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