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Faith In A Promise -- Romans 4:9-25 by Pastor Lee Hemen October 29, 2006 Fred Bowlby, owner of a west London pub, The Pig and the Whistle, had become famous for his Doomsday Chair. It was an old cane chair with gold cushions, chained to a fixture in the pub. Any who dared to sit in this chair were offered free liquor. A city slicker had accepted the challenge and allegedly died on the spot. A town drunk unknowingly sat in the “killer chair” and his body was later found in the river. Father Duddleswell maintained that the absence of faith leads to superstition, and so he was challenged by the pub’s owner to sit in the chair. Bowing to public pressure and the offer of 100 pounds, the priest agreed to sit in the chair every day for a week at a designated time. When the week was over the father proudly took the chair home and displayed it in his study. Later, the father confessed that he had found an identical chair in a local antique shop, and with the help of the pub owner’s wife, had sw...

Faith, Not by Works– Romans 4:1-8 October 22, 2006 by Pastor Lee Hemen I can remember my father standing over me as I slowly came out of my self-induced semi-conscious state. What happened was I had this really great idea to jump off the roof while holding several big pieces of cardboard. Now do not think I was stupid, I did duct tape them onto my arms first! The sky was blue, the birds were soaring in the white fluffy clouds, and I was soon going to join them. I knew something immediately went wrong when the ground came hurling up at me in a green and brown blur. Well, you know the rest. My father stood over me asking me, “What in the world do you think you were doing?” My thought was, “Why do you ask such silly questions of your son who is lying there, in pain, slowing dying? I was trying to FLY!” Just because I thought I could fly with cardboard taped to my arms did not mean that I could master the intricacies of aerodynamics. Faith did not equal works, so-to-speak. Interestingly, P...

Faith Baby, It’s Faith!– Romans 3:19-31 October 15, 2006 by Pastor Lee Hemen It is interesting to note that if we decided to make up a religion that people would adhere to, we could sit down and devise such a scheme quite easily. In fact, it has been done before. Several colleges have experimented with the concept. The Satirist Online has a whimsical web page that looks at the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Cult Leaders” and gives suggestions on such things as personal grooming, time management, and conceptualizing your cult. Then there are other sad attempts from those who have a rather odd sense of humor. However, the basis for any such attempt usually follows the pattern whereby devotees are told that unless they follow a certain set of guidelines, then they are doomed. Cults play on people’s personal insecurities. When God gave the Hebrew people His commandments, He intended that they would guide people into faith, trust, and devotion to Him and show them a better way of living....

When Being Good Is Not Good Enough – Romans 3:1-18 by Pastor Lee Hemen October 8, 2006 I have shared with you before about some of the vain attempts my folks made to us boys for us to be good. And like I have shared before we tried, we really did try. However there were times when being good was not good enough. You know, like the time I tried to wash the dog in the galvanized washtub in the front yard and he got away, rolled in the garden, and ran into the house. It started out as a good attempt at doing something quite good without being asked to, only to end in… well… tragedy. Our lives can be the same way when we try on our own to please God. Spiritually, we must learn when being good is not good enough. The Apostle Paul was writing to his Jewish brothers in Rome that had become believers. He asks and then answers obvious questions that his argumentative style had no doubt raised in the minds of his readers. Remember, the Jews bragged about their relationship to God, yet their life...

God Hates Religiosity and Ritual - Romans 2:17-29 by Pastor Lee Hemen October 1, 2006 AM Should a person practice what they preach? Recently we heard and saw on the nightly news a past President loudly trying to defend his ability to do the job he had once been elected to do. Sounding like a petulant child he vociferously defended his record. However, there is just one problem, the history of his own office shows otherwise. Even those that served with him in the capacities required, disagreed with his statements. Little was done in eight years of his Presidency. In fact, our enemies have related that they were embolden to attack the us again because of this President’s inaction. He is learning that we are not only held accountable by the words we use, but by the actions we do. The same is true for our faith in Jesus Christ. God hates religiosity and ritual. The Jews of Paul’s day felt that they could rely on their past history of being pious people, but their spiritual and physical rec...

