blur of a few events rather than anything coherent, mostly due to the onset of cold/flu junk early last week. We are better now, and I think we're getting back on track. Here's the links for this week's sermon as well as the previous week. Hope you enjoy!

Sermon, November 1
Sermon, November 8

Being an example

There are a lot of very applicable ideas in 1 Thessalonians 1:6-10, but I only picked on a few. Paul discusses the example the Thessalonians set, and how they were looking forward to Christ returning. Good things for a young church, and good things for us to think of as well!

Sermon, Oct 25

A New Sermon Series

We're going to be working through 1 Thessalonians, and today we covered the first 5 verses. I like the letters to the Thessalonians because there are very good practical truths in there that are applicable for any church. However, it's neat to look at the letter from the perspective of realizing just how young that church was, and how God sustained them and caused them to grow.

Sermon, Oct 18

Today was a bit of a conglomeration of things, so hopefully anyone listening to this can still make sense of it all. We started with some promos for Operation Christmas Child, which is the project from Samaritan's Purse that distributes shoebox presents to kids around the world.

Then, we discussed our missionaries here at the church and jsut went over how our missions giving works at the church.

Finally, we talked about Village Missions, and encouraged everyone to be praying for the mission right now as it grows and changes.

Sermon, October 11

Wrapping up James

This was the fina; sermon in our study of James, and I hope it took care of more questions than it brought up. James wants us to understand how important following Christ really is, and that it's not just a walk in the park. However, it is worthwhile, worth seeking out the truth, and I hope you've seen that as we've gone through this letter.

Sermon, October 4

Patiently Enduring

James is bringing things full circle now, coming back to the idea of undergoing trials. They are a part of life, but God can use them to teach us many things, including patience. It's hard to wait for things, especially when it's waiting to be rescued from the problems we're going through. We want to jump ahead, avoid difficulty. But, it's a divine appointment that we need to go through.

Sermon, Sept 27

Two for one today

Well, it seems that I completely forgot to upload last week, so there are two links today for sermons! If I get any more forgetful, I'm gonna be in real trouble ;-)

Sermon, Sept 13
Sermon, Sept 20

How We Fight

It's hard not to get a bit upset sometimes when things don't go our way. But how many times have we examined why we get upset? James tells us that it's our own envious nature, our selfishness. We look to blame others, but we can only be responsible for our own actions and reactions. James tells us to humble ourselves and let God raise us up, which is pretty hard to do. Hopefully, though, we find that as we submit to God, we learn that He can solve the problems that vex us.

Sermon, September 6

Real Wisdom

Everyone wants to be thought of as wise. Someone that has answers, that knows what to do. They handle themselves right in any given situation. But maybe there's more to it than that. James thinks there is, and he gives a description of what godly wisdom is so we can understand what God wants us to have.

Sermon, August 30

Taming the tongue

It's hard to keep our mouths in check. I know. I've said more than my share of poorly thought-out stuff, it seems. It really is amazing how quickly we can go from hero to zero with just a few careless words. We all know that little old phrase "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." We also know that it's now true. Words can hurt, and how we speak says a lot about how we think. So, we need to be diligent to control our words, and use them to build others up, and never to tear down.

Sermon, August 23

Prove It

Today's message was a pretty light treatment of James 2:14-26. There's a lot to delve into in this passage, but the basic gist is that real faith produces real works. A faith that has no outward display of an inward change isn't worth much. In fact, James calls it useless. That's pretty stiff, but important nonetheless. Our faith should stand up to being challenged, and we should be able to take a good hard look at ourselves (or have some other Christian that we trust do it) and see at least some evidence of God working in our lives, and an outflowing of that into what we think, say, and do. Just saying "I have faith" isn't enough. The important thing to determine is "Is there proof?"

Sermon, August 16

Also, we had a great afternoon out at lake Pueblo, and the baptism service went wonderfully. God provided a perfect day for us, and there were maybe 80-90 people present to share in the testimony of the four who were baptized today.Thanks to everyone who was there, and perhaps I can even try to get some pictures posted up on here for others to see!

Baptism Service on the 16th

Our Baptism Service is going to be this Sunday (August 16th) down at Lake Pueblo. I have made a little map and added some directions on it for those who aren't sure how to get where we are going. If you have any questions, please contact me and we'll try and help you out! It's pretty exciting, with several people getting baptized and we're going to make a day of it with a cook-out and an evening service after all that.

Everyone is invited!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD MAP

Playing Favorites

How often do you size someone up and make a snap judgment about them? Let's face it, we all do it more often than we think. But how often are we right? That takes longer to tell, and sometimes we don't take the time to really know a person. James warns us about the dangers of showing partiality to people because of who they are or what they look like or how much money they have. The world is full of lost souls that come in all different packages, and we must be so careful to treat each one with the same love and care that God has shown to us.

Sermon, August 9

The Lord's Supper

I won't spend a lot of time discussing what this sermon was about, but I can tell you that I was really looking forward to it. Being able to take part in communion with our new church was a wonderful time, and a real blessing as a pastor.

In the message, I tried to set the context for the Lord's Supper. What were Jesus and the disciples doing that night in the upper room, and why were they getting together? What was the significance of the Passover and what Jesus was showing them? Hopefully I answered those questions!

Sermon, August 2

EDIT: Well, it appears that we had some technical difficulties, and the message was not recorded :-( My apologies to those who have tried to listen. We're still trying to figure out how to get all our ducks in a row with this recording, so it's inevitable that things like this happen! So, let me tell you, it was a great sermon, the best I have ever preached! No, in all reality, I really enjoyed preaching this one, it just hasn't been preserved for posterity. Oh well...

