“All our obedience, every resolve to do good, and every work of faith is ‘by his power’ and so that the Lord Jesus would be glorified because of the grace he gives. Yes, we must pursue obedience, but that obedience must always be cruciform, formed by Christ’s cross. We must seek to obey because of the cross, find the grace to obey because of the cross, and live free from condemnation whether we succeed or fail in the light of the cross. The cross must be our only story, as Paul boldly proclaimed: ‘For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2).”
- Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson in Counsel from the Cross (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2009), 171-172.
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I know it’s a little late, but here are two video from the worship service on 2/28/10. The first is of the worship songs that we did. The second is of the message that I had the opportunity to give from John 11. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
Thanks!
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From John Piper via Twitter:
Share and Enjoy:“Heartfelt confidence that, because of Christ, our all-controlling God is 100% for us, is the key to indomitable joy.”
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We began a new series this week that will take us through Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter. The series, called “Do You Believe?” is designed to help us again consider the claims Christ made about Himself and the evidence that proves those claims. In hearing the truth about Christ, we have to occasionally stop and ask ourselves, do we believe? Because if we believe, it will affect how we live, what we think, and what we do.
For the people who walked with Jesus during the final weeks of His earthly life, they discovered some amazing things about Him as He spoke and demonstrated God’s glory. Those same things can be as significant for us today. In this first week, we looked at the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John 11 and His declaration that He is the resurrection and the life.Our service flowed like this:
Welcome/Announcements
Our God Saves (Baloche/Brown)
Video: Evidence, Part 1
Comments about the new series
Video: Evidence, Part 2
Message
Video: Redeemed
Reflection/Prayer
Jesus Paid It All (Hall/Nifong/Grape)
Jesus Messiah (Tomlin/Carson/Cash/Reeves)
Because of Your Love (Baloche/Brown)
Offering
Jesus Saves (Cottrell/Moffitt)
Responsive Reading based off Ephesians 2
Closing
This Sunday was a bit different. We deviated from our normal flow, but I was also the only pastor in town. Our senior pastor has traveled to Thailand for a missions event for about 10 days, and our youth pastor was away at a youth ministry conference. That left me. I got the privilege of preaching, as well as caring for the regular parts that I am responsible for. It was a full week in preparation, and we also hosted a simulcast on the Saturday before and had an unexpected memorial service in the middle of the week.
We based the series graphics and opening off this video we found at WorshipHouseMedia.
How’s that for a flashback? School-House Rock, anyone? We split the video in half and introduced the series in between the parts.
It was a great beginning to the series. I enjoyed being able to tell the story of Lazarus and the implications of Jesus’ revelation as the resurrection and the life. During the prayer and reflection time, I took the opportunity to again explain to people how they could gain the full life Jesus offers or else renew their life in Christ. The story of Lazarus offers a great spiritual metaphor for us in that just as Lazarus was dead and needed Jesus to bring him back to life, we too need Jesus to bring to life the spiritually dead part of us. Yet, when we place our faith and belief fully in Jesus, we discover that physical death is not the end of life.
We closed the message portion of the service with this video as I asked the question, “Who do you believe Jesus is?”
We were a bit down in attendance this weekend. It seems that there was a lot of stuff going on. We probably had the lowest attendance of any weekend thus far in 2010. Despite that, people seemed to sing and worship together well. We placed most of our singing after the message this week because it seemed like a natural response to again being reminded that life and resurrection is found fully in Jesus alone.
At the end of the service, we introduced the Travis Cottrell/David Moffitt song “Jesus Saves.” This is a great song that captures the story of the Gospel. I pulled this song out at the last minute, and we worked on it at practice with no one really having heard it before. The team did a great job with it on short notice, and we hope that the congregation grabs a hold of it strongly in time for Easter.
If you were there, it would be great to hear your thoughts. I’ll probably post some video in the days ahead.
Thanks for stopping by. Head over to The Worship Community to find out what other church’s did this week.
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It’s been said that our life betrays what we believe. Or that our beliefs are betrayed by our life. Either way, most, if not all, Christians say that Christ is the most important thing to them, but their living says they are more concerned with life, work, status, homes, cars, retirement plans, etc. Most aspects of life reflect a forgetting of our Maker, Redeemer, and Savior. I’m not here to tell you how a life that has Christ as the most important thing will be played out in you specifically, but to simply cause you to think.
