Have you ever wondered why sometimes God does a miraculous deliverance and other times God seems to be nowhere to be found and you feel like you plod through adversity alone? One of my favorite Facebook posts of all time was a cartoon that was Jesus answering the question, “Where were you?” to a guy […]
This sermon entitled Jailbreak (based on Acts 5:17-24) was first preached on January 18, 2015 at Plymouth Congregational Church of Racine, WI. Today’s jailbreak is a reminder that where God calls, He also provides in whatever way is required, even as He propels us back to our post, to do our duty as our obedience to […]
I like patterns. Maybe it’s that some of us never outgrow Sesame Street or mind-puzzlers, but I always liked those assignments in school where we had to figure out what comes next in the sequence by figuring out the pattern. Well, in the book of Acts that we’ve been studying, we can now see a […]
This sermon entitled Pure Church. Powerful Church. Growing Church (based on Acts 5:12-16) was first preached on January 11, 2015 at Plymouth Congregational Church of Racine, WI. Click on this link to listen to the audio version on YouTube.
There’s nothing like a New Year. All kinds of hopes and dreams and diets are reborn. All kinds of plans are made that will soon be forgotten, lost in the shuffle, or stripped of every ornament and left out at the curb. But still, we love the idea of a New Year. There’s something happy […]
This sermon entitled “The New Year Holiness Challenge” (based on Acts 5:1-11) was first preached on January 4, 2015 at Plymouth Congregational Church of Racine, WI. Click on this link to listen to the audio version on YouTube.
I suppose most of my recurring nightmares are school-related: Skipping Class All Semester Nightmare in which I find I don’t know any of the subject matter–even where the final exam is being held, which in my nightmare is always RIGHT NOW. Then there’s the Procrastination Nightmare with a whole bunch of assignments announced the first […]
This message entitled Share and Share Alike–on the beauty of charity in God’s economy of grace–was first preached at Plymouth Congregational Church of Racine on 12.28.2014 by Barbara Shafer. Click this link to enjoy the audio version of Share and Share Alike on YouTube. Let’s be the Church by learning to share and share alike.
The message Because He Came was first preached by Barbara Shafer at Plymouth Congregational Church of Racine on December 21, 2014. You can read the text version already posted or listen to this message now on YouTube by clicking this link.
It is appropriate on this 4th Sunday of Advent to take a bird’s eye view of why Jesus came. It is hinted at in the final verses of the prayer in our Acts passage (Acts 4:27-30) and therefore, I thought it was fitting that today we pause to see the bigger picture. How often do […]
