Pastors: Kyle Bitter, Eric Schroeder, Joshua Yu and Joel Leyrer

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 45:5, 6, 18-25;  Romans 3:19-24; John 14:1-6; Acts 4:1-12

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Reformation Lesson 1* Pastor Bitter: The devil’s goal, from the very beginning, has been to replace God with something else.  In bible times, it’s pretty easy to see.  Open idolatry was prevalent the worship practices of the pagan nations that surrounded God’s people.  For many years, physical statues accompanied by sin-filled worship rites at pagan temples served as the “easy” replacement for the true God. 

Pastor Eric Schroeder

Sermon Text: Romans 10:17

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Romans 10:17 - “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” How many messages were sent your way this week?  I suppose it depends on what you count as a message, but let’s try to stay as broad in our definition as possible.  Every interaction with people involves communication, and communication is all about sending and receiving messages.  So if we start by adding up our voicemails, our emails, our text messages, and social media messages, we get a pretty good number going.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Everything you heard on the radio, everything you read in a book, magazine, or newspaper is a message.  Everything you saw on television, on a computer screen, or on a billboard sign is a message.  Every single conversation you had contained multiple messages back and forth, including both verbal and nonverbal messages.  So we start to add them all up and we are probably already well past any number we’d want to count up to. 

Pastor Kyle Bitter

Sermon Text: Hebrews 11:1, 2, 8-12

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Grace Alone.  Faith Alone.  Scripture Alone.  As the Lutheran church prepares to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, chances are you’ve heard those words once or twice, and appropriately so, since they’re a summary of the core Bible truths rediscovered in the Lutheran Reformation.  Those three ideas also serve as the themes for our final three worship services before our celebration of the Reformation here at St. John’s.  This week we have the chance to think about the second one – faith alone.  It’s easy enough to say, but when was the last time you stopped to think about what the implications are?  What does it mean to Live By Faith Alone?  One thing is for sure – what’s easy to say is not always easy to do.  Let me give you a couple of examples. 

Pastor Joel Leyrer

Sermon Text: John 1:1-3, 14, 15, 17

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Dear Friends in Christ:  From your knowledge of Bible history, you will recall that God’s Old Testament people spent four centuries in Egypt, most them as slaves.  At the proper time, God raised up a man named Moses to lead them out.  You might remember the memorable way in which Moses was called.  All of this is found in the opening chapters of the Book of Exodus.  Moses, a shepherd at the time, was routinely grazing his father-in-law’s sheep in what today we call the Sinai Peninsula when he saw something strange in the distance:  a bush that was burning, but was not being consumed by the flames.  So, he did what any of us would do.  He went to investigate.  When he got there, God himself spoke to him and said: “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Pastor Eric Schroeder

Sermon Text: Romans 14:5-10

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As we close out our sermon series based on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, we come to what might be one of the most difficult sections in the whole letter.  I say that for two reasons: the first reason that these verses are difficult has to do with the cultural context, and how Christian congregations were very different back then.  At the same time, with a little explanation, I am confident that we will all be able to understand what Paul is saying.  The second difficulty is what ought to concern us more.  The first difficulty comes from how different churches are, and the second difficulty comes from how Christian churches today (including ours) are exactly the same as they were in Paul’s day.  And so even as we will recognize that we struggle with different issues, at the heart of it all, these words apply to every one of us here today.  They are words of Freedom and Judgment, and how those two ideas fit together.