Sermons
2021 15 August Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost: Jesus the living bread – John 6: 51-58
My encouragement for you all this week is to make sure you carve out some time to be with the Lord in a quiet place, read his Word and pray, giving to him your petitions and needs, but also resisting the urge to get the experience over with and done quickly.
Spend the time reading his Word especially the Gospels and words of Christ, chewing and digesting every word and phrase.
2021 8 August Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost Jesus, the Living Bread: John 6: 35,41-51
Come and eat friends and feed on your Lord Jesus who wants to give himself to you. Come and receive the constant antidote to your sickness, the bread of life and medicine that makes the difference.
2021 1 August Tenth Sunday After Pentecost: Jesus is the Bread of Life John 6: 24-35
What I love about God though is that he is proactive and graceful. I often find the feeding he gives is exactly what is required to not only to help me through a difficult time but gives me interesting stuff to consider and chew on, so to speak with joy and
happiness. God provided manna to rain down to help the Israelites survive through the desert experience, and for all of you he will do the same in our desert experiences right now.
2021 25 July Zoom Worship Service: Jesus walks on the waters John 6: 16-24
“It is I; do not be afraid.” These words of Jesus about fear can be a mantra or a chorus of our lives. In all the different anxieties, they are spoken to us. The disciples heard them and remembered them on many occasions. These words, ‘It is I, do not be afraid’ are words which Jesus is speaking to each of us, all of the time.
2021 11 July The Foreshadowing Mark 6: 14-29
Foreshadowing is actually the theme of our Gospel reading in Mark chapter 6 this morning. Some of us may have perhaps asked the question at one time why Mark our Gospel writer wants to go into so much detail, and say so much about how John the Baptist dies. That is because John’s death is actually a foreshadowing of what will happen to Jesus. John not only prepares the way for Jesus’ ministry in his lifetime he also in his own death, appears to prepare the way for Jesus’ death. We are going to have a look at some similarities of what happens to John in terms of the end of his life, as a living sacrifice for the Lord, and also similar things in common with Jesus at his trial and crucifixion.
2021 4 July Jesus Rejected Mark 6: 14-29
In today’s Gospel message we are looking at the rejection of Jesus in his home town. Now home, and especially the town or region you grew up in, you’d expect that place
to be your safe place, the place of comfy slippers where you can relax and be yourself
surrounded by people who truly love you and know you. Well sadly this is not the case for Jesus as he ends up not getting that ‘welcome home’ feeling. But I also wonder what his expectations might have been as he approached ‘home’? Keep in mind that
Jesus has so much of his human history in this community of Nazareth. He’s a
carpenter who was once a key part of the community and now a person who’s left them to go into God’s ministry. What might have been their feelings about that? Had they forgiven Jesus for leaving the community, his mother and siblings in the first place?
2021 13 June Fourth Sunday after Pentecost Mark 4: 35-41
In today’s Gospel reading we encounter the very famous gardening parables of the growing seed and the mustard seed, where Jesus uses these pictures to show us what the kingdom of God is like. Now where I want to begin this morning is to make a focus for a moment on the mustard tree that Jesus talks about. He describes the mustard seed growing into a tree that becomes the largest of all plants with big branches to allow birds to perch in its shade.
2021 27 June Mark 5: 21-43 Jesus raises the little girl
With our Gospel reading today we have an example of what’s called a story sandwich and it has things in it that are definitely compressed and pushed down, and this will be one of the themes we’ll be looking at today. So, this story is a sandwich and what I mean by that, is how the story is told. Mark, our Gospel writer likes to tell the stories of Jesus in the story form of a sandwich. What that means is that we have one large story which has a beginning and an end, and a smaller story inserted right in the middle.
