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The Crumbs Are for the Dogs – Mark 7:24-30 March 28, 2010 AM By Pastor Lee Hemen The late Leona Helmsley was a billionaire New York City hotel operator and real estate investor. She was a flamboyant personality and had a reputation for tyrannical behavior that earned her the nickname “Queen of Mean.” When she died, she instructed that $8 billion of her real estate go to the care of dogs. This is from the woman who said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Interestingly, surveys show that over 45 million households own a dog. Some are service dogs. Others are used for security or hunting. More than a few have been inherited by parents of college age children who left them behind. But most are kept for companionship or friendship. According to the American Pet Products Association, they estimated that $47.7 billion will be spent on our pets in the U.S. in 2010! Sadly, in some families, more time and money is spent on pets than on people! What would you d

What Makes A Person Clean or Unclean? - Mark 7:1-23 By Pastor Lee Hemen March 21, 2010 AM It is amazing to me that there are those who do not believe in God and those who do believe in God that presume to speak for God. Non-believers can have a false sense of security and self-righteousness by thinking they can just dismiss that God exists, therefore, justifying a kind of self-made morality. Then, there are those who say they believe there is some sort of a god, yet by doing their own thing, they live in kind of a spiritual fantasyland of their own making. For both groups feelings have become their personal spiritual guide. We find no such theology in the Bible. While the Greeks and Romans, of Jesus’ day, could be found spiritually in one of these two aforementioned groups, there were also the Pharisees who followed their own self-inflicted form of spirituality. They justified their pious imprisonment by saying their righteousness came from following the letter of the law. Jesus, in to

Walking on Water - Mark 6:45-56 By Pastor Lee Hemen March 7, 2009 AM Over the years, I have heard Christians lament over the fact that they have never experienced the same kinds of miracles that they read about in the Bible. However, I suspect the problem is not one of miracles actually occurring but rather one of people's spiritual blindness to their happening. Plus, we forget why Jesus did many of the miraculous things he did at the time. Jesus was trying to garner the attention of his Hebrew brethren that God's kingdom had come and that he was indeed the promised Messiah they longed for. Jesus never did miracles for the sake of performing a miracle and in fact, he bluntly warned that only "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah." (Matthew 12:39) Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection was that "sign." Here in Mark's Gospel we find Jesus