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

 





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

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

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

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

The most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.

Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell

The deepest root of the contemporary malaise of Western culture is an individualism which denies the fundamental reality of our human nature as given by God--namely that we grow into true humanity only in relationships of faithfulness and responsibly toward one another.  The local congregation is called to be, and by the grace of God often is, such a community of mutual responsibility.  

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.  We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it, our encounters with others tend increasingly to be competitive as a result of the search for privacy.  We less and less often meet our fellow man to share and exchange, and more and more often encounter him as an impediment or a nuisance: making a highway crowded when we are rushing somewhere, cluttering and littering the beach or park or wood, pushing in front of us at the supermarket, taking the last parking place, polluting our air and water, building a highway through our house, blocking our view, and so on.  Because we have cut off so much communication with each other we keep bumping into each other, and thus a higher and higher percentage of our interpersonal contacts are abrasive. 

Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness

Memory, community, and hospitality.  Christian sojourners are people of the Book who love one another and entertain angels.  Without biblical memory, generous community, and sacrificial hospitality, no authentic Christian community can exist. 

Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness

Order of Worship, November 7 2010

Grace Presbyterian Church

The most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.

Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell

The deepest root of the contemporary malaise of Western culture is an individualism which denies the fundamental reality of our human nature as given by God--namely that we grow into true humanity only in relationships of faithfulness and responsibly toward one another.  The local congregation is called to be, and by the grace of God often is, such a community of mutual responsibility.  

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

At no point does the gospel come into more violent collision with the world than in its insistence on humility as the paramount virtue.  The wisdom of the world despises humility.  Western culture has been greatly influenced, often unconsciously, by the power-philosophy of Nietzsche, who envisaged the emergence of  "a daring and ruler race."  His hero was the Ubermensch, tough , brash, masculine and overbearing, who would become a "lord of the earth."  But if the ideal of Nietzsche was the superman, the ideal of Jesus was the little child.  There is no possibility of finding a compromise between these alternative models; we are obliged to choose.

John R. W. Stott in Alive to God

Where the Spirit is poured out on the church, it sweeps the believers along as though in a great river of obedience, praise, and mighty works.  Empowered by the Spirit, the community can dare and hope great things, seeing visions, dreaming dreams, turning the world upside-down...Preeminently, the Spirit energizes the community to bear witness in word and deed to the power of the resurrection...Where the Spirit is at work, liberation is underway: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, deliverance to the oppressed.  The purpose of God's outpouring of the Spirit is to establish a covenant community in which justice is both proclaimed and practiced. 

Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament

Order of Worship, October 10 2010

Grace Presbyterian Church

American religion is a mass of contradictions.  We want community, but on strictly individual terms.  We want human closeness without feeling cramped or obligated.  We want a personal God who doesn't ask much personally.  We want mystery, but in a controlled, non-disruptive way.  We want a faith that's fulfilling, practical, earthy, tolerant, transcendent, fun, empowering, morally serious without being morally demanding, a faith that restores wonder and deepens intimacy, and we want it not to cost too much or take up too much time.

Mark Buchanan ,  Article in  "Books & Culture"

Order of Worship, April 15 2007

Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans

Some critics seem so intent on deciding who bears responsibility for killing Jesus that they've turned the story into a major whodunit.  The truth is though, Christ's death is not a mystery to be unraveled, but a love story to be embraced.

Lorraine V. Murray, "Why the Passion Matters" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 1 2004)

Our world is torn by ethnic, class, and religious hatred.  Don't show the emerging culture a movie about Jesus: show them a movement of people living like Jesus-people who like him love the different, even the enemy, whose doors are open and tables are set with welcome.

Brian McLaren, Article in "Christianity Today"

Order of Worship, April 1 2007

Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New Orleans