The SermonCentral.com Weekly Newsletter
—November 25, 2003

Theme: John 5: The Troubled Waters

Dear SermonCentral.com user,

Our newsletter this week and next will be following our “Gospel of John” series. Then, we will have 2 Christmas newsletters. We want to help you plan the best Christmas service possible.

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Happy Thanksgiving,
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P.S.
Last week we took a survey to ask which church affiliation to which you are the closest. The results are toward the end of this newsletter. (The Nazarene church is a bit underrepresented because it was listed as the Church of the Nazarene, and some of you didn’t find it).

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In This Issue

1. Top 5 Sermons On John 5: The Troubled Waters

2. Top 5 Illustrations On John 5: The Troubled Waters

3. Go PRO!

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1. Top 5 Sermons On On John 5: The Troubled Waters

The Healing At Bethesda
by Ed Pruitt: John 5:1-15
John tells us, that if all the incidents were to be included in this book, that all the books in the world wouldn’t have been sufficient.

It’s not hard for us to surmise why John would include this particular story.
It would be interesting but futile, of course, to ponder some of the stories that more

Healing? ME!?
by Michael Deutsch: John 5:1-9
Soon after the discovery of the New World, Europeans began making the long journey across the ocean in hopes of finding something. Some were hoping to find a new life. Others wanted adventure. Some wanted religious freedom. And there were still others who came in search of gold. One was a Spanish conquistador by the name of Ponce de Leon. Ponce de Leon and his men were the first Europeans to explore Puerto Rico, parts of Mexico and Florida. In his quest to find gold, he met many Indians who told him of a spring that bubbled up out of the ground. It more

He Can Overcome Our Hurts
by Melvin Newland: John 5:1-15
When you look around at the people who attend church with you on Sunday, what do you see? Do you see impressive people, dressed in fine clothes who have it all together? Or do you see hurting people in need of comfort; troubled people in need of peace; sick people who need healing?

Marshall Hayden wrote an article a few years ago entitled, "Would Every Non-Hurter more

Do You Want To?
by Guy Caley: John 5:1-9
When I was a chaplain for soldiers in Basic Training, I learned to use a counseling technique called "Solution Focused Therapy.” One of the main questions that the counselor asks with this technique is, "What are you going to do?"

Almost always the first reply would be "I need someone else to do something for more

Walking with the Lord
by Barry Robinson: John 5:1-15
When my first girl Clarissa was born, I was about the proudest daddy you had ever seen. Still am. And I must say she was a daddy’s girl. When she said her first word, it was “dada!” I was proud, and I didn’t spend much time teaching her that either. But with walking, that was another story. I would force her to roll over until she more

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2. Top 5 Illustrations On John 5: The Troubled Waters

WHO HEALS?
God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.
Benjamin Franklin

Contributed by: SermonCentral PRO

HOPELESS
There are no hopeless situations; there are only people who have grown hopeless about them.
Clare Boothe Luce.

Contributed by: Paul Fritz

THEY’RE ALL HERE
Marshall Hayden wrote an article a few years ago entitled, "Would Every Non-Hurter Please Stand Up?" He pointed out that people come to church wearing their best clothes & their best smiles. Everybody looks happy, so we assume everything is okay. But he suggests that we need to look beyond the facade & realize that the pews are full of hurting people.

He wrote, "Over here is a family with an income of $550 a week and an outgo of $1,000. Over there is a family with two children who, according to their dad, are "failures." "You’re stupid. You never do anything right," he is constantly telling them. The lady over there just found a tumor that tested positive. The Smith’s little girl has a hole in her heart.

"Sam & Louise just had a nasty fight. Each is thinking of divorce. Last Monday Jim learned that he was being laid off. Sarah has tried her best to cover the bruises her drunken husband inflicted when he came home Friday night. That teen over there feels like he is on the rack, pulled in both directions. Parents & church pull one way, peers & glands pull the other.

