Decatur Presbyterian Church Summer with the Parables Archives

Of Sheep & Goats

14 Aug 2017

Matthew 25:31-46 – presented by the Children’s Ministries Skit Team: 31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another...

Bridesmaids, Ready or Not

07 Aug 2017

Holy God, by the power of your Spirit, illuminate your Word to us this day, so that we may hear again the promise of your coming kingdom and ready ourselves to meet you face-to-face, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Before reading today’s parable, we should note its context in the...

Grateful & Ungrateful Guests

30 Jul 2017

Chapter 21 of Matthew’s gospel begins with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the whole city in turmoil as the Passover approached, not unlike the turmoil in Jerusalem this past week. Jesus immediately goes to the Temple Mount and drives out all those buying and selling in...

Greed & Grace

24 Jul 2017

I read somewhere this week that Martin Luther once said sometimes you have to squeeze the biblical passage until it leaks the gospel. Well, I’ve been squeezing this passage and I believe God’s grace just might leak out of it. The stories we find in Scripture can be really hard...

The Great Reversal

17 Jul 2017

We’ve heard over these summer Sundays that the parables are meant to challenge us, to surprise us, to make us uncomfortable, and I’m going to add that I think the parables are meant to change us. That’s my hope, at least. They are meant to cause us to think differently about what...

Lost & Found Sheep

10 Jul 2017

In the Gospel of Luke, three similar parables are deliberately grouped together – the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. These three parables beautifully describe the nature of God – the one who seeks and saves the lost. The setting for these parables in the gospel of...

Fields of Wheat & Weeds

06 Jul 2017

Just following parable of the sower, or as we called it last week, the parable of the soils, comes another parable of seeds sown in a field. In this parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus tells the truth about the human condition and refers to judgment at the end of time that...

Rich & Rocky Soil

25 Jun 2017

Matthew reports that Jesus went to the lakeshore to teach, and the crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a fishing boat, where he sat down to sow the seeds of the kingdom of God. The location of this teaching was most likely the northwest shore of the Sea...

New and Old Garments

19 Jun 2017

If you were to write a parable, how do you think you would start? Would you write about the nature of God or the in-breaking of God’s kingdom or about what it means to be a disciple of Christ? Perhaps it’s not a fair question on the second week of our summer series on the...

Wise and Foolish Builders

13 Jun 2017

We begin this morning a summer series on the parables of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew. Parables have been called “earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” Parables are memorable, easy to recall. Once a person hears the parable of the prodigal son, they will likely...

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