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