Worship at First Presbyterian Church of Marion, Illinois

Week 2 – The People of God in a Strange LandZephaniah 1:14-18, 3:14-20 Call to a different way of life. The day of the Lord comes. It comes with condemnation, justice, and punishment. In the first part of the reading, the day of the Lord comes, and we don’t want to see it come. It comes with consequences for misbehavior, for sin,…

Benjamin and Tricia lead us in worship, reflecting on the last year (their 4th) in service at LCC in Klaepeda, Lithuania.

Luke 11:3-4, Matthew 6:11-13Exodus 16:1-9I Corinthians 11:23-26Colossians 3:12-17 A reminder that these are the things Jesus puts in a prayer for us.These are the basics, the absolute essentials, the needs, not the wants.We need daily bread. We need forgiveness. We need to forgive. We needto not be tempted, and we need to be delivered. These…

Luke 11:2, Matthew 6:9Matthew 6:25-34John 18:33-37Daniel 7:15-27 God’s kingdom is a much debated theological thought. It gets pulledinto all sorts of debates in contemporary times, about end times, and aboutpretty much everything. All too often, we view it as simply a slighter better,slightly different version of the nations of today. I don’t think Jesus would…

Luke 11:2, Matthew 6:9Revelation 15:1-4, Isaiah 6:3-13 Hallowed is a word that doesn’t really live in our vocabularies today. Itmeans ‘holy’ or even ‘sanctified.’ This is the second thing that Jesusinstructs us to pray about when we pray to God. God is holy. That maysound obvious, “Of course God is holy!” Yet there’s more to…

Luke 10:21-22, Isaiah 49:14-18 We start this foundational, common, shared, prayer with an addressto God. Out of all of the ways that Jesus could start a prayer, and couldteach us to start a prayer, Jesus starts with an intimate address of God. It isa relational address. It is a familial address. It isn’t distant, or…

Acts 2:1-4 1 Corinthians 12:1-13 Now, I already made a mistake. You don’t have just one gift, as thetitle implies. You are gifted. I don’t mean in that honors track sense ofacademically gifted. I mean gifted, equipped, and sent by God. Do youknow what God gave you?Not just what your parents said you were good…

1 Corinthians 15:1-26, 51-57 – Jesus’ resurrection and the future resurrection; death as the last enemy. Often we come to doubt the resurrection. I don’t mean that we intellectually doubt it, although that does happen. I mean we emotionally doubt whether the resurrection is real, and whether it it is for us. This canhappen near…

1 Corinthians 13:1-13      “Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.”            Love. How many sermons on love? How many weddings with this passage? You have to love him/her, they’re your ____. The greatest commandment is to love. Now we have to love, God says so.            What do we really…

Acts 18:1-4 – Founding the church at Corinth.1 Corinthians 1:10-18 – Factions in the church and the word of the cross. We’re at another church founding today. Luke gives much less detailthan the last one. Thessalonica seems to go smoother, with conversions,and rougher, with pushback. And while the word argue may put us off tothe entire passage, as it may have last…