Prayer for September 16, 2020: Please pray with me. God of forgiveness, thank you. In our confession, we speak words that scare us – that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. Humans don’t like this – we want to believe we can free ourselves. But...

Martin Luther defined sin as the turning inward on oneself. I think that’s a pretty good definition. When we turn in on ourselves, we turn away from God and from everyone else. By Luther’s definition, sin is narcissistic in nature, which is pretty fitting actually. When we talk about...

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Prayer for September 14, 2020: Please pray with me. God of forgiveness, thank you. Thank you for giving us forgiveness. Thank you for not basing forgiveness on whether we earn it or not. We’d all be screwed if you did. Change our hearts because of your forgiveness – melt...

(I preached this sermon on Sunday, Sept 13, 2020 in response to the Gospel reading – Matthew 18:21-35 – where Jesus tells Peter to offer forgiveness 70 times 7 times. You can see the entire service or skip to the sermon by visiting www.ststephenlc.org) Chris, a man in his...

Prayer for September 10, 2020: Please pray with me. God of grace, you grant us the privilege of grace and mercy. We didn’t earn these things. You give them to us anyway. And they are a privilege. A privilege that comes with responsibility. When you give us grace and...

Let’s start with a definition. Lexico.com defines privilege as, “A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” So what does that mean? It means that a privilege doesn’t automatically mean you are better off. It could though. A privilege could be...

Prayer for September 9, 2020: Please pray with me. God of mercy, have mercy on us. We desperately need your mercy – especially when we don’t think we do. We need your mercy so that we can be merciful with others and ourselves. Forgive us when we lack mercy...

When you hear the story of the Israelite’s exodus from bondage in Egypt to freedom, who do you identify with? Who do you actually come closer to? Those are different questions. Those are questions I struggle with. We want to identify with Israel because it is clear that Egypt...

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