Readings for Sunday, November 22

Sometimes the word of God baffles us. Sometimes it dismays. It can confuse, mystify, trouble and confound the wisest of us. Our tendency when we run up against the hardness of the Scripture is to throw up our hands and sit down. That's not the way. The way of humility finds a door locked and moves down the hallway to try another. The way of humility trusts God enough to walk past the locked doors and walk through the open ones.
This passage in 1 Thessalonians is one of the open doors of Scripture. It is wide open in it's simplicity, wide enough for anyone to walk through in obedience. If you've ever said that you just want to be told what to do, this is a passage to satisfy you and challenge your sincerity at the same time.


November 22, 2009

Call to Repentance
1 Thessalonians 4:7-8 (page 1840)

Call to Worship
Psalm 30 (page 867)

OT Reading
Psalm 118 (page 956)

NT Reading
Ephesians 5:1-21 (page 1822)

Message
Jump and How High
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (page 1841)

Gift Pak

Gift Paks are due at the church on Sunday, November 22nd.

Readings for Sunday, November 15th

We are participants with God in a cosmic insurgency. Our life of faith is not a personal and passive matter; it's not about me being saved by God. Our life of faith is about throwing our lot in with Heaven's rebel forces and joining in the stirring struggle to make a beachhead for our soon arriving King. When we love the unlovely and draw out our invisible neighbors, when we make sacrifices to feed hungry people, when we raise our voices to tell the truth, and when we deal aggressively with the sin in our lives we are making the right kind of holy war: we are working for global regime change where the illegitimate ruler of this present darkness is cast out and our Lord is established as King of a new heaven and new earth forever.


November 16, 2009

Call to Repentance
Hebrews 10:29 (page 1874)

Call to Worship
Psalm 84 (page 922)

OT Reading
Psalm 50 (page 888)

NT Reading
2 Peter 3:1-10 (page 1896)

Message
Regime Change
2 Peter 3:11-13 (page 1896)

Readings for Sunday, November 8, 2009

When Jesus talked about putting new wine into old wineskins he was using a metaphor that his audience would understand immediately, without explanation. It is still a remarkably apt metaphor but it needs a lot of explanation now, especially to those of us whose firsthand knowledge of fermentation is limited to things gone bad in the fridge.
But the thing with new wine was that it still had some fermenting to do and that meant that its container had to be flexible enough to accomodate the fizzing and swelling of something that was almost living and breathing.
What Jesus meant was that when people put their faith in him they would receive God's own Holy Spirit in their lives and that spirit would bubble and percolate and stretch them. And if they were brittle and rigid, like an old skin that had lost all of its elasticity, the results would be messy and disastrous.
Same with the new patch and the old cloth.
So often we find the new thing and try to use it to make the old thing work, which is backwards.
When someone first begins to believe that Jesus might be the Son of God and worthy of faith, the temptation is to get just enough Jesus to make our miserable lives work. Just enough Jesus to make our dysfunctional relationships somewhat functional. Just enough Jesus to make our unsustainable lifestyles barely sustainable. Just enough Jesus to get us through our miserably self-centered days.
Jesus is not a patch of new cloth to make our shabby cloaks work. When we try that we'll get that much more tattered.
Try unfolding your Jesus patch until he's too big to patch the holes, big enough, in fact, to take the place of your shabby rags, big enough to wear. Big enough to get lost in.


November 8, 2009

Call to Repentance
1 Peter 2:11 (page 1888)

Call to Worship
Psalm 4 (page 845)

OT Reading
1 Kings 19:9-18 (page 559)

NT Reading
Romans 13:8-14 (page 1765)

Message
Our Cherished Rags
Matthew 9:14-17 (page 1509)

Readings for Sunday, November 1

This is going to be a sermon about what happens when God asks us to kill something. Because sometimes he does.
It's always distressing and difficult. Even when he asks us to kill something we already hate (an ugly sin in our lives) we find it difficult to do so. When he asks us to kill something good that we have loved and cherished (a dream about the future, for instance) it is hard on a galactic scale.
And it makes us ask lots of questions. "Why is God asking me to do this?"
"What gives God the right to ask this of me?"
"Is there a way of honoring God's intentions without following his instructions?"
"What will happen if I don't bring down the knife?"
But the question to ask is "how great is our God?"
And the answer to that question is "very, very great." He is great enough to bring back to life the thing we have killed out of obedience. He is also great enough to keep it dead. And He is great enough, if it pleases Him, to show us something far greater than the thing he had us kill, something we could not have imagined and would never have seen had we held on to the lesser good.

Call to Repentance
Hebrews 3:12-13 (page 1865)

Call to Worship
Psalm 138 (page 973)

OT Reading
Genesis 22:1-14 (page 31)

NT Reading
John 12:20-33 (page 1671)

Message
How Great Is Our God?
Hebrews 11:1-2, 11-12, 17-19 (page 1874)

Readings for Sunday, October 25

This Sunday we're going to be celebrating a dedication of Miles Tate, my nephew. My father, Miles' grandfather, Barry Joe Tate will be performing the dedication and preaching the message. And I am really looking forward to what he has to share.

Call to Repentance
1 Peter 5:6-7 (page 1892)

Call to Worship
Psalm 111 (page 952)

OT Reading
Jeremiah 42:1-7 (page 1245)

NT Reading
Matthew 1:18-25 (page 1497)

Message
Let Our Ordered Lives Confess

Readings for Sunday, October 18, 2009

This Sunday I'm going to be preaching on the woman at the well from John 4. Specifically, I'm going to pick up on her remark that, as a Samaritan, she worships on the mountain that her fathers all worshiped on, and Jesus' response to that.

It is so much easier to climb a customary mountain to worship God than it is to worship Him in spirit and in truth. That is a little counterintuitive, but it holds true again and again. It is easier to follow rules than it is to bow your heart. It is easier to go through even boring and difficult motions than it is to be vulnerable and available.

I, like the Samaritan woman, have been guilty of thinking that my worship requires certain conditions to be met. For me to have a really good worship experience I need a certain type of music at a certain volume with specific accompaniment in a certain location among a specific group of people on a certain day between the hours of 10:00 and 11:00. I think it would make God laugh if it didn't make Him so angry.

Call to Repentance
2 Corinthians 7:1 (page 1800)

Call to Worship
Psalm 24 (page 862)

OT Reading
Amos 5:18-27 (page 1426)

NT Reading
Luke 9:51-62 (page 1611)

Message
To Worship
John 4:1-24 (page 1651)