PRAYER OF ADORATION
Holy Father,
We bless your name this morning for you have blessed us in Christ. In Christ we know that every spiritual blessing is ours. You are the God who forgives sin and pardons the sinner. You are the one who has removed our sin from us as far as the East is from the West.
And you are our Father—for you have adopted forgiven sinners into your family to be your …
Almighty God,
We praise you that you are the eternal God. You are not bound by space and time. Instead, you created space and time and you set their boundaries. You sustain the ground we stand on and even this room where we have gathered for worship.
You laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will all wear out like a garment, but …
We do quite a bit of standing and sitting in our service. And I want you to know that we do it all for a reason.
Earlier in the service we all stood to hear an assurance of pardon. Think about what’s happening at that moment of the service. We’ve just confessed sin. We’ve come, as it were, into the courtroom of the cosmic judge and we’ve pleaded guilty to all the charges of breaking …
EXHORTATION
The Christian faith isn’t just a faith of ideas. It’s also a faith of practices. And that’s because human beings aren’t just brains on sticks. There is more to us than our minds. We have bodies made up of hands, eyes, ears, and stomachs.
God isn’t just out to form your mind. He wants to conform every part of your body to the image of Christ. And one of the ways he does this …
One of the secrets to having a loving and peaceful family is regular repentance. Regular admission and confession of sins. Regular forgiveness.
Imagine two identical families. In each family, there’s a father and a mother. Both families have two children. Now imagine that these identical families live in two identical houses. Same square footage. Same layout. In both houses, you have the same number of dirty dishes, the same number of dirty clothes, and the …
Most of you know that liturgy is a favorite topic of mine. Over the past few years, I’ve read numerous books, engaged in hundreds of conversations, and worked hard to craft Christ-centered liturgies for the church I pastor, Lake Wylie Baptist.
It may come as a shock, then, to see a blog post exhorting you to stop explaining the liturgy, but let me explain. By the title, I do not imply that ministers ought not …
EXHORTATION
Psalm 62:5 says:
For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
As Christians in America, our faith runs the risk of being colored and shaded by the values of the culture we inhabit. If culture loves excess, the unconscious church will value self-indulgence. If culture worships success, a blind church will begin promoting growth and numbers more than holiness and true proclamation.
Our culture is obsessed with …
Galatians 6:9 says, And let us not grow weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
When you’re trying to grow a vegetable garden you have to sow a lot of seed, you have to protect those seeds until they can germinate, then you have to constantly pull weeds, and water (but not too much). Your hands have to ache. Your face has to sweat. And then you …
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility
Sin divides man from God, and man from man. But, when Christ died for sin, he broke down the walls that divide us from God and one another. From …
EXHORTATION
1 Corinthians 13:7 says…
Love… believes all things
This means that Christians who are growing in love choose to believe the best in others. The word for believe is the same word we translate as “faith.” So, literally, love has all faith.
Believing all things means we give others the benefit of the doubt. We take one another’s word at face value. It means we open ourselves up fully to one another. We believe …
