Christ the Kind and Thanksgiving Sunday!
Matt. 6:25-33
(1) Focus
Statement:
This sermon tells us to not worry
because God will take
care of us and to be thankful for
God's continuous care.
(2) Function
Statement:
Because of this sermon the
congregation will relate to instances
in their lives where God has been there and cared for them and will be thankful.
Introduction:
Today is
Christ the King and Thanksgiving Sunday!
This Sunday completes the Christian year. We have cycled through Christ’s birth and life. Today, we celebrate that Christ’s sits on the
throne in heaven and reigns along with God over all creation. We celebrate His reigning in our lives! We celebrate that whatever happens He is
there to bring us through, and we can be thankful for that!
1st Movement
As I may have
already indicated before, I lived through a very bitter split in the church
that I was a member of as a teenager. I
would like to share one story from the time we attended the church after the
split which was about two years.
It was a Saturday
work day at the church. We had been
working inside on either installing a Baptistry or remodeling the nursery,
putting one way glass in so people in the nursery could see the worship
service. Things had gone pretty
well. In some ways, the church had tried
to pick up and go on over the last two years; in other ways, they had not. We had done a lot of work on the building
during these regular work days, and the church had tried to create a new start,
but there was a lot of bitterness toward "those other people." This particular work-day, we had finished
what we were doing inside, and a prominent lady from our church and myself
(about a 17 year old youth) were out in front of the church. There was this old ugly stump out in the
front of our church where we had cut down a dead tree in the past. A man from the other church who was a farmer
came by, stopped, and offered to pull out this stump for us with one of his
tractors. Before I tell you what
happened next, you need to know that this man, prior to the splitting of the
church, had been the Youth Sunday School teacher, had held cottage prayer
meetings with the youth in his home, and had been a trustee in the church. When this man made the offer to remove the
stump, this leading lady in our church laid into him something fierce with me
standing at her side. "You get off
of this property! We don't need your
help! You didn't help us when you were
here, and you're not going to help us now!" As he kind of backed toward his truck, he
made another attempt. "I just
wanted to do what I could to help; I think we all need to work together; I could pull it out pretty easy with my
tractor." She said to that,
"Get out of here! We don't need
you!" After he left, I tried to
talk to her, but she made one other statement that I will never forget, "I
don't know if it is right or wrong, but that is the way I feel!" After this last of many events that showed to
us that the people were not willing to leave the past in the past and move on
for the Lord, my family and I moved to another church. I was very broken, my family probably left
mainly because of me, but the Lord brought me through it and has helped me to
grow and be better because of this chain of awful experiences in my life. The Lord has taken care of me!
I can remember one
other time, as I looked at this scripture, before Donna and I got married, my
family and I went on vacation to Michigan.
My grandparents and some of my other relatives were in Michigan, and we
would try to go up there about once a year to see them. We were driving up, and it was night. It was one of those dark, rainy nights where
you can't see too well. I was driving,
and we had missed the turn where we usually turn because things do not look the
same at night. We were trying to get off
in Holt because that is where my mom's brother lived (Holt is a suburb of
Lansing). We saw an exit that we
recognized as being a road near them, so we went off. We circled around off of the ramp and came to
a stop light. We looked the situation
over, and decided to turn left. We
couldn't see any signs, but that felt like the way that we should go. As soon as I made the left turn, blue lights
started flashing in my rear view mirror.
I pulled off, and the policeman came to my door. I told him that we were lost, and he said,
"That's evident!" Come to find
out, we were headed up a one-way street the wrong way. He said, "It's a good thing it is this
time of the night because normally people are coming down this road at 55
mph." He told us how to get where
we were trying to go and let us go. The
Lord, with the help of this officer, took care of us again!
2nd movement
Our passage today
says not to worry about our life, what we will eat or drink, and don't worry
about our body, what we will wear. Look
at the birds of the air and the flowers in the field. God takes care of them so wondrously, and we
are more important to God than these. We
spend a lot of time worrying about life.
As I look back over my life, God has been there. God hasn't always sheltered me from the bad
as is evident from the first story that I shared today, but God has helped me
to grow and be better in spite of what Satan or the world brings my way! I have learned to cherish the
scriptures: (1) "All things work
together . . . .", (2) "God is not the author of confusion . . .
.", and (3) "God will not allow us to be tempted beyond . . .
." God can take our hurts and turn
them into something good for us. On the
other hand, there have been those times when God has sheltered me from the bad
as is evident by the second story. I
know God doesn't always promise to do this.
We don't know what the future holds, but we know that God is there and
will take care of us. That is what our
scripture tells us this morning!
3rd movement
In a couple of
days, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving Day.
As we pause for just a moment, I would like to ask you to try to think
of some experiences in your life when God has been there and cared for you. Pause . . . . Have you thanked God for God's abiding
care? I challenge you to do that as we encounter
Christ at the table today; after you
receive communion, you can kneel at the altar or you can pray at your seat,
whichever seems to you to express the most thanks to God. Also, if my story hits a little close to home
because you have experienced a crisis in your life that has left you broken,
God wants to restore your life. Won't
you bring that God as we encounter Christ at the table this morning? I also hope that after looking at this today
we can be more conscious of God's abiding care as we go through this next
year. God deserves our praise and thanks
more often than once a year! Amen!
Prayer of Confession
Service of Communion
No comments:
Post a Comment