Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 26 to 37 of 37 results

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

James Merritt

There was a very lost, wicked, rebellious man who decided it would be good for business if he went down to the church and joined it. He was an adulterer, an alcoholic, and had never been a member of a church in his life. But when he went down to the altar to join the church, he gave public testimony to the church that there was no sin in his life, and that he had grown up in the church, and they ...

27. Why Jesus Likes Sinners

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

King Duncan

Jesus continually shocks us. No wonder the people of his own day crucified him. He wouldn't be too popular in our community. At least not among the better people in town. It is almost as if he preferred to associate with the disreputable, the rejects, the rubble of humanity. "Two men went up to pray," he said on one occasion, "a Pharisee and a tax collector." Now the audience was suppose to hiss a...

28. Worship Wars!

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Stephen M. Crotts

We pastors call it The Worship Wars. One can see the frowning battlements in the faces seated in pews, hear the rumble of its artillery in negative comments, and feel the white heat of its lethal shrapnel in board meetings. "It's boring!" "Why, those songs are so old, every time I sing them I get a backache!" "Worship is becoming a nightclub act! What will we do next?" "Choruses are 7-11 worsh...

29. Pride: The Deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

R. Curtis Fussell

Girolamo Savonarola was one of the great preachers of the fifteenth century. He preached in the great cathedral of Florence, Italy, which contained a magnificent marble statue of the blessed virgin Mary. When Savonarola started preaching at this great cathedral, he noticed one day an elderly woman praying before this statue of Mary. He then began to notice that it was her habit to come every day a...

30. A Lesson From Prayers Overheard

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Theodore F. Schneider

We Watched His Eyes! It was late New Year's Day when the showdown finally came. The number one and two college bowl teams in the nation were set to fight it out in the Fiesta Bowl at Tempe, Arizona, deciding who would lay claim to being the "Beast of the East" and the best in the nation. Among those who predict such things, there was agreement that the nation's number one team would remain numbe...

31. The Good

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Will Willimon

I always hold my breath on Sundays until I find out which texts are assigned by the ecumenical lectionary. Look, I realize that your high tuition pays my modest salary, so naturally I want to make a good impression on visiting parents. (And let me take this opportunity to thank all of you parents for your tuition payments. Without you, not only your Duke sons and daughters, but even this preacher,...

32. Amazing Grace

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Will Willimon

''My son is a good kid. He's quite a remarkable, wonderful young man," the mother said to me on your first day here. ''I'll be the judge of that," I thought to myself. Yet she is probably right. After all, he got in Duke. And our Office of Admissions makes certain that no slouch gets in Southgate. 1300 on your SAT, 198 of you were number one in your high school class. God I thank thee that I don...

33. The Last Coca Cola in the Desert

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

King Duncan

I think we’d all agree that English is a funny language. Every region of the country has its own idioms, its own phrases, that make sense to us but sound ridiculous to people from other countries. In English, we have phrases like “a dime a dozen” to refer to something that is common. Or “too big for his britches” doesn’t speak at all to the size of one’s jeans. Rather it refers to someone who is o...

34. Two Contrasting Prayers

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Richard Hasler

A newspaper reporter once wrote about visiting a church to hear a famous Boston preacher. Later he reported in his column about the pastoral prayer. “It was the most eloquent prayer ever offered to a Boston audience,” but is it not true that prayer is to be offered to God, and to God alone? Jesus once told a parable about two men who went to worship to pray. If we had a helicopter in those days,...

35. Silent Sinning

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Lori Wagner

In our culture today, particularly post-pandemic, a new word has entered into our cultural vocabulary: “Silent Quitting” or “Quiet Quitting.”The term refers to an employee who does the bare minimum in his/her job or workplace. He or she will stay exactly within the job description, will work exactly the required hours, and will fulfill the minimum of what needs to be done without being fired but w...

36. Don't Hold Back

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Jill J. Duffield

It was supposed to be a routine pastoral visit, you know: a pre-surgery prayer, a brief discussion about what was expected on the other side of the procedure. A: “When do they say you get to go home?” or “Will you have to do rehab?” It was questionable as to whether or not a visit was even warranted. This wasn’t a church member who expected a lot of attention, a phone call that afternoon would hav...

37. The Grande Masquerade

Luke 18:9-14

Sermon

Lori Wagner

In 1842, Edgar Allen Poe wrote a disturbing short story called “The Masque of the Red Death.” The story follows a character named Prince Prospero during a time in which a strain of plague is causing people throughout the land to bleed to death. Confident that he can outwit and escape “death,” Prospero seals himself and a large number of his friends inside of his abbey away from the outside world. ...

Showing 26 to 37 of 37 results