Ephesians 2: 1-10 (links validated 2/21/24)

New Resources

  • Sermon Starters (Lent 4B)(2024)

    by Doug Bratt
    In his sermon, “I Was Just Wondering … How Do I Understand Predestination?” at the LaGrave Christian Reformed Church on October 22, 2023, the Rev. Peter Jonker tells a story about Harry Jellema. Dr. Jellema was a beloved professor at Calvin University who devoted decades of his life to studying reason and logic. He was among the world’s foremost philosophers who spent much of his life trying to “answer life’s great questions.” But in 1982 Jellema was dying. So his pastor Jake Eppinga went to visit him. Jake prayed with and read Scripture to him. They talked about both life and death. Eppinga later reported that while Jellema had spent a lifetime reading, thinking and speculating about life, his last words to Eppinga were: “It’s all grace, Jake. It’s all grace. My whole life long I’ve been carried along by God’s grace.”
  • Grace Abounding

    by Dan Clendenin
  • Exegesis (Ephesians 2:1-10)

    by Richard Donovan
  • Lent 4B (2024)

    by Phil Heinze
  • Lent 4B (2024)

    by Craig Keen
  • Lent 4B

    by Bill Loader
    always good insights!
  • Snakey!

    by Jim McCrea
    Someone once posted a true story on the internet about a time when two different hives of bees that were both located on a dairy farm near San Francisco got into a feud. So they were stinging each other to death. The beekeeper wasn't sure what to do, so he got in touch with Dr. J. Lloyd Henderson, who was the control manager for the Golden State Dairy Company. Part of Dr. Henderson’s job was detecting feed odors in milk. He knew that odor was important to bees and that bees recognized each other by their smell. So he sprayed both hives with a powder that had a strong scent of apple blossoms. As a result, the bees could no longer distinguish friend from enemy, and the bee war ended...
  • Lent 4B (2024)

    by Emerson Powery

Illustrated Resources from the Archives

  • Saving Grace (Recommended Resource!!!)

    by Mickey Anders
    Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, reached the unshakable conviction, now a canon of twelve-step groups, that an alcoholic must 'hit bottom' in order to climb upward. Wilson wrote to his fellow strugglers, 'How privileged we are to understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection: that pain is not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth.' The Apostle Paul could not have phrased it better. Early in the AA program, two groups divided over the issue of perfectionism. One, an offshoot of the Oxford Group, insisted on 'Four Absolutes' and required its members to commit to a strict Christian creed. The other, led by Bill Wilson, started with a dependence on grace, an acknowledgment that its members would never achieve perfection. Absolutes, said Wilson, either turned alcoholics away or gave them a dangerous feeling of spiritual inflation. Over time, the perfectionist Oxford Group shriveled up and disappeared; grace-based AA has never stopped growing...
  • The Beauty of Humility

    by Phil Bloom
    ("When Michelangelo Buonarroti was in his mid-eighties, realizing his death was near, he confided to a friend that two things made him sad. 'The first,' he said, 'is that I have not taken more care for the salvation of my soul.'...")
  • Sermon Starters (Lent 4B)(2021)

    by Doug Bratt
    Such helplessness resonates throughout one of Katherine Paterson’s prize-winning books, The Great Gilly Hopkins. Its main protagonist is an eleven-year old whom countless foster parents have thrown out of their homes. Readers increasingly sense, however, that Gilly has engineered most of those evictions. She has done nothing and, in fact, seems to be unable to do anything to earn her caretakers’ acceptance. Gilly has, in fact, basically done everything she can to earn their rejection. To most of the world, especially her beleaguered social worker, Miss Ellis, Gilly is basically a worthless nuisance who is helpless to earn love. Gilly’s condition is much like our spiritual condition before God. God’s dearly beloved children are naturally persistent rebels who do little with what God has graced us. In fact, it sometimes seems as though we do everything we can to earn God’s rejection...
  • Journey toward Wholeness

    by Fred Buechner
    ("Naya was born in Washington, D.C. two years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln there and lived well into her nineties. Like everybody else, she had her happy times and her sad times, her weaknesses and her strengths, her good luck and her bad luck, but what makes her so rare in my experience is that, no matter what happened to her, she seemed always to remain remarkably and invincibly herself...")
  • From God, to God

    by Fred Craddock
    In Dallas, Texas, one week prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, I heard German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias reminisce about his life in Israel where his parents were missionaries. After WWII, he returned nervously to Israel to see if the treatment of Jews by the Nazi regime had severed forever his friendships there. When he knocked at the door of an old friend, he was welcomed with an embrace. He joined his friend in the backyard, where a crude tent had been erected for the observance of the Feast of Tents or Booths, a time of recalling Israel’s wandering in the desert, dwelling in tents. Fastened on the entrance to the tent were two slips of paper, each bearing a brief message: on the left was "From God"; on the right was "To God." There, simply yet dramatically, said Jeremias, was the whole of life: from God, to God, and in the years between, a tent...
  • Lent 4B (2021)

