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 

Prayer of Confession
O Lord, we have not longed for your coming as our only hope.
We have not lived as citizens of your kingdom as we should.
We have chosen easy belief instead of the fellowship of Your cross.

We have made this world our treasure,
giving our hearts to the creation, instead of You, the Creator.
We are callous to the needs of the poor, the lonely and the suffering.
We have not cried out for justice.
We do not grieve for those who are without Christ in a dying world.

Forgive our offenses and sins
By the Holy Spirit fill us with the light and life in Christ.
In our weakness may Your grace witness to Christ's glory.

Assurance of Pardon
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in our humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. Hebrews 2:14-15

Order of Worship, January 16 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not a gospel of growth.  It sets our eyes on a development more complete than any that can be conceived by a psychology confined within the limits of nature.

Paul Tournier,  A Place for You

Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. 

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Christianity entered history as a new world order, or rather a new social dimension.  From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a "doctrine," but exactly a "community." There was not only a "Message" to be proclaimed and delivered, and "Good News" to be declared.  There was precisely a New Community,distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited.  Indeed, "fellowship" (koinonia) was the basic category of Christian existence. 

Georges Florovsky, quoted in A Peculiar People (Rodney Clapp) 

We can no more learn what it means to be a Christian simply by attending to Scripture than we can learn to be Texan by reading about the history of Texas.  Rather, we learn that story, like the way we learn the story of Texas, by caring for the tombstones of the saints.  It is from them, as we see what the story of Jesus has done to their own stories, that we begin to understand what that story requires and means.  For the truth of the story we find in the gospels is finally known only through the kind of lives it produces.  If such lives are absent than no amount of hermeneutical theory or manipulation can make those texts meaningful.  

Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today

Order of Worship, January 16 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

Jesus among your other gods: Knowledge - the keys to the universe?

An idol is like salt - it is what you depend upon to bring meaning and flavor to an otherwise bland or painfully distasteful meal.  

God's invitation of friendship, in Jesus Christ, offers a share in God's way of knowing the world, of seeing and acting in it, of imagining its present and future in God's love... God's friendship is dangerous to us because it undermines our handy friendships and ways of detachment, and, in the process, it undermines the manner in which we are attached to the world.  If we have been setting out to find ourselves through following our own way and building our own futures, God's friendship undermines our identities and the vision of the world that we call our own.

David McCarthy, The Good Life

The greatest benefit of a good education has always been that it enables us to think clearly.  We learn to draw different kinds of logically straight lines and how to count in a variety of ways - in highly sophisticated forms and modes.  But, says the Pundit [Ecclesiastes' author], there are some things that education, even the best education, is powerless to do: it cannot untangle the twists in the human heart; it cannot make up for what is lacking in the soul.  Perhaps he too had noticed that some of the most intelligent and well-educated individuals are among the saddest and most tortured people.  

Sinclair Ferguson, The Pundit's Folly

When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man's labor on earth--his eyes not seeing sleep day or night--then I saw all that God has done.  No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun.  Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning.  Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.  Ecclesiastes 10:16-17

In the words of C.S. Lewis: 'I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer.  You are yourself the answer.  Before your face questions die away...'  The bottom line of human knowledge is simple:  we can't know it all.  Indeed, we can know only a very little about God's vast and rich creation.  Awareness of our limitations should breed humility and dependence.  For true wisdom is found only where Job found it: in surrender to God.  

Dan Allender & Tremper Longman, Breaking the Idols of Your Heart

My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Colossians 2:2-3

To fear God, to trust God, to love God, and to know God - these are really one and the same thing.  In fact, the fear of God about which the Pundit speaks arises from the discovery of God's love for us in our sin and weakness.  It is the sense of awe that results from the discovery that he knows me through and through, means to destroy all that is sinful in me, and yet does so because he loves me with an intensely faithful love.  That stretches my mind and emotions to their limit...

There is what Paul calls a 'futility' in our 'thinking.'  But the fear of God reverses this, placing him at the center of our universe.  He is at the center of life.  We see everything in the light of his creating and sustaining activity.  Then things begin to make sense: "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." [Psalm 25:14]

Without Him, life is at best a puzzle, at worst a tragedy; this is not a self-contained 'user-friendly' universe.  With Him we learn that even when his immediate purposes are hidden from us his ways are perfect (for we do not always, nor do we ever fully, understand his plans).  We also learn this: even though we will never know everything about this world, we do know something about everything: God is its Creator, and he is our Heavenly Father. 

Sinclair Ferguson, The Pundit's Folly

Questions and especially questions without answers move us to contemplate a source of truth larger, with more authority, than ourselves.  Granted, we live in a world in which we ignore the clear answers to many of the questions.  Most of us know what we should do in enough situations so that we can survive and even thrive.  Some of us, therefore, don't have time nor desire to consider the more difficult questions for which there is no clear and available answer.  We prefer to live as if these questions don't exist, since the answers don't exist for us.  We prefer to view the world apart from the existence of these plaguing questions.  The danger, of course, is that we will not contribute to the discovery of answers, or that we will miss any authority and source of truth larger than ourselves or our system.  We may even miss God.  Concerning him, how many unanswered questions exist?  Of course, you may assume he doesn't exits since all your questions cannot be answered. 

N. Lewis, In Search of Satisfaction

Sunday School, January 9 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other.  We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more.  Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. 

Dorothy Day

The existence of a plurality of "Churches" (in the modern sense of the word) is scandalous, for the Church's unity in Christ is of its very essence.  The degree to which it has ceased to appear scandalous is the measure of the extent to which the word "Church" has been evacuated of its New Testament meaning.  A divided Church in the New Testament sense of the word Church is something illogical and incomprehensible--as illogical and incomprehensible as human sin. 

Lesslie Newbigin

The linkage which unites Christians in a common body is a linkage which crosses the boundaries of the centuries as well as the lines of longitude and latitude.  The Christian community, the Church, is a massive body spread out across the map of history.  It is a body quivering with life in all its members.  All its members; not just those passing here and now between birth and death.  That is the community the Christian joins at baptism. 

Harry Blamires

Order of Worship, January 9 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church

Prayer of Confession
Gracious Lord, we confess that we have dishonored you in our words, thoughts and deeds.

Depending on our strength, we have stumbled.
Trusting in our goodness, we have become prideful.
Confident in our plans for our lives we have failed to seek your will.

We pray now, Lord, for you to forgive all of our many sins;
to cleanse the unrighteousness from our lives,
and to turn from our faces and our hearts back towards you.
We pray these things in the name of your most precious son, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

Assurance of Pardon
Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousnesses.  Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.  But to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousnesses.  Romans 4:3-5

Order of Worship, January 2 2011

Grace Presbyterian Church