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



 

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