This aspect of drift and forgetting is a common occurrence in all of our lives. The issue isn’t so much if it has happened (because it will at some point), but recognizing it and making appropriate course corrections.
The season of Lent, at its core, calls us back to God, back to basics, and back to the spiritual realities of life in Christ. Back to the things that we say we believe in. It’s a time when we can ask Christ to once again put to death sin and indifference toward God and others so that we might fulfill the Greatest Commandment to love the Lord our God with all of who we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We can once again enter fully into the joy of the Lord Who is our strength.
Lent has much spiritual significance. Its duration of the 40 days leading up to Easter (excluding Sundays) is designed to remind us of the 40 days that Christ spent in the wilderness before beginning His public ministry. In the early church days, Lent was a time of preparation for those who would be baptized on Easter Sunday. It was also a time of restoration for those who had repented of significant sin to the fellowship of believers.
Despite the spiritual significance, Lent has been seen as many as threatening and scary. Some of that comes from misunderstanding, unpleasant past church experiences, or the fact that Lent themes are not as prevalent in modern church practice like the themes of Advent at Christmas time. For many, Lent has been a dark and foreboding time of works based effort that is joyless and unfulfilling.
In most protestant and evangelical church traditions, we prepare for Christmas by recapturing the sense of longing in the Advent season. However, most don’t prepare for Easter (beyond buying a new outfit) even though Easter can be considered the climax of Christian belief. So beyond the rituals and such, what is the true spiritual intent and value of Lent?
David the Psalmist wrote, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin…Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me…The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:1-2,10-12,17 niv).
In Lent we have the opportunity to consider and meditate on our own sinfulness and separation from God and others. We can ask the question, “Why would Jesus step into that?” The idea is not just a general sense of sinfulness, but the recognition of and wrestling with our sin personally. In that battle, we see the personal connection with the passion of Christ and an identification with and participation in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a period of renewal through repentance.
We have the opportunity to again seek God in a fresh way and to see the need for Him to be in every area of our life. We see again the basics: God’s unconditional love for us and our response to that love. We can experience again the first love of our faith. We take time to re-evaluate and re-order our relationship with God.
In Lent, we are invited to carry the temptation and sin that continue to torment us to the cross and to confront the sin there, allowing Christ’s presence to be fully in control. We might need to deny the sin or the righteousness that we think we have. Perhaps we will need to experience a breakthrough in areas of sin and relationship that are out of alignment with God.
The thing about Lent that is often missed, though, is that it isn’t so much about giving up as it is about taking on. It is a time of transformation and renewal where we prepare to encounter Christ’s sacrifice again as we continue in the journey of sanctification. As we once again come face to face with our sinfulness, we can open ourselves more fully to the presence of God in our lives so that we are more fully shaped by God’s grace every day.
As we look ahead to another celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, are we living out and embodying the belief system we agree with intellectually? Lent is an excellent time to reconsider and reflect.
I’m thankful to the writings of the late Robert Webber and his book Ancient Future Time, the work of Dan Wilt of worshiptraining.com, and the writing of Julie Clawson in the preparation of this article.
Additional Scriptures for consideration: Joel 2:1-1,12-17; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10 and Matthew 6:1-6,16-21.
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From Martin Luther:
This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.
Found via Tyler at Man of Depravity. Thanks!
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If you attend a church for any amount of time, you will eventually be asked to learn a new song. For some this is an exciting thing. For others it is not. Perhaps you wonder why we choose to do new songs. By doing new songs, are we saying that the old songs are bad or no longer useful? Not at all. The song selection for a worshipping community does not need to be either new or old, but can be both.
Some may say that we should do new songs because the Bible tells us to. They will point to Scriptures such as those found in Psalm 96:1, which says “Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth;” or Psalm 149:1, which says “Praise the LORD. Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise to the assembly of the saints.” However, most scholars believe that the meaning of these verses, and others like them, has little to do with an actual song, and more to do with what happens in our hearts as God renews us through the Holy Spirit and we see and understand the amazing grace extended to us through Jesus Christ. As our hearts are reborn, then what is expressed is a new song of praise to the King of kings instead of the old song of sin and selfishness. It is the redemption through Jesus Christ within our lives.
After all, think about it. All that is created comes from God. He is the author of all things. How could it be possible to come up with a song, either in content or style, which would be new to Him? As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “there is nothing new under the sun.”
