September 18, 2011
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
I did a couple of conferences this past year where some of the speakers were classmates of mine. In fact, some of them were in the classes below me when I was in seminary. And look at them now! Headlining major conferences! They’ve done so well! I’m so proud of them!
No I’m not!
I keep thinking: Why them and not me?Read More »Begrudging God–Matthew 20: 1-16
Matthew 16: 21-28
August 28, 2011
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
The disciple Cephas has really scored. All the other disciples are high-fiving him. He got it right! He figured it out! Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God! And to reward him, Jesus has renamed him “Peter,” which means “The Rock,” and Jesus has told Peter, right in front of everybody, that Peter will be the rock on which Jesus will build His church, and that he, Peter, will have the keys to heaven and hell! He’ll personally decide who is in and who is out!Read More »Too Hard to Believe–A Sermon on Poverty, Politics, and Faith–August 28, 2011
When I became a Christian as a teen in the ’70s, Billy Graham was the guy I looked to. I read Decision Magazine avidly every month. I like to tell people that “I was a teenage Evangelical.”
But when I went to college, I began to fall away from my early evangelical roots. Then, too, I discovered a soulmate and guide in Billy Graham, whose post-Nixon soul-searching led him to question some of the assumptions that had driven his early ministry–assumptions about God’s anointment of leaders, the unblemished blessedness of the American Way, and the necessity of nuclear weapons. He was a harbinger of a new, broader-minded evangelicalism, and you see his spiritual children in the likes of Rob Bell. And, I hope, in me. Graham’s humble, honest search for a broader way to represent Biblical truth in a political setting helped me return to my own evangelical roots.Read More »I Miss Billy Graham
