City Church of Richmond Sermons

“If laypeople cannot find any spiritual meaning in their work, they are condemned to living a certain dual life; not connecting what they do on Sunday morning with what they do the rest of the week. They need to discover that the very actions of daily life are spiritual.”

— William Diehl

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“We need to find a way to cuss without cussing and the imprecatory psalms do that.”

— Eugene Peterson

“Ever since Cain, one type of person looks at another and thinks, maybe that one is going to get what I need, let me kill him to save myself. What can overcome that fear? Only love. Which is not a vague feeling of benevolence towards the other group. Love requires interaction. Understanding. Living alongside. Sharing. Sacrificing for the other. Listening. Repenting. Love brings a change in perspective, from competition in a world of scarcity, to collaboration in a world where grace throws all bets off. Love means confidence that God has my back, that I don’t have to kill or threaten or dominate my neighbors to survive. Love celebrates the differences that make this world beautiful and interesting…”

— Dr. Jennifer Myrhe

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell.”

— C.S. Lewis

“The Psalms can disorient us to move us to a new orientation marked by joyous trust. They lead us to a mighty engagement with God, a struggle against God, and then a wondrous communion with God.”

— Walter Brueggemann

“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

— Frederick Buechner

“Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

“[Lament] notices and attends, savors and delights - details, images, relationships. Pain entered into, accepted, and owned can become poetry. It’s no less painful, but it’s no longer ugly. Lament is a bridge from life to death to life.”

— Eugene Peterson