Sermon of the Week

Scripture Romans 8:35, 37-39
³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

SERMON: To Confidence
I hope that all of you who were here last week remember that we talked about (PIC)
fear.
The more I think about fear, the more trouble that I believe it causes.
Remember now, fear and worry are just two names for the same thing.

We worry about everything.
We worry about everything from whether the baby will get caught in the bars of the crib to whether our spouse will die and leave us alone to whether there will be money at the end of the month or month left at the end of the money.

Speaking of money, I no longer believe that money, or even the love of money, is the root of all evil.
I now believe that fear is the root of all evil.
Fear leads to distrust and hate.
Fear leads to greed and materialism.
Fear leads to every kind of evil thing from overeating and gossip to laziness and murder.

Because fear drives us to do so many of the bad things that we do, it is vitally important that we learn to control our fear.
But how can we control something that we have not even considered a problem before?
Well, the first thing that we have to do is to recognize that fear or worry is a major issue in our lives.
We need to talk about it.
Is fear always bad?
No; sometimes fear is a good thing.
If you are in the jungle and you hear a lion roaring close by, fear may just save your life.
If, on the other hand, you are afraid that someone will gossip about you because your car is more than 3 years old or has more than 60K miles on it and that fear is driving you to buy a new $30K automobile, that fear can cause you to waste the money that God gave you to underwrite a ministry somewhere.
And believe me, spending God’s ministry money on our fears is an evil thing to do.
In any case, talking about fear, what might be fear, what worries us, can help us get a grip on a driving factor in our lives that, for most people, runs uncontrolled all of our lives.

Naming our fears, our worries, and getting them out in the open is a really good, first step in controlling our fear.
For all you control freaks out there, this is a great place for you (that would be US) to focus our undying urge to control something.
There are a few places where we can let our need to control something run rampant, and controlling our fears is one of them.

Now, when we start to weed out something negative, something sinful, in our lives, Jesus had a little advice on what to do next.
In Matthew 12 and Luke 11, Jesus is recorded telling a tale about a man who was possessed of an evil spirit, which left him.
Before long, the evil spirit decided that it missed its old home, gathered 7 friends and moved back into the man it had left.
The point being, when we set out to reduce the influence of something bad in our lives, say, fear, then we need to replace it with something good or our old, bad or worldly ways will come right back to us.
In this case, I’m recommending that we replace fear with (DIVER PIC) confidence.

As long as there have been people of God, we have been called to put our confidence in God.
In Dt 31:6 as Israel prepared to enter the Promised Land we read: (TEXT)
^{Dt 31:6} Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."
When the Assyrians first came we read these words in 2^nd Chronicles:
^{2Ch 32:7} "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged because of the king of Assyria and the vast army with him, for there is a greater power with us than with him.
That power was the Lord our God.
God has called us, God has created us, and God will never abandon us.
David wrote in the Psalms 46: (TEXT)
¹ God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
⁷ The Lord of Hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.
And in this morning’s reading from The Gospel of St Paul to the Romans, ch8:(TEXT)
I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in Christ, even if the stock market completely tanks and takes the rest of the jobs and all of our pensions and insurance with it, we have(NO FEAR) nothing to fear.
God is with us and nothing can separate us from the love of God that we have found in Christ Jesus!
We can have confidence that the same God who clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds and rabbits loves us and will provide us with what we need, even if the things that we want are never available to us again.
Even if we die, and we have to get over thinking like that, because there is no doubt; we are all going to die; God has already provided life everlasting for us. (BLANK)
Now, maybe you don’t know what I’m going to say next and maybe you do.
This is the third week in a row.
Living like this is not going to be easy.
Throwing away a lifetime of fear and worry, bad habits that we have developed over several decades is going to be HARD.
But we can do it.
In our time of meditation every day, we can say to ourselves: (TEXT) God is my refuge and strength; therefore I will not fear. (TEXT) Nothing can separate me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Over and over, half a dozen, even a dozen times every day say it: (TEXT) God is my refuge and strength; therefore I will not fear. Nothing can separate me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We can build into ourselves confidence in God and in our salvation and fear and worry will no longer dominate our lives.
Free from fear, we can find the hope, peace, joy, and love that God created us for in the first place.