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I want to begin this morning with a simple question: What will you be remembered for? What is it about you that people will remember even after you’re gone?

Some people, like Wayne Gretzky or Tiger Woods, will be remembered for their great ability to play sports. Other people, like Sir Winston Churchhill or Abraham Lincoln, will be remember for being great and influential leaders. Still other people, like the Wright brothers or Thomas Edison, will be remember for their life-changing inventions.

But how about you? Not all of us will be world class athletes or national leaders or famous inventors. So how will we be remembered? How will you be remembered?

This morning we are beginning a new message series. And the title of this series is “Built to Last”.  And one of the main issues we want to tackle is, “What can we do with this brief period of time called “our life” that will have lasting impact? Because, I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want my life be useless. I don’t want to live on this planet for some 90 years and accomplish nothing of value.  I want to do something that matters. I want to be a part of something that will last. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are going to conclude our Great Battles of the Bible series. You might remember that we started this series with the Sunday School Classic – Joshua & the Walls of Jericho. From there we went to the not-so-familiar story of Jonathan & his armor-bearer. Then we talked about our most memorable character of this series – King Snack-of-ribs (that is, King Sennacherib) and his attack on King Hezekiah in Jerusalem. Then finally last week, we talked about Elisha and his practical joke on the Arameans. And through all that, we’ve learned (or at least have been reminded of) many different things about the character of God. We’ve learned that God is sovereign and that He is the one who directs all the affairs of man. We’ve learned that God cares about individuals as well as nations and He intervenes on our behalf. We’ve even learned that God has a sense of humor and He does things that are totally unexpected.

Well, today we’ve got one more story to look at and I trust that we can learn one more thing from this Great Battle of the Bible.

Now before we get started this morning, I have to make a clarification. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are going to look at a fourth battle story, however this one is a little different.  This one is more like a covert, under-cover military operation. So it’s not your typical battle. But it is a fantastic story with a lot of great lessons in it.

You’ll remember that last week, the Assyrians had completely destroyed the ten tribes known as ‘Israel’, and only the two tribes known as ‘Judah’ had survived. Well, today we need to go back in time about 200 years from that point. Israel has not yet been wiped out. The King of Israel at this time is King Ahab and his capital city was the city of Samaria. At this particular time, the Arameans were at war with Israel. But they were having a little trouble because of a certain prophet named Elisha.

So let’s turn to 2 Kings chapter 6, starting at verse 8 to see how this story begins. Read the rest of this entry »

This is our third week in our series of Great Battles of the Bible. We started off with the Sunday school classic – Joshua and the battle of Jericho. Then we looked at the not so familiar story of Jonathan & his armor bearer taking on the Philistines. Now today we are looking at a story that again, isn’t one of the more popular Bible storybook battles, but I think it’s a story that give us some good insight as to who God is and how we are to respond to Him.

So if you want to follow along in your Bibles, we’ll be starting in 2 Kings chapter 18, but I’ll warn you right off the bat, it’s a pretty long story. Its about 74 verses in all – so I’m just going to be reading the key verses – perhaps you’ll want to read all the details later.

But for now, let’s start at 2 Kings, chapter 18, verse 5. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we began a new sermon series – Great Battles of the Bible – because the Bible is just chucked-full of battle stories. We started off with a Sunday school favorite – Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. But this week, we’re going to get off the beaten trail a little bit and tackle a story that you’ve probably heard, but it’s not one of those Sunday School classics.

It all starts just a short while after King Saul is made the first king of Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next few weeks for our morning message time, I want to tell you some stories. Walter always says “Sit down and tell us a story – it doesn’t have to be true.” Well, these ones are true – although some of them are so fantastic, that you might think I’m just making them up. But they are true, because they are found in the Bible.

You see, the Bible is an amazing story. Its the story of the Almighty, everlasting God interacting with the people that He created. And in the Bible we find a huge variety of different kinds of stories. There is a genre for everyone. Read the rest of this entry »