help on Receiving Help

Leader: Our help is in the name of the Lord, People: who made heaven and earth.  Leader: If You, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? People: But wit...

Pastor: Our help is in the name of the Lord, People: who made heaven and earth.   Pastor: If You, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? People: But with You th...

As a stranger walked down a quiet residential street, he noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. The homeowner was clearly having a hard time, so the passerby, wan...

It is a phone call no parent wants to receive. “Jerry,” Bethany said, “Catherine’s had a little accident.” “Accident! How bad?” “She’s going to be okay. You want to talk to her? We’re in a kind of am...

Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?” Do I? Do I really? I’ve been this way so long It’s what people expect of me It’s what I expect of me I know this life I’m getting by Is it good? No Is...

Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are, and so we knock on doors and ask for assistance. Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than w...

Over time, I have learned it’s easier to get help if you look like you don’t really need it.

Changing Direction There was a story going around about the Special Olympics. For the hundred-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine ...

Joseph would be the first to tell you that life in the pit stinks. Yet for all its rottenness, doesn’t the pit do this much? It forces you to look upward. Someone from up there must come down here and...

A climber recently had to be airlifted off Japan’s Mount Fuji due to altitude sickness. That alone would have been a dramatic enough story. But four days later—still recovering—he climbed back up ...

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

Pastor: As we are about to receive our Lord’s body and blood in, with, and under this bread and wine for the forgiveness of sins, let us make confession to our heavenly Father. With the psalmist w...

“Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” What did God do to help us? God chose the people of Israel to make a new beginning. They received God’s covenant and prepared th...

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with o...

Leader: Our help is in the name of the Lord, People: who made heaven and earth .  Psalm 124:8 Leader: If You, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? People: ...

While there are an infinite number of ways for a movie to fall short, a common complaint is if the inciting incident of the drama is solved in a way that comes out of nowhere, even breaking the logic ...

On the one side there is God in His glory as Creator and Lord. . . . And on the other side there is man, not merely the creature, but the sinner, the one who exists in the flesh and who in the flesh i...

Total need requires total help

God doesn’t help those who help themselves: he helps those who trust him.

An American woman visiting the Philippines, observed an elderly woman on the outskirts of Manila. She looked poverty-stricken and walked with the help of a cane down into a ditch alongside a main road...

Leader: Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted. People: Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”? Leader: But you do see, ...

I can’t help but recall here a scene from The West Wing. White House chief of staff Leo McGarry reaches out to his deputy, Josh Lyman, who is struggling with PTSD. Leo tells him a parable: This guy’...

O God, the Father of the forsaken, the help of the weak, the supplier of the needy, you have distributed and proportioned your gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform...

“The help will come,” said Trufflehunter. “I stand by Aslan. Have patience, like us beasts. The help will come. It may be even now at the door.”

Pastor: Our help is in the name of the Lord, People: who made heaven and earth.   Pastor: If You, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? People: But with You...

I am struck by all the things Jesus didn’t say or do in response to the litanies of pain and defensiveness he heard from people. Jesus didn’t say to the man, “You sound like a victim to me; what are y...

When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears     and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted     and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictio...

Pastor John Ortberg shares this amazing story about how God sometimes uses even our broken pasts to to help others: I read about a woman who locked her keys in her car in a rough neighborhood. She t...

[Christ] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matthew 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of ...

There’s a story (probably apocryphal) about a small dog that had been hit by a car and left injured by the side of the road. A passing nurse noticed the wounded animal, saw it was still alive, and sto...