God’s Divine Standards – Romans 2:1-16 by Pastor Lee Hemen September 24, 2006 The Bible relates that “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death (Proverbs 14:12 or 16:25).” In today’s world there are those who want to decide who God is, what He desires, and how they should live for Him or not. In other words they want to set God’s divine standards. There are several problems with this ideology: 1) It tends to constantly change, 2) it is not biblical, and 3) which standard would be correct for you? Everyone’s? Paul relates that there is only one standard that matters. God’s divine standard. I will never forget when I was speaking to a machinist friend of mine. I wanted him to make a part for me for a table saw I had. He asked me what the measurements were for the specific piece I needed. I related, “Oh it is about so long and so wide.” He just shook his head and looked at me. Then I took out of my pocket a mechanical drawing I had done that had the exact ...

Spiritual Ignorance Is No Excuse – Romans 1:18-32 September 17, 2006 by Pastor Lee Hemen Bob Deffinbaugh, from Dallas Theological Seminary, writes that: “We know that these verses in Romans chapter 1 are… on condemnation. Paul is seeking to establish the fact that all men justly deserve the consequences of the eternal wrath of God. The thrust of these verses, however, is not primarily that God will judge the heathen because of his rejection of the truth, but rather that God is judging the heathen for his rebellion and rejection.” I believe it is both. When you reject the truth of God, as clearly manifested and seen in His creation, you reject the gospel. You are without excuse. Diffinbaugh goes on to write that “The wrath of God, then, is not merely future; it is also present. Men face the consequences for their sins in eternity but also in the present.” I agree. However, that being said, God does punish men for their choices, allows them to continue in their choices, and gives them ov...

What Life Is All About -- Romans 1:16-17 by Pastor Lee Hemen September 10, 2006 Have you ever been ashamed of someone or something? I have. Personal embarrassment can cause us to do a lot of silly things. I remember in the old movie “Support Your Local Sheriff,” where James Garner walks outside of the boarding house he is staying at and the daughter of the mayor, Miss Purdy, does not want him to see her dressed as she is. She had just been involved in a street mud fight and was in her long johns washing in the kitchen sink trying to clean herself up. She is embarrassed and tries to hide, ending up in a tree where, of course, he discovers her hiding. Now that’s embarrassing! Sadly there are those who claim Jesus as Savior and Lord, who either act embarrassed or are embarrassed of others finding out. Paul, on the other hand, was not embarrassed by the gospel message nor its author. He knew what it meant for him personally and what it meant for the entire world. It was far to important fo...

What Our Faith Means – Romans 1:8-15 September 3, 2006 by Pastor Lee Hemen We all like to be encouraged. Many put a premium on encouraging others. So much so in fact that it is now a viable way to say you care about something or someone by just telling others you do. You know, kind of like the phony bumper stickers that say, “My Child Is An Honored Student.” What does that mean really? Or the ones that tell you to “Hug your kids.” The one I find really irritating is the one that states: “Be kind to Mother Earth.” What in the world does that mean? Am I supposed to bend down and kiss the dirt? Could I even possibly hug a planet? In my thinking there is nothing worse than phony effusion. Gladly, Paul never did that with the people he dealt with. When we find him handing out complements, there were good reasons for doing so. For him, it often defined what faith was all about. In the eight verses we will look at this morning, we discover what faith meant to Paul. Virtually all of Paul’s mes...

Who We Are – Romans 1:1-7 by Pastor Lee Hemen August 27, 2006 AM Who we are is important. Not only to others but to ourselves and to God as well. A lot of people spend much of their lives seeking out the answer to that very question of who they are. Some folks define who they are by their work, their social status, beauty, material possessions, or intellect. In Paul’s Letter to the Romans he not only defines himself for all of history to read, but he also defines for us exactly who the Christian is. And, for Paul, who we are in Jesus Christ is far more important than who we are as far as social or material status is concerned. In fact, as we read this letter we will discover that who we are not only carries eternal significance but also life significance for our lives right now. Who we are is vastly important. As we were in San Francisco the Youth Team was fascinated by the row houses. At a distance they looked like shoe boxes standing side-by-side, all in a long line, marching off int...