From Sampler to Sower

Teaching Series: Look Up

Message Title: Elijah Was a Man Just Like Us

Sermon in a Sentence: “Elijah was a a man, just like us. He prayed earnestly (James 5:17a).”

Text(s): Psalm 121:1-2, 1 Kings 16-18, James 5:17

Message Summary:

We started a new series at Water’s Edge this week called Look Up. The theme verse from the series is Psalm 121:1-2:

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth (NIV).

The Psalmist asks where he can turn for help, and he knows the answer.  “My help comes from the Lord.”  When we need help, we don’t look to other things or other people.  We’re called to lift up our eyes and turn to God.  In this series we’ll be learning what it means to live a life a prayer — a life that looks up.

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Teaching Series: Cultivate

Message Title: Faithfulness and Self-Control

Sermon in a Sentence: Running to win the prize requires a certain trust and disciplined self-control.

Text(s): Galatians 5:22-23, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Message Summary:

This week marked the end of our Cultivate series. We’re still playing catch up from all the weeks we had to miss due to the snow and ice this winter.  While the other catch up combination weeks had a bit of logic to them — joy and peace; patience, kindness and gentleness — this mash-up of faithfulness and self-control wasn’t quite as natural.  Hopefully I did them justice, though to be honest I feel as though I may have shortchanged faith.  I would have liked to spend more time on the connection between faith and faithfulness.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Cultivate

Message Title: Goodness

Sermon in a Sentence: God does not save us because we are good, He saves us so that we can do good.

Text(s): Galatians 5:22-23, Matthew 19:16-22, Micah 6:8

Message Summary:

This week we continue our Cultivate series by looking at the sixth attribute of the Spirit’s fruit: goodness.  This is a difficult topic to address because in modern English the word “good” is almost meaningless.  What is good?

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Weekend Teaching Series: Cultivate

Message Title: Patience, Kindness, and Gentleness

Sermon in a Sentence: God calls us to bear with those who typically would annoy us, actively offer grace to those who have nothing to offer in return, and to serve those “below” us in our social structure.

Text(s): Galatians 5:22-23, Exodus 34:6-7, 2 Peter 3:9, Luke 6:32-36, Matthew 20:25-28

Message Summary:

This week we continue combining some of the fruit in the hopes of finishing the series on time.  I had already planned on combining kindness and gentleness, since as concepts they are so closely related.  And like any good auctioneer trying to make sure everything has a chance to sell, I threw in patience for good measure.  Just trying to keep up with the weather cancellations.

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Granted, it’s been a while since week in review #20-almost exactly a year to be, well, exact.  So it’s high time to get back to this.

Weekend Teaching Series: Cultivate

Message Title: Love

Sermon in a Sentence: The solution to the problems caused by love is not to give up on love, or to tone love down; it is a radical reorientation of love.

Text(s): Romans 5:1-8; Romans 8:38-39; Galatians 5:13-26; John 15:1-17

Message Summary: This sermon was the second in our Cultivate series for Water’s Edge. It’s all a part of our church’s Homesavers campaign.  From the first of the year through Ash Wednesday, every department of our church, children, youth and adult, are all taking a closer look at the Fruit of the Spirit.

Read more to see our original video The Vegetables of the Spirit and to see a summary of our teaching for this topic.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Avatar

Message Title: Avatars and Incarnation

Sermon in a Sentence: We do not need to fear rejection when we approach God, because He chose us.

Text(s): Ephesians 1:3-14

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, Again, a fairly straightforward message that was fun to preach.

Message Summary:

We began by watching the following clip.  (The embedded copy is from YouTube.  We got our clip from WingClips.com.)

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Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #5: If you give up on hope, then you’ll be happy.

Sermon in a Sentence: Biblical hope does not disappoint because it is grounded in a God who does not fail.

Text(s): Ecclesiastes 9:3-5, Isaiah 38:18, Romans 5:1-5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty:8 of 10; This week’s lesson incorporated several videos which all had to be cued at the right time, plus shooting the best (and most complicated) of our Mythbusters videos.

