Sermon Commentary Library

Our weekly sermon commentaries are Lectionary-based, which across its three-year cycle, encompass a vast array of biblical texts. Filter the Sermon Commentary Library to search Scripture texts by book and chapter to find commentary, illustrations, and reflections to spark ideas.

Looking for something else? View our Heidelberg Catechism sermon resources and our Reformed Connections to the RCL section that traces Lectionary texts to specific parts of the Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession.

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2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Sermon Commentary

Lent 4C

Christians might argue that a source of the world’s hatred and violence is our failure to view people the way God views us. Countries wage wars and people launch verbal broadsides against each other in part because we believe that our enemies are something other than beloved image-bearers of the living God. Parts of North…

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2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13) 14-17 Sermon Commentary

Proper 6B

Students decorated the back bumpers of cars on the campus of the dispensationalist Christian college near which I grew up with a number of eye-catching bumper stickers. Among the most memorable was “Read the Bible. It will scare the hell out of you.” I’m not sure reading the Bible ever scared anyone away from eternal…

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2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Sermon Commentary

Lent 4C

There are Sundays when nearly all of us feel like the Spirit inspired the Scriptures’ authors to address the day’s headlines. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson is one of those times. As I write this Commentary, Russia continues to escalate its assault on Ukraine and its people. Its troops recently bombed a maternity and children’ hospital,…

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2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17 Sermon Commentary

Proper 6B

The end of Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson has taken on perhaps extra poignancy over the past fifteen months or so. That’s partly because, at least in the United States, the global pandemic, political partisanship and struggles for racial justice have added new chapters to the story of what its verse 16 calls “a worldly point of…

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2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Sermon Commentary

Lent 4C

“From now on,” Paul insists to the Corinthians in this Sunday’s RCL Epistolary Lesson, “we regard no one from a worldly point of view (16)”.  Yet whenever I hear him say that, I want to ask, “Really?!  Do we really no longer view people from a worldly point of view? After all, how quick aren’t…

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2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17 Sermon Commentary

Proper 6B

When we were younger (so much younger than today . . .), we perhaps naively thought that so long as we were sincere and well-intentioned then, even if we made mistakes (as we all do), we could avoid creating any enemies, avoid having anyone who so disliked us as to avoid us in public even…

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2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Sermon Commentary

Lent 4C

When we were younger, we perhaps naively thought that so long as we were sincere and well-intentioned then, even if we made mistakes (as we all do) we could avoid creating any enemies, avoid having anyone who so disliked us as to avoid us in public even as they derided us in private. But then…

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2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17 Sermon Commentary

Proper 6B

“Life is difficult.  This is a great truth, perhaps the greatest truth.”  Those opening lines of M. Scott Peck’s bestselling, The Road Less Travelled, were a sensation back in the 1970’s.  Now, as the GEICO insurance commercial says, “Everybody knows that.”  What people don’t know is how to deal with the difficulty.  That’s what Paul…

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