Midtown Presbyterian Church Midtown Presbyterian Church

Sermon Resources:
1. “Of course God will forgive me; that’s his job!” -Heinrich Heine
2. “The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to all be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation…In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water"
3. “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. If we let Him, He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly, though of course on a smaller scale, His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long, and in parts painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less.” -C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

Brand New | Dealing Differently With Suffering | Gayle Parker - 1 Peter 1:3-9 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

Sermon Resources:
1. "One Nation Under God," by Jon McNaughton, 2014
2. "Head of Christ," by Warner Sallman, 1941
3. Digital reconstruction of first century Jewish man: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3359548/Is-real-face-JESUS-Experts-use-forensics-reveal-Christ-looked-like.html
4. "I want to say to you that most of our brokenness cannot be simply taken away. It’s there. And the deepest pain that you and I suffer is often the pain that stays with us all our lives. It cannot be simply solved, fixed, done away with…What are we then told to do with that pain, with that brokenness, that anguish, that agony that continually rises up in our heart? We are called to befriend it.Suffering is a period in your life in which true faith can emerge, a naked faith, a faith that comes to life in the midst of great pain. The grain, indeed, has to die in order to bear fruit and when you dare to stand in your suffering, your life will bear fruit in ways that are far beyond your own predications or understanding. Spend some time each morning doing nothing but simply sitting in the presence of God and praying, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Gradually, God will enter your heart in a new way and bring new light into your struggle.” -Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish To Freedom
5. “We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia, for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.”
-2 Corinthians 1:8-9

Sermon Resources:
1. “We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.” -Dallas Willard, "Renovation of the Heart"
2. “Do you love your faith so little that you have never battled a single fear lest your faith should not be true? Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth." -George MacDonald, "The Curate’s Awakening"
3. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose of doubt, not with genuine intellectual method and character.” -Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing A Conversational Relationship With God
4. “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Last Notebook | 1880-1881
5. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” -Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
6. “What we have to remember is that our eyes are not all we have for seeing with, maybe not even the best we have. Our eyes tell us that the mountains are green in summer and in autumn the colors of flame. They tell us that the nose of the little girl is freckled, that her hair usually needs combing, that when she is asleep, her cheek is flushed and moist…But all these things are only facts because facts are all the eye can see. Eyes cannot see truth. The truth about the mountains is their great beauty. The truth about the child is that she is so precious that without a moment's hesitation we would give our lives to save her life if that should somehow ever become necessary. It is not with the eyes of the head that we see truths like that, but with the eyes of the heart.” -Frederick Buechner, "The Seeing Heart"

Easter Sunday 2024 by Midtown Presbyterian Church

Good Friday 2024 by Midtown Presbyterian Church