Saturday, October 03, 2015

In preparation for a sermon

Sheep, goats and other things I came up with while thinking about the Gospel of Matthew.

I was asked to deliver a sermon at church in our pastor's absence in a couple of weeks. The title is "The Cause" which is tied in to the financial campaign. The text is Matthew 25:31-40, which is entitled in my Bible as the "Judgement of Nations."

This is the story of the King separating the nations like a shepherd will separate sheep from goats. This got me thinking: why does the Bible cast sheep as good and goats as something else; bad even? I intend to broach this subject in the children's sermon. Think about it. How about changing things around...things like "the Kid of God that takes away the sins of the world..." or " there were in the same country goat herders abiding in the field keeping watch over their herd by night....". I mean, we are conditioned to think positively about sheep and negatively about goats.

My question is: how are we conditioned about other things...things Biblical, in fact? What is wrong with goats? Nothing as far as I can tell in my experience.
I'm going to touch on that topic in the course of the sermon.

But the second half of the scripture is about figuring out who the "least of these" are in our lives.  Oh yes, hungry, thirsty, nakie, sick, imprisoned...of course....but I maintain there are hurting people right next to us on a daily basis...what are we doing about that and of course, wrapped up in all of that is what role does Our church play...what is our Cause?

I am going to blog my thoughts as I smooth up the sermon. If you are a member of our "flock" or not, keep watching. I'd love some feed back.




3 comments:

Jeff said...

I'm waiting!:-)

sweettealover said...

Great! Wish I could hear it!

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