Words for Reflection

Give me the kind of love you possess.  I do not have it within myself.  I need You to give it to me, God.  I know this is  prayer that will please You.  Answer me in Your love.

I want to give love freely, without counting the cost, but this is not natural.  I do not have it within myself.  I need You to give it to me, God.  I know this is a prayer that will please You.  Answer me in Your love.

I want to bless, with joy, and self-sacrifice, not considering my own wants, but I do not have it within myself.  I need You to give it to me, Lord.  I know this is prayer that will please You.  Answer me in Your love.

Give me this love in abundance.  Please, God, grant my request, and make me a shining beacon, radiant with the generosity of Jesus. 

Kari Kristina Reeves

 

Order of Worship, May 26 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church 



Words for Reflection

As Christians we cannot activate a spiritual gift by flipping some inner switch of awareness.  We seek God's glory, not our own, trusting the Spirit to enable us in speech and action.  Since all is of Him, there is nothing the Spirit cannot use.  Desire to please the Lord clarifies our purpose.

The fellowship of the Spirit is more than a sense of camaraderie.  It is a sharing together in the presence of the Spirit, and of His gifts... Christians often most need those who differ from them the most with regard to spiritual gifts. Seeking the unity of the Spirit means appreciating the diversity of the Spirit's gifts and learning from one another -- growing together to the full maturity of Christ.

Ed Clowney

 

The Christian is not a natural man who has become religious.  Already before conversion, Paul said, many early Christians were highly religious, devoting themselves earnestly to the worship of idols.  Conversion, moreover, did not just involve a change of liturgical habit... To be a Christian means to be refashioned in all of one's desires, aims, attitudes, actions, from the shallowest to the deepest.  This is not a matter of giving shape to unshaped human nature.  There is no formless, underlying "human stuff" waiting to be modeled into a Christian shape... For the unbeliever, the problem is not that the stuff is unformed but that it is badly and wrongly formed and has to be reformed and transformed into the form of Christ.

Peter J. Leithart

 

Sermon Notes -- The Body of Christ, a People of the New Creation (I Corinthians 12:1-31)

Reverend Jason Little

 

We vacillate between self-loathing (my part is not needed) and self-worship (my part is most important).  But Jesus gives us at third way.  It is by the same Spirit that we are all called here, and that means what He gives to each to bring is essential.  No spiritually insignificant or nonessential person, gift, or ministry among us, the Body.  If you don't trust yourself to see that, trust that God sees it. 

 

Order of Worship, May 12 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church



 

Words for Reflection

The believer sanctifies himself that God's purpose may not be frustrated in him, but find glorious fruition.  Only he does so in constant reliance on divine grace.  It would be a mistake to confine the province of faith to justification.  All progress in holiness depends on it.  It is the element, the atmosphere in which the Christian lives, that which imparts to his works their sacrificial character and makes them pleasing to God.  And, because, thanks to God, it is deeper in him than his deepest sin, even when he fails and falls, he does not despair, nor is utterly forsaken. God's witness remains in him; he can say with Peter: "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love thee!" Finally, the Lord here assures the hungry and thirsty ones, that they shall be satisfied. 

Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

 

Sermon Notes -- The Body and the Table of the New Creation (I Corinthians 11:17-22)

Reverend Jason Little

 

The Need: Broken relationships; relating just as the world does ... poor & needy not taken care of, haves & have-nots within the church totally separated and distant

 

The Gospel: Giving to us Jesus -- cling to Jesus, and your relationships will be transformed.  Remember who Jesus is to you and you will remember who you are to be to one another.  'On the night he was betrayed...' and then extends the bread and wine as forgiveness and grace.

 

Application: Have to feel and own that as much as we belong to Jesus, we belong to one another.  What's important is that we feast, together.  As we come to Him, our lives are woven into each other.  Coming together to feast is the chance to rehearse forgiveness and reconciliation.  To love each other, we much worship together. 

