Bethel United Church of Christ

Sermon 05/29/11

By Pastor Diane

Psalm 66: 8-20

⁸Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, ⁹who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip. ¹⁰For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. ¹¹You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; ¹²you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place. ¹³I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will pay you my vows, ¹⁴those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. ¹⁵I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah ¹⁶Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me. ¹⁷I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue. ¹⁸If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. ¹⁹But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer. ²⁰Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.

Acts 17:22-31²²Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ ²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

February 22, 2012

Ash Wednesday Dinner

Help us choose the main course for our dinner. Would you prefer Chicken Fajitas or Applesauce Beef Loaf. Then one with the hightest number of votes wins. Thanks!

(17 votes)