Message Summary:

This week we wrap up our Mythbusters series with a sermon on hope. Originally we were going to complete the trilogy of faith, hope and love, but a couple of snow days and the fact that our next series is set to coincide with Lent means we have to cut it short and wrap up this week.

We began by showing a video from eleven72 called Change IS Possible.  It features a guy singing about hope.  Only he realizes as he sings that some people never change, and hoping they will really is meaningless.  The song ends with the line: “There is no hope.  Give up on hope.  If you give up on hope then you’ll be happy. Or whatever.” The video closes with text on the screen encouraging viewers not to give up on hope, but we made sure to stop the video before that.  Our fifth myth was the closing line of the song – “If you give up on hope, then you’ll be happy.”

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Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #4: All You Gotta Do is Believe

Sermon in a Sentence: Biblical faith moves from mental assent, to trust, to obedience, and ultimately to an experience of God’s grace.

Text(s): Genesis 15:6; John 3:36, 6:29; Acts 8;Romans 5:1; 2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 2:8-9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10 Yeah, we did another custom video (see below) but that’s nothing new.  The only “new” thing was having to convert a Quicktime video clip from wingclips.com so it would play in EasyWorship.  (We use Super for video conversions. I thoroughly recommend it.  I do not, however, necessarily recommend EasyWorship.  It has some real plusses, but also some significant drawbacks.)

Message Summary:

The message this week focused on what exactly the Bible means by “Faith.”

We started off talking about the “power of positive thinking.”  Showed a quick video clip from the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop from wingclips.com.  If you haven’t checked them out yet, I’d strongly recommend it.  They have a detailed and current index of movie clips.  What is more, you can get the clips directly from them, including clips from movies that are in theaters right now, like Mall Cop.  Seeing a clip from an “In Theaters” movie instantly got students attention.  Next time it might not, but for the first time we’ve used Wingclips, it was an instant attention getter.

The clip we showed featured Paul Blart (Kevin James) explaining that “the mind is the only weapon that doesn’t need a holster.”

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Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #3: It’s to late for me to go home now

Sermon in a Sentence: You are God’s child, and there will always be a place at home for you.

Text(s): Matthew 12:31-32; Luke 15:11-24

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10; Again, about the only difficult thing was producing another episode of our Mythbusters spoof videos.

Message Summary:

This week I decided to offer something even better than a summary.  If you’re interested, I’ve posted the full audio of the sermon in our Senior High Service.

Of course, if you’d rather read a summary, here it is.

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Last week was a crazy week.  Didn’t get much done by the way of blogging unfortunately.  But I didn’t forget you all . . .

Here it is, the Week in Review for our second night in the Mythbuster’s series.

Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters

Message Title: Myth Two: God Doesn’t Speak to People Any More

Sermon in a Sentence: If we want to hear God’s voice, we need to stop reading the Bible and start eating it.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 11:18; Joshua 1:8;1 Samuel 3; Psalm 1:2; 2 Timothy 2:15; James 1:22; Revelation 10:9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 of 10, now that our set is set, this service was fairly easy.  The only real challenge was making yet another episode of Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Summary: We started with the story of the calling of Samuel, a young man dedicated to God by his mother Hannah, who grew up in the Tabernacle serving God and the High Priest Eli.  Late one night the Bible tells us that Samuel heard a voice calling his name.  He got up, went to the side of the aging Eli the priest, as he probably did fairly often, and asked “What is it you want?”  Eli tells Samuel that he did not call him, and sends him back to bed.

The Bible tells us this happens three times before the High Priest realizes what’s going on.  Finally it dawns on the old priest that God is calling the boy.

Now we can understand why young Samuel might be confused.  What doesn’t make sense is Eli’s response.  How can the High Priest of Israel fail to recognize the voice of God?

I suspect it’s because Eli fell for our second myth: God doesn’t speak to people any more.

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