Looking in the mirror

I tend to be a big picture person, and as such I like to cover passages of scripture with more of a telescope than a microscope, if that makes sense. Sometimes that means that there's a lot to cover in a particular sermon, but I want to give a sense of how the pieces fit together as a whole.

With that disclaimer, James is a very pointed book with lots of very specific instruction. In today's passage, James 1:19-27, there's a lot to chew on, and we by no means exhausted all that was there. But, what's clear is that God is concerned about our behavior, just as much if not more so than our brains. We need to study and apply the Word of God, and I can say that even as a pastor, I don't always do that. Hopefully, for myself and everyone else, we are growing in maturity and learning to be doers of the Word as James exhorts us in these verses.

Sermon, July 26

Wanting what we don't have

The passage we looked at in James today dealt with the idea of trusting in God's goodness. That seems straightforward enough, but the context is dealing with wealth and poverty, and temptation. All of us, at some point or another, wish we had more, wish that we were more wealthy. But James says that God exalts the one with less, and the rich man actually has to remember that his riches will pass away. Temptation also strikes all of us, an appeal to our sinful desires. We want to be satisfied with something that we know is wrong. Do we give in or do we turn away and trust that God can give us something better than that tempting thing.

Sermon July 19

Learning God's Way

We've started a new sermon series this week, working through the book of James. I have done Bible studies through it and read it many times, but never preached through it. I love James' abrupt but loving style. He speaks very straightforwardly, and uses many illustrations to get his point across.

Today's sermon takes in the first eight verses, and the main topic is learning through trials and difficulty. We all experience them, some are small, others threaten to overwhelm us completely. God uses them to teach us and work in us, so we should look at them with a joyful attitude. That's not always easy to do, but gradually, I believe we learn more and more to rely on God and depend on His help and wisdom.

Sermon, July 12

Think on these things

I have to start with an apology for this sermon. Well, an apology about the recording, anyway. We had worked up a way to hook my laptop up to the sound system itself a couple of weeks ago, which was working pretty well. Yesterday, when I started getting everything ready, I failed to connect the cable that actually connects the amp to my microphone port on the laptop, which meant that there was basically no sound. Or so I thought. My laptop has a built in microphone, and even though it was in the back of the church, it actually picked up most of the sermon. So, I'm going to go ahead and post this, with the warning that you will probably have to turn your speakers up very, very loud. Don't forget to turn them back down later!

This is the last message in the series on being a healthy church, and the discussion is about having the right perspective. God cares about what we do and think, and Paul's challenge in Philippians 4:8 provides a fitting end (I hope) to this bunch of messages. It's a call to discipleship, to really following Christ, where every part of us belongs to Him.

Sermon, July 5

Authenticity

I think I got the sniffles handled for this week, which was nice. And I'm sure for those of you actually listening to these messages, you'll appreciate not hearing "snnssssnnffffff" every 10 seconds. Anyway...

As we continue to talk about a healthy church, today's topic was being real, that we need to be authentic and genuine both as individuals and as churches, and that hypocrisy is our enemy. We don't want to admit that we're messed up sometimes because we are afraid of what people will think of us or we are ashamed, but God already knows everything about us. And, if we're honest, we realize that everyone needs help, everyone needs the support and love of the body of Christ.

There's more to ponder about all of this, so take a listen, and feel free to leave comments if you like! And, if you have problems, you can email me at pastor.ed79@gmail.com.

Sermon, June 28

Meaning and Purpose

Our primary passage today was Ephesians 2:1-10, which has all sorts of great stuff in it. This sermon was mostly intended to give support to why we are to live out the Christian life, and why we are Christians at all. Salvation is truly a gift, it is from God's love, not because of anything we do. Real fulfillment comes from understanding what verse 10 says, that we are His workmanship!

Sorry about the sniffling on the recording. There is something over at the church that just makes my nose run like crazy, and hopefully I can take care of that by next week ;-)

There is no recording from the evening service this Sunday. Sorry!

Sermon, June 21

How the body works together

This Sunday we talked about how the church is supposed to work. Unity is everyone having a common goal and common mindset, but the diversity in the body of Christ means each person has a different role to play. Just as our bodies are made up of many members working together harmoniously, so the church is to work together, with people from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures forming a cohesive whole, much greater than the sum of its parts.

The evening service dealt with the biggest barrier to working well as a part of the body: pride. If we don't have the right perspective about ourselves, we won't be able to serve Christ effectively or serve with others in a pleasing way. Click on the links to download the messa

Morning Sermon, June 15 2009
Evening Service, June 15, 2009

Unity in the local church

We're working through a series of passages that (I hope) have bearing on how a healthy church should work. The first one was on each member examining themselves with the Word, and then bringing their lives into conformity with it, not the other way around. This second sermon has to do with what true unity is, at least in part. Unity can be very confusing for us because often we mix in modern concepts such as tolerance and peace. Not that we don't need those things sometimes, but our world has defined those differently, and not necessarily Biblically.

So, have a listen, feel free to leave comments, and let's work on real, Christ-like unity in our own lives and churches!

Sermon, June 7 2009

Greetings!

Welcome to the Kendrick Bible Church blog! You'll be able to get sermon audio here, as well as post comments and ask questions. In the future, we'll try to have upcoming events and links to other sites of interest. Let Pastor Ed know if you have any comments or questions, and feel free to pass the address on to others if you like!

Click on the links below to get the sermon. They are in mp3 format.

Messages for May 31, 2009
Morning Sermon: Healthy Church Part 1
Evening Message: Communication