"Then there are those of us with lesser hurts, but they don’t seem so small to us: an unresponsive spouse, a boring job, a poor grade, a friend or parent who is unresponsive ...on & on the stories go. The lonely, the dying, the discouraged, the exhausted, they’re all here."

SOURCE: Melvin Newland in “He Overcame Our Hurts” on www.sermoncentral.com

HEALED FROM ANGER
Author and speaker Tony Campolo tells this story:
I was in a church in Oregon not too long ago, and I prayed for a man who had cancer. In the middle of the week, I got a telephone call from his wife. She said, "You prayed for my husband. He had cancer." I said, "Had?" Whoa, I thought, it’s happened.

She said, "He died." I felt terrible.

She continued, "Don’t feel bad. When he came into that church that Sunday he was filled with anger. He knew he was going to be dead in a short period of time, and he hated God. He was 58 years old, and he wanted to see his children and grandchildren grow up. He was angry that this all-powerful God didn’t take away his sickness and heal him. He would lie in bed and curse God. The more his anger grew towards God, the more miserable he was to everybody around him. It was an awful thing to be in his presence. After you prayed for him, a peace had come over him and a joy had come into him. Tony, the last three days have been the best days of our lives. We’ve sung. We’ve laughed. We’ve read Scripture. We prayed. Oh, they’ve been wonderful days. And I called to thank you for laying your hands on him and praying for healing.

And then she said something incredibly profound. She said, "He wasn’t cured, but he was healed."

SOURCE: Tony Campolo, "Year of Jubilee," Preaching Today #212, Preaching Today.

Contributed by: A. Todd Coget

BELIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE
Alice laughed. "There’s no use trying," she said: "one can’t believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven’t had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

SOURCE: Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Contributed by: Alan Perkins

3. Go PRO!

This is where we tell you about a great feature of SermonCentralPRO and how to use it.

Service Maker
Have you ever wished you could get all your sermon resources from one source? Now you can! SermonCentral PRO’s exclusive Service Maker feature searches sermons, illustrations and dramas according to the topic of your choice with one search feature. Preparing a relevant sermon complemented by appropriate dramas and illustrations is now as simple as a mouse-click.

On the left hand column of the home page, under the bar that reads "Pro Tools" click the link that says "Service Maker." Choose the topic and sub-topic of your search, and mark any of the items you wish to search for (dramas, illustrations, sermons and whether you want outline or manuscript sermons). Click "start service maker" and let your professional research assistant go to work for you.

To try Service Maker, click here

Which church affiliation do you belong to?

.....Assembly of God 7.8%
Baptist -- American Baptist 1.4%
Baptist -- Southern (SBC) 15.3%
Baptist -- Other 6.6%
Bible Church 0.5%
Brethren 0.5%
Calvary Chapel 0%
Catholic 0.2%
Charismatic 1.7%
Christian Church 4.8%
Christian Missionary Alliance 0.9%
Church of Christ 3.3%
Church of God – Anderson 1.7%
Church of God – Cleveland 2.4%
Church of the Nazarene 4.1%
Congregational 0.3%
Disciples of Christ 0.5%
Episcopal/Anglican 3.1%
Evangelical 0.9%
Evangelical Free 0%
Foursquare 1.2%
Free Methodist 0.9%
Grace Brethren 0%
Holiness 0.2%
Lutheran 1.6%
Lutheran – Missouri Synod 2.2%
Mennonite 0.5%
Non-Denominational 4.7%
Orthodox 0.2%
Pentecostal 5.7%
Presbyterian 0.9%
Presbyterian – PCA 0.7%
Presbyterian – PCUSA 1.4%
Reformed 0.9%
Salvation Army 2.1%
Seventh-day Adventist 1.9%
United Brethren 0% 0
United Methodist 5.5%
Vineyard 0.2%
Wesleyan 2.1%
Other 11.4%

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