Advancing Word Podcast

While the church grows stronger through worship, larger through evangelism and witnessing, deeper through discipleship and wider through ministry, we grow warmer through fellowship.  This sermon, Part 4 of the series “Improving Our Serve” focuses on the account of the victory that David and his army won against marauding Amalekites.   Although an Old Testament passage, this account recorded in the Book of First Samuel, Chapter 30, verses 18-25, is a timeless precedent and primer on what authentic fellowship is in the life of the church.  

Someone defined discipleship as “thought accompanied by endeavor.”  In the Book of Judges, Chapter 7, Gideon leads three hundred Israelite soldiers with unconventional weapons to victory against a vast Midianite army.  Their actions demonstrate the characteristics that should be present in the life of every disciple.  In this sermon, Part Three of the series, “Improving Our Serve”, Dr. Stubblefield shares “The Three B’s of Discipleship”.  

In Part 2 of the series, “Improving Our Serve”, this sermon focuses on the account of Naaman the Syrian general recorded in Second Kings, Chapter 5, verse 1 -15.  Despite his position of power and prominence in the Syrian nation, military renown, and wealth, Naaman was a leper.  His visit to the prophet Elisha in Israel began with the faithful witness of a Jewish slave girl and culminated in healing and spiritual wholeness as he experienced firsthand the awesome power of God.  Naaman became a witness too!   

In the first of a series of sermons around the theme, “Improving Our Serve,” Dr. Stubblefield focuses on worship.  Using Second Samuel, Chapter Six, verses 12 – 15, he makes the compelling case that worship is the church’s SPD, “Spiritual Prime Directive”.  Worship is the pressing priority of the church and the perennial occupation of heaven.  Worship is compliant, costly, compelling and contagious.  Like King David in the text, worship gives every child of God an opportunity to “breakout”!  

If the life of Jesus was a movie, the Transfiguration recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and in the Second Epistle of Peter is a “spiritual trailer” and “a preview of coming attractions.”  It revealed God’s purposes regarding the death of His Son on Calvary and is the precedent that is the future hope of the Church because Jesus tasted death for all of us and His transformation on Mt. Hermon was the powerful pregnant prelude to His resurrection.  On a practical note, this sermon reminds us that the “glimpses of glory” God gives us in everyday life and in ministry stabilize us when we are facing challenges.

This sermon focuses on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter Nine, verse 36, and the compelling profile there of Jesus’s ministry as the Good Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep.  His compassion is the hub around which this text and sermon pivots and pulsates.  Jesus models compassion with His searching awareness, His sincere affection and His sobering assessment.  These commitments propel the sacrificial accommodation that is the powerful prelude to Resurrection Sunday.  Jesus gave His life on the Cross for those who are helpless, harassed and hopeless.  He lives now not only as the Compassionate Shepherd but also as the Conquering Sovereign.   

The Cross on which our Savior died is at the epicenter of human history.  It defines everything that goes before it and determines everything that comes after it.  One of the seven sayings or utterances of our Lord from the cross was “It is finished.”  This cry was not the wobbling, woeful words of an abused victim but the triumphant trump of a valiant Victor.  “It is finished” is not the rant of a tragic resignation but the regalia of treasured redemption.  These powerful and poignant words of Jesus announce not only the “finish of the start” but the “start of the finish.”  

This sermon is Part 2 of a two-part series. It introduces “huddle disease”, the malingering, malicious, malignant malady that cripples the contemporary church. Huddle disease frustrates the church’s efforts to develop laborers for the spiritual harvest that Jesus said, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, verses 35 – 38 , “is plentiful”.  This disease accounts for the anomaly of a “church on every street corner,” yet this massive physical presence failing to impede the moral, spiritual, social and economic decline in our cities and communities.  We have become hostages to the huddle, and it has crippled our ability to model the Master’s ministry and to fulfill the Great Commission.  Do not listen to this message if you don’t want to be challenged.   

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, verses 35 -38, provides a preview of the primary parameters of the ministry of Jesus.  The priorities, perspectives and principles that Jesus models in this passage is a blueprint for the contemporary church.  In the first sermon of a two-part series, Dr. Stubblefield will focus on how Jesus was committed to reaching out, reaching in and reaching down.  

In our Bibles, Psalm 86 is ascribed as a “prayer of David”.  The psalm expresses the comprehensiveness of the care David expects and experiences as a member of the covenant community.  As members of the Lord’s church, we are the bountiful beneficiaries of that care and coverage as well.  In this sermon, Dr. T. D. Stubblefield, in vintage form and focus conducts a policy review of stanzas four through seven and concludes that our relationship with the LORD provides coverage you can count on.  Refresh Community Church in University City, MO, one of the St. Louis Region’s fastest growing churches was blessed by this compelling message during their 2024 African American History Sunday Worship Celebration.  You will be too!