Sermons by Dr. Ritch Boerckel (Page 91)
Leaping for Joy
At the end of each year a prominent Christian researcher, George Barna, releases a summary of his finding concerning the church in America. Some of his research this past year has been encouraging. For instance, an estimated 22 million adults have been added to the church in America in the last decade. America’s youngest pastors are more aware of and responsive to the battle for the minds and hearts of children. Most Americans, nearly two-thirds of them, continue to give…
Marks of a Healthy Church
Many Christians who move into a new community discover that searching for a good church proves very difficult. Often families decide upon a church for all of the wrong reasons. As a twenty-five year old youth pastor, I remember one mom telling me that her fourteen year old son was visiting our youth group that Sunday and that she and her husband had decided to let him choose the church to which they were going to attend and ultimately worship.…
The First Sermon of the Church
Shortly after I came to Bethany, a little over eleven years ago, and I began serving as pastor a very seasoned, yet discouraged pastor said to me, “I do not think preaching makes very much difference in people’s lives.” While I respected this man, I did not believe him at the time. In fact, I wanted to weep for him; that a preacher would consider that preaching would have little effect upon those who would hear. But in these eleven…
Empowered by God’s Spirit
A classmate of mine at Dallas Theological Seminary told an interesting story in a sermon as he preached to his classmates. His dad was a pastor in a small town in North Carolina and his dad had pastored this small church of about a hundred people for over that twenty years. In those twenty years the church did not grow at all. This pastor remained faithful to praying for the lost; to equipping the saints; to preaching the Word faithfully,…
God’s Guidance Through Prayer
Dwight L. Moody was a great witness of the Gospel in the late 1800’s. He not only spoke to crowds of thousands of people at that time but he also filled his day witnessing one-on-one to people no one else seemed to care about. D.L. Moody once entered a tavern in order to ask the bartender if his two little girls might attend Sunday school. The bartender told Moody that the atheist club met there every Thursday night and he…
Witnesses of the Lord
Our culture is in a desperate need of a witness to the truth about God. This week’s Time magazine illustrates this need with marked clarity, at least clarity to the Christian, anyway. The cover story reads, “The God Gene: Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?” The cover article inside begins this way: “It is not hard to see the Divinity behind the water temples that dot the right terraces and valleys. It is there in the…