A sermon by Rev. Mitchell Hay.

Epistle Romans 8:26-39

The Spirit, too, comes to help us in our weakness. For we don’t know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit expresses our plea with groaning too deep for words. And God, who knows everything in our hearts, knows perfectly well what the Spirit is saying, because her intercessions for God’s holy people are made according to the mind of God.

We know that God makes everything work together for the good of those who love God and have been called according to God’s purpose. They are the ones God chose long ago, predestined to share the image of the Only Begotten, in order that Christ might be the firstborn of many. Those God predestined have likewise been called; those God called have also been justified; and those God justified have, in turn, been glorified.

What should be our response? Simply this: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Since God did not spare the Only Begotten but gave Christ up for the sake of us all, we may be certain, after such a gift, that God will freely give us everything. Who will bring a charge against God's chosen ones? Since God is the One who justifies, who has the power to condemn? Only Christ Jesus, who died—or rather, was raised—and sits at the right hand of God, and who now intercedes for us!

What will separate us from the love of Christ? Trouble? Calamity? Persecution? Hunger? Nakedness? Danger? Violence? As scripture says, "For your sake we're being killed all day long; we're looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered."

Yet in all this we are more than conquerors because of God who has loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, neither heights nor depths—nor anything else in all creation—will be able to separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus, our Savior.

Gospel Matthew 13:31-33

Jesus put before them another parable: “The kin-dom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

Jesus told them another parable: “The kin-dom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."