[Propertalk] Fwd: Sermon Resources for January 29 - Part 2

[Joe Parrish]

Don't Forget Your Dance Partner!
 
C.S. Lewis once penned some thoughts on worship, particularly in the face of liturgical innovators in England who seemed to think that every worship service needed to be a kind of variety show with each week being different from the week prior. Lewis had no truck with that kind of thinking. Worship, Lewis wrote, should be a bit like dancing. Once you have learned how to dance and have become good at it, you are able to immerse yourself in the dance and just do it almost without thinking about it. But if you must constantly look down at your feet, if you have to think about each movement before you actually make it, then you can't dance yet but are just learning how to dance.
 
Worship is like that, Lewis thought. A believer should be able to move through the liturgy without having to check his every movement first. An ideal service would be one you hardly notice in the sense of your simply being immersed and caught up in a set of actions and a series of thoughts that are fully a part of you already. Overall, Lewis makes a good point. Still, I would throw in a cautionary note to his analogy: worship may be like a dance that you are so good at you can just do it freely and flowingly, but we dare never forget who our dance partner is! 
 
Scott Hoezee, Center for Excellence in Preaching 
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Help in Facing Our Fears
 
Leslie Weatherhead once told a parable of a little boy who fled from a witch who had turned herself into a cat. As the boy ran, he kept glancing fearfully over his shoulder. The first time he looked back, the cat was the size of a calf. The next time he looked, it had grown to the dimensions of an elephant. Then the boy fell, and was unable to go farther. Resolutely he got up and faced the pursuing horror. It stopped. So he took a step toward it. It backed away. As he continued to advance toward it, it began to shrink in size as it retreated from him. Finally it changed into a mouse and ran under the door of the witch's cottage to be seen no more. 
 
The moral is clear: it pays to face up to your fears. But sometimes that is hard to do. That is when we need to turn to Christ. He can help us stand up to our fears and conquer them. He can cast out demons.
 
Adapted from Leslie Weatherhead.
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Christ Has Come to Free Us
 
That man with an unclean spirit understands who Jesus is better than anyone else in the room. He is on the margins of society and the margins of sanity, but he knows exactly who Jesus is. Remember that the disciples don't figure it out until Chapter 8, when Peter says, "You are the messiah, the one sent by God." This man of unclean spirit is way ahead of everyone, and he wants to know, "What are you going to do with people like me? Are you going to destroy us?" 
 
"Be silent and come out of him!" And then the man convulses and cries out loudly and the unclean spirit leaves him. I still have no idea what an unclean spirit is, but I am impressed. Mark still hasn't told us a thing about what Jesus taught, but he has showed us that Jesus had a power over things that people label as unclean. Mark is making this point: that the will and purpose of God present in Jesus is engaging and fighting against the purposes of evil that exist among humanity. This battle is not fought just at the highest levels of government or industry, but right in the midst of common folk like us. The battle of good versus evil, right versus wrong, life versus death happens amidst the people who are gathered for worship. Christ has come to shatter the domineering designs that shackle people to lower standards for life than God intends. Christ has come to free us from the demons like prejudice and pride, greed and guile. Christ is among us, whenever we gather in church, to demonstrate a power among us.  If we devote ourselves to anything less than a divinely directed destiny, we have missed the goal of faith.
 
Todd Weir, What Will You Do with Us, Jesus?
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Authority without Relationship 
 
A young second lieutenant at Fort Bragg discovered that he had no change when he was about to buy a soft drink from a vending machine. He flagged down a passing private and asked him, "Do you have change for a dollar?" The private said cheerfully, "I think so, let me take a look." The lieutenant drew himself up stiffly and said, "Soldier, that is no way to address an officer. We'll start all over again. Do you have change for a dollar?" The private came to attention, saluted smartly, and said, "No, sir!"
 
James W. Hewitt, Illustrations Unlimited, p. 42.
 
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My Best Demons
 
Kathleen Norris writes, "When I think of the demons I need to exorcise, I have to look inward, to my heart and soul. Anger is my best demon, useful whenever I have to go into a Woman Warrior mode, harmful when I use it to gratify myself, either in self-justification, or to deny my fears. My husband, who has a much sweeter nature than I, once told me that my mean streak grieved him, not just because of the pain it cause him but because it was doing me harm. His remark, as wise as that of any desert Abba, felt like an exorcism. Not that my temptation to anger was magically gone, but I was called to pay closer attention to something that badly needed attention, and that was hurting our marriage. It confirmed my understanding of marriage as a holy act: one can no more hide one's true faults from a spouse than from God, and in exorcising the demon of anger, that which could kill is converted, transformed into that which can heal."
 
What are your best demons? To name them for what they are and how they bring suffering, is half the battle.
 
Kathleen Norris
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What an Understatement!
 
Now comes the understatement. The people in the congregation, having witnessed a scene to rival anything in The Exorcist, look around at each other and say, "What is this? ... A new teaching!" 
 
A new teaching? If this had happened in any congregation I know, they may have sat for hours in stupefied silence, they may have rushed to the altar in sudden repentance, or they may have jumped out of the church windows in terror, but the last thing they would have done was to comment on how this casting out of a demon constituted an innovation in Christian education. A new teaching? Indeed. 
 
To call such an extraordinary event of the casting out of a demon a new teaching, well, I think that constitutes understatement for most of us because our ordinary experiences of teaching are so dull. So much of our teaching and learning involves stuff that is on the periphery of our lives. We may need to know it, but it doesn't exactly hit the core of us, the things which most centrally define us as persons. It doesn't move us, change us, make us new persons.
 
Christ's teaching, on the other hand, transform us. Just ask the demon-possessed man, ask the apostle Paul, ask Martin Luther, ask John Wesley. You could describe this as a new teaching but better yet describe it as God with us. For if God is with us, that changes everything.
 
Brett Blair, www.eSermons.com. Adapted from an unknown source.
 
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What's The Other Reason?
 
A few years ago a teacher noticed one of her students, a shy young girl, was having trouble working out her arithmetic assignment. The teacher went to the child quietly and asked if she could help with any questions knowing the girl was timid about asking for help.
 
When the problem was sorted out the little girl thanked the teacher. The teacher told the little girl not to be shy about asking questions, "That's one of the reasons I am here."
 
The little girl thought about that for a moment and asked quietly, "What's the other reason?"
 
Unknown
 
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The Church Dare Not Have an Influence 
 
In his penetrating book The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian author who defected to America, makes an interesting observation about how the Russian authorities handle the church. He writes: "No one stops them from ringing their bells; they can break communion bread anyway they please. They can have their processions with the cross. But they will in no way allow them to have any connection with social or civic affairs." The church was allowed to go through the motions; it could have a presence, but it dare not have an influence.
 
What bothered the scribes was not that Jesus prayed and preached. It was the fact that his prayers and his sermons were moving the people to action. I wonder if the church still has that concept of authority. So often our problem is not that we do not have authority, it is that we do not use the authority that we have. It is time that we quit defining the problems of the world and start applying the power of the church to the problems. 
 
We have been given authority by God, through Jesus Christ, to heal, to proclaim, to change, to bring redemption, and to expel. We are under an imperative from God and we need not fear either principalities or death for Christ has been given all authority over heaven and earth. Now we need to start applying that authority. 
 
Now the ball is in our courts...
 
 
Many additional illustrations and sermons, including many sermon series for Lent, can be accessed at www.Sermons.com.
 
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