Sermons

  According To Luke: Bring Out Barabbas  Opening Illustration: How many of you have ever watched “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”? Good, most people have. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is a fairly simple show. Basically it is just a trivia show. You start out with a $100 question. It is pretty easy. You have 4 choices…a,b,c, or d to answer the question correctly. It is a multiple choice game show. The questions get harder along the way. The more questions that you answer correctly, the harder the questions are and the more money there is at stake. Eventually the contestant will get stumped. If they do, they have three lifelines. They can have two of the answers removed giving them a 50% chance of getting it correct. They can phone a friend hoping that their friend will give them the correct answer. The last lifeline is to poll the audience. The original host of the show, Regis Philbin once stated that the ask the audience lifeline was correct 95% of the time. In fact, most of the tim

  According To Luke: The Verdict On Jesus Opening Illustration: In studying for this message, I ran across a funny story. A true story. It happened about 20 years ago in San Francisco. The story starts with a talk radio station. The host of the show asked the listeners to express an opinion. 35% said “yes”. 33% said “no”. 32% said that they were “undecided”. One listener, aghast at the large number of undecideds, called into the show and stated that it was “this sort of apathy that’s ruining America.”  The only problem with all these responses was that the radio station had never posed a question. The people were listening but they were not attentive. They were tuned in in body but tuned out in mind and spirit. Friends that’s the way we are at church I’m convinced. Our bodies are at church, our mouths are singing, but we really are not tuned in.  Not only do I think that is the way that many people experience church, that is the way that many of us experience Jesus. We know abou

  According To Luke: A Crushed Rock Opening Illustration: I have a question for you this morning. Do you love God’s Word? Raise your hand for me this morning. Do you love God’s Word? Good deal, it appears that most of us in this room have a certain affinity for the Bible. Another question, why do you love God’s Word? I bet the answer to that question is different for each person in this room. Some of us love God’s Word because it offers us hope. Others of us like it because it corrects us, it teaches us how to be more like Christ. Some might say that we love the Bible because it gives us insight into the Creator God. All those answers would be absolutely correct. I will tell you why I love God’s Word.  God’s Word is filled with deadbeats and derelicts. It is filled with stories of losers and loafers. It’s pages tell stories about the duds, the flops, the bums, the has beens and the also-rans. There is only one character in the Bible who you would classify as a winner and victory a