Hark! the Herald Angels

We're thinking together on these Sundays of Advent of the symphony of our salvation, and this morning we come to the third movement of that symphony, ...

On Beyond Zebra

This morning I want to launch us into the message with a reading from one of the great minds in theology, Dr. Seuss. I have here a copy of On Beyond ...

Glory to God in the Lowest

Christmas is a time of surprises. A lady was preparing her Christmas cookies. There came a knock at the door. She went to find a man, his clothes poor, ...

Levi's Genes

Everybody knows the genealogies are the biggest yawn in the Bible. "Rehoboam begat Abijah, and Abijah begat Ralph"I mean it warms your heart about as ...

Grace at Christmas

Those of us from a western culture somehow take all of our techniques and apply them when we come to a genealogy. If the Bible were all genealogies, we ...

A Faith Like Mary's

It may very well be the story in the Bible. The account was read to you this morning of the angel Gabriel's appearance before a young, Jewish peasant ...

A Twinge of Nostalgia

One wintry day the children put a top hat on their snowman, and, in a spell of Christmas magic, he came to life.

Frosty the Snowman showed those children ...

Christmas 365 Days a Year

We often talk about the night before Christmas, but what do you think about on the morning after Christmas? I've been thinking about this wonderful ...

Getting Sober For Christmas

When you drive long distances, as some of you just did for Thanksgiving, it is so easy to be lulled into a state of . I'm sure you know what I'm talking ...

Martin Luther's Christmas Sermon

Design, Not Despair

After reading that genealogy, believe it or not, I have a message of hope for you today. I begin on that positive note because I sense that some of you ...

Seeing the Light

We're all familiar with the traditions relating to the Wise Men. For instance, for some reason we've decided there were three of them. The Bible doesn't ...

Jesus Came to Be the Light

About twenty years ago a house near the entrance of our subdivision kept their Christmas lights burning long into January, even though the Christmas season ...

A God's-Eye View of Christmas

 

At the turn of the millennium, people are looking back to the great events of the twentieth century: the amazing journeys people have made, ...

Blood in Bethlehem

Two weeks ago NPR carried a story about plans to spruce up Bethlehem, the dusty little Palestinian town of Jesus' Nativity. Tourists take the bus from ...

A Wonderful Night

W. Would you look at those stars! There's Orion and the Pleiades, a shooting star ... and another one! Aah, I will never get tired of looking at the night ...

Christmas As the Angels Saw It

The words we are going to read from Scripture were probably part of a hymn sung by the early Christian believers. You'll notice that the first line of ...

When God Bent Down

Before there were vast black holes sucking matter into the staggering abyss of interstellar space; before there existed stardust and subatomic particles ...

The Purpose of Christmas

First John 1:1—4:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands ...

God's Marshmallow Test

Back in the 1970s a research team of psychologists from Stanford University performed on a group of 4 an experiment they called the "marshmallow test." ...

A Tiny Gift- Strangely Wrapped, Silently Delivered

Introduction

Since the Christmas season began, one word has fallen from our lips more than any other. Maybe you haven't stopped to think about which ...