 

Order of Worship, May 5 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

 





Words for Reflection

We need to face the truth of the limits of our perceptions and look again at who Jesus is revealing Himself to be.  Jesus' words are an invitation to contemplation, a call to awareness.  His admonition is the gentle but powerful reminder that a great deal of the work we do as we follow Him along the Way is to keep opening our eyes and ears to the truth of who He is.  He can never be exhaustively described by us.  There is always more about Him to discover.  The ingredients of mystery and humility are part of what fuels our journey with Him.

David Rohrer, The Sacred Wilderness of Pastoral Ministry

 

Premodernism asserted that there was an objective truth that could be known by those who had the skill to see it.  Modernism objected that truth was relative, that different people saw truth differently according to their own situations.  Postmodernism insists that there is no truth at all, that whatever truth there might be must be created by each person, for any larger claims to truth are in reality disguised bids for power.  The meta-narrative of the Christian community compassionately demonstrates that Jesus is the Truth, an objective Truth who can be known.  We know Him only partially, but because we know Him we do not have to try to create truth for ourselves.  Furthermore, His truth is not oppressive, for as Mark Schwehn emphasizes,

     For Christianity, the quest for truth is bound up inextricably with discipleship, and therefore the  

     shape of power is for them always cruciform...So long as Christians remember that, for disciples,

     power is not dominion but obedience, faithfulness, and suffering servanthood, they can rightly

     claim an integral connection between truth and power.

The Christian story we offer to our neighbors introduces them to Jesus, the Truth, who brings healing to postmodernists' fractured souls.

Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time

 

Order of Worship, April 28 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church



 

 

 

Words for Reflection

God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers.  The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into His heart.  Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God.

It is said of God that no one can behold His face and live.  I always thought this meant that no one could see His splendor and live.  A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see His sorrow and live.  Or perhaps His sorrow is splendor. 

And great mystery: to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness, the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent His beloved Son to suffer like us, through His suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil.

Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

 

Order of Worship, March 31 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church



Words for Reflection

The external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast.  The earth's treasures no longer serve to build God's garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction.

Pope Benedict XVI

 

     God wants from us not numb obedience but devoted freedom, creativity, and energy.  That is what the grace of God is for -- not simply to balance a ledger.  In short we are to become responsible beings: people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them -- expecting us to make something significant of our lives... For such undertakings, we have to find emotional and spiritual funding from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces towards God's light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, bathed in it, revitalized by it.  Then we have to find our role within God's big project, the one that stretches across the border from this life into the next.  To be a responsible person is to find one's role in the building of shalom, the re-webbing of God, humanity, and all creation in justice, harmony, fulfillment, and delight. To be a responsible person is to find one's own role and then, funded by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it. 

     To speak of sin by itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace is to forget the resolve of God.  Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.  Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler.  Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.

     But to speak of grace without sin is surely no better.  To do this is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ.  What had we thought the ripping and writhing on Golgotha were all about?  To speak of grace without looking squarely at these realities, without painfully honest acknowledgement of our own sin and its effects, is to shrink grace to a mere embellishment of the music of creation.  To ignore, euphemize, or otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel.  For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and finally uninteresting.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not The Way It's Supposed To Be

 

Order of Worship, March 10 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church 





Words for reflection

For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

Hebrews 13:14

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs.  For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language, nor practice an extraordinary kind of life.  Nor again do they possess any invention discovered by any intelligence or study of ingenious men, no are they masters of any human dogma as some are.  But while they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast, and follow the native customs in dress and food and the other arrangements of life, yet the constitution of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvelous, and confessedly contradicts expectation.  

They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers.  Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign.  They marry like all other men and they beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring.  They have their meals in common, but not their wives.  They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh.  Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.  They obey the established laws, and they surpass the laws in their own lives.  They love all men, and they are persecuted by all.  They are ignored, and yet they are condemned.  They are put to death, and yet they are endued with life.  They are in beggary, and yet they make many rich.  They are in want of all things, and yet they abound in all things.  They are dishonored, and yet they are glorified in their dishonor.  They are evil spoken of, and yet they are vindicated.  They are reviled, and they bless; they are insulted, and they respect   Doing good they are punished as evil-doers; being punished they rejoice, as if they were thereby quickened by life.  War is waged against them as aliens by the Jews, and persecution is carried on against them by the Greeks, and yet those that hate them cannot tell the reason of their hostility.

Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, excerpt from a 2nd century letter

Order of Worship, February 24 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

When I was 9 days old, my parents brought me to baptism.  I couldn't do anything to receive it, earn it, deserve it.  Totally by grace, the Triune God washed me in mercy, forgave me utterly, adopted me as His child, took up residency in me, initiated me into His Body and ordained me into the priesthood of all believers.  I could never be able to pay God back for all those gifts, nor does God want me to try.
Baptism therefore frees me to respond to the immensity of Trinitarian grace by loving God and loving my neighbors.  Because in my baptism I became inhabited by the Spirit and a "priest" in God's service, it orders my life and initiates my commitment to live according to the focal concerns God mandates.  Because baptism is not merely a rite, but also includes the whole life inaugurated by that rite, it is a source by which to challenge constantly my involvement in the technologized, commodified society.  Daily I renew my baptismal covenant because the Trinity is always faithful to God's side of the relationship.  Daily that grace and hope empower me to ask about everything: Is this appropriate to my baptized life?
Baptism thus equips us to engage in other practices that enable us to live as Christians in a technologized, commodofying world.

Marva Dawn, Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society

Order of Worship, February 17 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God.  It is not a divine afterthought.  It is not an accident of history.  On the contrary, the church is God's new community.  For this purpose, conceived in a past eternity, being worked out in history, and to be perfected in a future eternity, is not just to save isolated individuals and so perpetuate our loneliness, but rather to build his church.  The reason why we are committed to the church is that God is so committed.

John Stott, The Living Church

School of Discipleship, January 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

A familiar phrase coursing through culture is, "The only constant in life is change." Weather changes, people change, relationships and attitudes change   Colors fade from clothing, our faces and bodies change shape and texture over the years.  Most change is small and unnoticeable,  but we'd be hard-pressed to find anything that does not change considerably over time.

For a guy like me, that's hard.  I spend hours perfecting one thing or another, honing life to my specifications.   Wood-working, a project, the beds I plant in the yard.   I even spent years perfecting my penmanship so I could write faster and neater and that my letters would look exactly the way I wanted. Yet, looking back, everything has changed.  Sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously.

Scripture teaches us again and again that Yahweh does not change.  "I Am that I Am," God told Moses.  Numerous authors of scripture have articulated the same truth.  God does not change.  We need to hear it, meditate on it, and see what difference it makes in our lives.  It doesn't make Him archaic, irrelevant, obsolete, or discarded; in fact, it should make Him the most significant part of our lives.  Everything else is fading away, and He remains.

Nate Conrad

Sermon Notes -- Psalm 102:1-28

We tend to rely on things that change to give us abiding contentment.  But that won't work -- we must rely on something that abides unchanged.  

His unchangingness makes Him God -- if He could be even more or less of what He is now, He wouldn't be God.  But His promises are sure and set.  If He changed, we couldn't depend on His promises, or even our own faith in who He is.  But He does not change & He keeps His promises.  

God brings change in our lives to show His perfect, unchanging goodness.  

Order of Worship, February 10 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

We have so many things to do, we forget why we are doing them; we have so many things, we forget why they matter.

Marva Dawn, Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society

Christians can't be pessimists because we know the future and its connection to the character of God.  Moreover, the future aeon has already broken into this present age, and God's kingly reign has already begun.  On the other hand, however, Christians cannot be optimists either, because we know that this aeon is still in severe trouble.  This time and this world are still characterized by sinfulness, brokenness, evil, idolatries, overwhelming fetters.  Instead of being either pessimists or optimists  Christians are hopeful realists. 

