EXHORTATION
In the ancient world, salt wasn’t valued so much for seasoning abilities. Salt’s true worth was its preserving qualities. If you have a piece of meat that’s going back, you can prolong it’s life by pressing salt into it. Salt stems decay.
And when Jesus tells Christians to be the salt of the earth, he’s saying that we are to be agents of preservation. When we see an individual who’s self-destructive or hopeless; when …
CALL TO WORSHIP – Psalm 90:1-2; 16-17
1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
16 Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. 17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of …
EXHORTATION
From time to time, you may hear one of the ministers end our prayer of confession with words like, “if we regard sin in our lives this prayer will be ineffectual…” What does it mean to “regard sin”? To regard sin is to respect sin. It means to let sin have some place in your heart or life. To regard sin is to make peace with sin—to invite it into your life and make …
In Luke’s account of the Last Supper, he tells us that:
And when the hour came, [Jesus] reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And [Jesus] said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.
As much as he didn’t want to suffer, he still looked forward with eager expectation to have this meal with his disciples. And I have to tell you that I have earnestly …
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 …
One of the great holes in our discipleship today is family worship. Husbands and Wives, Fathers and Mothers ought to lead their families to adore our Heavenly Father. God has made his desire for family worship clear enough:
…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You
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 …