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Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

LC
Lora Copley

Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider. Ever been to a Corn Maze? If you look at the maze from the outside, the perimeter, it looks like a harmless old corn field.  Very different when you view it from smack in the middle, the inside, trying to find your way. And of course, the view is…

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Psalm 71:1-6

Epiphany 4C

Doug Bratt Headshot
Doug Bratt

Psalm 71 seems to be an elderly person’s plea for God’s help in dealing with his enemies. While some scholars see this as aging King David’s prayer, the identity of the psalm’s author is not essential to the psalm. In fact, James Mays calls its language “plastic.” By that he seems to suggest that the…

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Jeremiah 1:4-10

Epiphany 4C

Scott-Hoezee
Scott Hoezee

My wife mentions this semi-often. For her, it’s a combination of envy and consternation. The issue is vocation, “calling,” and it crops up in conversation between the two of us whenever someone asks me once again to tell my “call story” to be a minister or in case some other preacher—in the course of a…

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Genesis 4:1-14

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

This is a story about the other side of Eden, a story about life and death, a story about brothers, a story about God. An introduction to this text could highlight current stories of life and death – stories that make it clear that we are for life and against death.  When I preached on…

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Genesis 45

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

The Joseph narrative comes to a climax in Genesis 45.  In reflecting on Joseph’s story up to this point, one can see that Joseph was both a wounded man and a broken man.  He was wounded, certainly, by the loss of his mother, by the mistreatment of his brothers, by the mischaracterization by Potiphar’s wife,…

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Numbers 13

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

Here in Numbers 13, the Israelites have arrived at the southern border of the Promised Land.  Ever since the days that they left Egypt, this is where they were heading.  The land was the gift that God had promised them.  This was “the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites” (13:1, emphasis…

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Judges 13:1-16

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

In its introduction to the book of Judges, my NIV Study Bible summarizes Samson’s life this way: “a lone hero from the tribe of Dan who delivers Israel from oppression from the west” (p. 324).  The book of Judges is sometimes seen as a book of heroes, with Samson in all of his strength, standing…

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Hosea 4

HDJ
Heidi De Jonge

When I first learned to preach, I was told that each text has one theme, and one theme only.  A few years later, another teacher of preaching told me that each text has many possible legitimate themes.  One must choose a theme and run that theme like a magnet over the surface of the text. …

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Genesis 13:1-18

Chelsey Harmon
Chelsey Harmon

Have you ever returned to a special place from your past? The place you got engaged, for instance, your old dorm room, your first job. What about a place where you distinctly heard the voice of the Lord? Even sadder places seems to pull us back or make us speed up as we pass them:…

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Genesis 38

Chelsey Harmon
Chelsey Harmon

Genesis 38 has to be near the top of the list of least-preached texts in Scripture. There’s death (by the hand of God no less), sex—both in marriage and outside of it, and lots of things that parents might not be ready to have their kids understand (i.e. parents are too embarrassed to have to…

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