So, why do new songs together? There actually are a number of good reasons. One is to give expression to the artists of each generation that the Lord raises up to lead the people. The Bible has repeated examples of newly composed songs being developed and offered to the Lord by His people in response to something He has done or revealed about Himself. These may not have been new concepts, but for that community at that time, it was a significant thing. These new expressions were added into the repertoire of songs that already existed.
Think of it this way. We all have favorite sermons from various seasons of our life, but we each want to hear a new and fresh sermon as we gather on a Sunday. The new message does not diminish the validity or truth of prior messages. In fact, we may have some recordings of sermons that have been meaningful to us that we listen to again, but we don’t expect that the preacher will give the same message again week after week after week.
Perhaps one of my favorite reasons for doing new songs is something I heard a while back. The exercise of learning a new song together is a unifying thing for a church. As new people come and join a church, instead of always expecting that they will learn all the old songs in order to fit in, the practice of learning new songs together fosters a fresh sense of community as the community changes and grows.
During 2009, as a community, we learned a number of new songs together that became expressions for us as we continue to walk with Christ and see God work in our midst. These songs included: Mighty to Save, Revelation Song, Show Us Who You Are, Exalted, Praise the Father, Praise the Son, Unashamed Love, Jesus Only, and Because of Your Love. Each of these songs has a message and truth that resonated with us.
What about in your church community? Did you learn new songs together in this past year? What were they, and what did they mean to you?
May the mysterious and glorious God that we love and serve be honored as His church worships Him together.
Image courtesy of sraburton at stock.xchang
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Found this via Jon over at StuffChristiansLike.net (thanks). It’s a stop motion piece done with a ginormous amount of post-it notes. Very well done and very cool. There is also a “making of” video. The process is as impressive as the finished project.
Enjoy!
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From Henry Blackaby in Experiencing God Day-by-Day January 15:
Share and Enjoy:“One mark of revival, during which God comes to His people in power, is that God’s people are compelled to offer their lives for His service.
“When God comes among His people in power, there is never a shortage of volunteers or resources for His work!
“There is no need to pray that God would come in power. That is the only way He ever comes. We need hearts that are so responsive to Him that He will choose to demonstrate His power through us.”
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As we move through February, we continue the “Be People of Prayer” series. This past Sunday, Valentine’s Day, we took a little different approach to the topic of prayer. Focusing on passages in 1 Peter 3:1-7 and Matthew 18:19-20, we took a look at the value of husband’s and wives praying together and how the relationship between the two can impact the effectiveness and vitality of the prayer life in a home.
The service as a whole was a great time together of remembering and celebrating Jesus. We sang, prayed, heard Scripture, and did communion together. Click through for more details…We began the service with welcome and announcements and brief spotlight on an upcoming community missions conference called SEEDS.
We then moved to a call to worship designed to remind people of why we do the call to worship (to remember why we have gathered to worship, who God is, and that we have gathered to worship Him) and read from Isaiah 43:19-21.
We then began to sing. We sang As Is Is in Heaven (Maher/Cash), Jesus Messiah (Tomlin/Carson/Cash/Reeves), and Holy Holy Holy (Heber/Dykes). We read some Scripture between Jesus Messiah and Holy Holy Holy. As It Is in Heaven has kind of become a theme song for this particular series for us. We’ve done it quite a bit, but it is still fun to do, and is still well sung by the congregation.
After Holy Holy Holy we took just a moment to be silent and reflect on the Lord, and then moved into the time of offering. The offering also set up the message with a video from the Skit Guys about choosing the right card to express love. Check it out.
After the message, we invited folks to take a few moments to pray together. As they finished, we sang Before the Throne of God Above (Bancroft) together in preparation for communion. For communion, I moved the table out a little bit into the congregation instead of having it right next to the platform to try and subtly communicate a feeling of the table being in the midst of the community. There were actually some seats event with, and even in front of, the table. It was interesting to watch where people sat in relation to it. During communion, we did a song from Chris Tomlin called This Is Our God. It’s a great expression of who Christ is, and was sung well by my wife with the help of the worship team.
After communion we sang Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) (Newton/Rees/Excell/Tomlin/Giglio) as a response before saying the Lord’s Prayer together as a benediction.
If you were there, it would be great to hear your thoughts and what was meaningful to you.
To find out what other churches did this past Sunday, check out other orders posted at The Worship Community.
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