Marva Dawn, Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society

What is desperately needed and seldom found in the church is an adequate theology of the family of faithful.  Paul believes that being brothers and sisters in Christ and sons and daughters of God transcends all other loyalties and should transform all other social relationships   Blood should not be thicker than the baptismal waters in the church.  Rather Paul calls for a "relativized" view of all this-worldly institutes, including marriage.  His idea of a family "church" is actualized where God's people treat each other as their primary family, not just as some secondary social gathering that happens once a week and that promotes the agenda of the nuclear family.

Ben Witherington, Conflict & Community In Corinth

Order of Worship,  February 3 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

Prayer is language used in personal relation to God.  It gives us utterance to what we sense or want or respond to before God.  God speaks to us; our answers are our prayers.  The answers are not always articulate: silence, sighs, groanings - these all constitute responses   The answers are not always positive: anger, skepticism,  curses - these are also responses   But always God is involved, whether in darkness or light, whether in faith or despair.  This is hard to get used to.  Our habit is to talk about God, not to Him.  We love discussing God.  The Psalms resist these discussions.  They are not provided to teach us about God but to train us in responding to Him.  We don't learn the Psalms until we are praying them.

Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer

Order of Worship, January 27 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy... (I Cor. 1.2).  Paul's salutation makes us uncomfortable: 'called to be holy ones,' literally, 'saints.'  In our world, saints populate stained glass windows, medals and automobile dashboards.  A politician will sometimes assure us: 'I'm no saint.'  He makes this modest disclaimer to divert attention from his past and assures us that he is human.  Under the scorn that dismisses saintliness lies a guilty avoidance of what it means to be human.  As rebels, we prefer to think that a saint is abnormal -- to be admired, perhaps, as a Mother Teresa, but not a real human being.  To be holy is to be genuinely human, for holiness is godliness, and life without God is life without meaning.

Edmund P. Clowney, The Church

Corporate Confession of Sin

Father, You have called us to follow Jesus and live Christ-like lives. 

You have called us to let the gospel shape our hearts. 

However, we come to You this morning, confessing

that we have allowed the world to shape us instead of Your lovingkindness. 

Where You desire us to serve, we have sought to be served. 

Where you desire us to sacrifice, we have sought self protection. 

Where You have sought us to engage, we have remained aloof. 

Where You have sought us as Your children, we have lived as orphans. 

Now, Father, accept our confession and receive us gladly.  

We do not ask for Your grace because we deserve it. 

We even doubt our ability to confess with full honesty the depth of our sin. 

Father pardon us for the sake of Jesus.  

Assurance of Pardon

God made Christ who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God!  2 Corinthians 5:21

Order of Worship, January 13 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection

One wonders how many congregations would hire someone like Paul, who touts his weakness in personal presence, his penchant to find or stir up trouble, his run-ins with the law, and his lack of the skills so often most valued today in a preacher, namely, good oral form, verbal eloquence, powerful delivery, and meaningful gestures.  I suspect that all too often we evaluate our ministers using Corinthian, not Pauline, criteria. In doing so, we too, have bought into the world's dominant vision of what it means to be wise, powerful and of great worth and have, like the Corinthians, made void the preaching of the cross.  The wisdom of the cross is a message not about strength instead of weakness, but in fact about power through weakness, through self-sacrificial behavior, through reliance on God's power to work through us.  It is not about our human power to manipulate a situation.  Until we learn the meaing of the words "when I was weak, then I was strong," until we learn what it means to be empty of self and full of Christ, we will continue to misread Paul's theology of leadership, status, power and wisdom.  Until then, the 'church' will continue to play the game of power politics with ministry, an all too human and too Corinthian game indeed.

Ben Witherington, Conflict and Community in Corinth 

Order of Worship, January 6 2013

Grace Presbyterian Church

Words for reflection
The New Year is a time to learn to rely more heavily on the grace of God.  Now I've met a few self-made men and women and so have you, but so often these people seem proud, self-centered and driven.  There is another way: beginning to trust in God's help.

Anonymous

If this is to be a Happy New Year, a year of usefulness, a year in which we shall live to make this earth better, it is because God will direct our pathway.  How important then, to feel our dependence upon Him!

Matthew Simpson

Order of Worship, December 30 2012

Grace Presbyterian Church