    by Joseph Cunningham
    there are surprising properties to some strands of venom too. Consider the following story, reported by National Geographic back in February 2013: Michael decided to go for a swim. He was on vacation with his family in Guerrero, Mexico, and it was hotter than blazes. He grabbed his swimming trunks from where they’d been drying on a chair… and jumped into the pool. Instead of cool relief, a burning pain ripped through the back of his thigh. Tearing off his trunks, he leaped…from the pool, his leg on fire. Behind him a small, ugly, yellow creature was treading water. He scooped it into a Tupperware container, and the caretaker of the house rushed him to the local Red Cross facility, where doctors immediately identified his attacker: a bark scorpion…one of the most venomous species in North America. The fierce pain from a sting is typically followed by what feels like electric shocks racking the body. Occasionally victims die. Luckily for Michael…the bark scorpion is common in the area, and antivenom was readily available. He had an injection and was released a few hours later. In about 30 hours the pain was gone. What happened next could not have been predicted. For eight years Michael had endured…a chronic autoimmune disease of the skeleton, a sort of spinal arthritis. No one knows what triggers it. In the worst cases the spine may fuse, leaving the patient forever stooped and in anguish. “My back hurt every morning, and during bad flare-ups it was so horrible I couldn’t even walk,” he says. But days after the scorpion sting, the pain went away, and now, two years later, he remains essentially pain free and off most of his medications. As a doctor himself, Michael is cautious about overstating the role of the scorpion’s venom in his remission. Still, he says, “if my pain came back, I’d let that scorpion sting me again.”...
  • Where There Is God, There Is Love

    by Thomas Gumbleton
    When a gunman rampaged through a high school in Parkland, Florida … a 15-year-old soccer player named Anthony Borges showed undaunted courage. Anthony, who is of Venezuelan descent, apparently was the last of a group of students rushing into a classroom to seek refuge. He shut the door behind him and frantically tried to lock it, but in an instant the gunman appeared on the other side. Instead of running for cover, Anthony blocked the door to keep the shooter out. He held his ground even as the attacker opened fire. "I asked him why he would do that," his lawyer … told me. "He said, 'What's so hard to understand about what I did?' He had no issue with risking his life." Shot five times in the legs and torso, Anthony phoned his father to say he had been wounded. He was rushed to a hospital and survived: Photos show him with wires and tubes snaking from him. He still can't walk — it's unclear if that is just temporary — but fellow students say he saved their lives...
  • This Powerful Grace

    by Janet Hunt
    I was called into a hospital room to visit someone I knew only a little. Once we exchanged pleasantries, I asked how she was. Lying flat on her back in a hospital bed, being sustained by oxygen and iv fluids, her face crumpled. I thought she was about to speak of her physical illness. Instead, she spoke of a lifetime of regret. Of deep grief. And of her resulting despair. I did not know then and I do not know now all the details. I know I struggled some for what to say for even then it was clear that the fault was not all, nor even primarily, hers. Even so, I spoke of God not letting go, of God never letting go. I spoke the truth that there is nothing God cannot, nothing God will not forgive. I offered absolution. I offered prayer. And I went home with a heavy heart. Late the next day I returned to this. She was sitting up in a chair. She was off the oxygen. The iv’s were taken away. And she was smiling.
  • Grace That Works

    by Rick Miles
    Ed Beck is a former basketball player at Kentucky, former chaplain to the U.S. Olympic team, and a pastor. Once, he said, he thought that the Kingdom of Heaven was like the best, first class athletes. Observing their training at the Air Force Academy practice field with all their dedication and native skill, seeing all that self-sacrifice and effort to be the very best, he concluded that here just might be the ultimate symbol of God’s Kingdom. But then he wandered down to the running of the Special Olympics, which feature physically and mentally challenged persons of all ages, races and backgrounds. He watched while eight of these special Olympians lined up for the world 100 meter dash. All eight charged off the starting line at the sound of the gun, but suddenly a small-framed boy among them fell to the asphalt and began to cry loudly...
  • Explain Grace

    by David Russell
    There is something called Prevenient Grace. Basically, it means grace that goes before us, grace that was there before we even knew it. Everything is a gift, and even the ability to accept the gift is itself a gift. Our mission team arrived in Puerto Rico on a Saturday. We got to the church where we were staying that evening. The people at that church were very nice, very gracious, and we thought we would worship there the next morning. I mean, it would be a short commute, about 30 steps. But we were told that we should go to the church where we would be working, maybe 15 miles away. So we did. The music was lively and although I didn’t understand many of the words, I enjoyed it. Then came the sermon, and it was translated. The pastor had a very different theology than me, but I decided to overlook that and take it in as a sociological learning experience. But the pastor and the whole congregation were clearly so happy that we were there. They were so welcoming and they prayed for our team during the service. After church we were going to go out to eat and then go to a beach. It was our free day. We were asking the worship pastor about a good place to eat. We wanted to go to the kioskos, a collection of food places by the beach, but we thought it would be too crowded on a Sunday at lunchtime. He said, No, I’ll take you there, follow me. We followed him. We got there and it was packed. He got out of his car and said, you can park right here. It was in the grass, beside a little garage. I was driving the 15 passenger van and after 3 or 4 attempts I backed into the spot. And then he took us to this open air restaurant. It was very nice. We asked but he said he was busy and couldn’t stay and eat with us...

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