Sermons

According to Luke: Demon Possessed, Dominated and Delivered!  Opening Illustration: Have you ever wondered what life would have been like if you had not met your wife or husband? Have you ever wondered how things might have turned out if you had moved to Dallas instead of Daphne? Maybe you ponder from time to time what your life would have held if you had accepted that job over your current job. There are lots of what if’s in the world aren’t there? Makes me remember the classic Christmas movie, “It’s A Wonderful Life” staring James Stewart as George Bailey. Do you remember that story? George is a frustrated banker and nothing seems to be going well. In a fit of discouragement he calls out to God and wishes that he had never been born. He maintains that everyone would have been so much better off if he had never been born.  God obliges Bailey and shows him what his life would have looked like if he had never been born. Clarence, Bailey’s guardian angel” sh...

According to Luke: The Storm Before The Calm Opening Illustration: It was just a week or so ago that we experienced the reality of Hurricane Michael. Michael took the normal quiet tranquility of the panhandle of Florida and turned it into a nasty mess of a war zone. Winds clocking in at 150 mph took well built homes and turned them into heaps of firewood. Trees were striped of their leaves and branches. Businesses that had been in operation for more than 5 decades were blown off the map as if they had never been built or even existed. It is estimated that more than 50 people might have lost their lives.  Storms, especially hurricanes, are scary. Hurricanes were not something that I ever thought much about until I moved here. It is good reminder thought that hurricanes don’t always have names do they. Sometimes the hurricanes take different forms. We call these the storms of life. Some of us are going through the storms right now. A storm could be a serious illness,...

According To Luke: Let Your Light Shine Opening Illustration: Saved By The Light In February 1954, a navy pilot set out on a night-training mission from a carrier off the coast of Japan. While he was taking off in stormy weather, his directional finder malfunctioned, and he mistakenly headed in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, his instrument panel suddenly short-circuited, burning out all the lights in the cockpit. The pilot "looked around … and could see absolutely nothing; the blackness outside the plane had suddenly come inside." Nearing despair, he looked down and thought he saw a faint blue-green glow trailing along in the ocean's ebony depths. His training had prepared him for this moment, and he knew in an instant what he was seeing: a cloud of phosphorescent algae glowing in the sea that had been stirred up by the engines of his ship. It was the "least reliable and most desperate method" of piloting a plane back onto a ship sa...