Yesterday’s service was pretty nice because I came into it feeling a little more miserable than I wanted, but as it progressed so everything just started to get better.
I enjoyed our time in worship. At around this time I’m pretty much letting the team do whatever they want, and I’m just thankful that they are able to lead the congregation (and myself) into singing. The lyrics flashed smoothly, there were no issues with our instruments and our mic mixing, and the singers were into it. Not merely leading others to sing, but leading others to worship.
Writing about this now, sort of helps me because I’m also working on a knowledgebase, a manual of operations for us to follow when it comes to hosting a worship service, and I guess I just shared what I’d like to see in an ideal worship team of musicians and singers.
But going on to the music: The third song was ‘I Look To You’, or ‘God, I Look To You’, not sure who sang it originally. When the song was proposed it was met with resistance by our overall Music Director, who said that the song is more for meditation than it is to be led and sung by a congregation. Here, we saw an opportunity to see how we perform in handling conflicts… and when I heard them actually leading the song, I made the assumption that they were all able to handle differences in opinion smoothly.
And honestly, the song was good. We have a younger lady on our team of singers, and she absolutely nailed the song; It was well within her range, and she added a little more of her own flair into the song.
More importantly, the song’s theme was graciously received by the rest of the congregation, myself included. And I couldn’t help but share, during my portion of the Service, that in the chorus, we don’t sing that God gives us strength, and God provides us with a shield – No, we explicitly sung and expressed, He HIMSELF is our Strength, our Shield, our Rock.
This, of course, was one of many examples we could see, where when we worship, we realize more of the Truth of who God is, and what He does for us.
I shared the Doxology as another example to the people: I wrote about it earlier, and shared it to them – We started with just singing ‘Praise God’, but the last line had us singing ‘Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’
Moving onto exhortation when it comes to communion, one of our folks in the Worship team stepped up, and it was his first time in a while before a crowd. I wasn’t as surprised when he went through the conventional quoting and reading of 1 Corinthians 11:23 and onwards, but to my surprise, after we did eat and drink, he had something else to share: In a nutshell, his point was the Old Covenant has us doing sacrifices in remembrance of our sin (Hebrews 9), but the New Covenant has us feasting on remembrance of the Son.
A member of our Media team then stepped up to exhort on Giving; he testified and shared a couple of verses, but I’ll get back to that a little later.
After making announcements and a short prayer, I started.
Last week it sounded like I was complaining regarding not having Manang Irene around. But by the power of the Holy Spirit I can choose to be thankful. In fact, we’re making some progress in the house. Things are getting moved and things are becoming clearer. The Holy Spirit helps us to see the opportunities in the forms of setback, particularly when it comes to the absence of good things or good people in our lives: In their absence, we appreciate what we have more.
That led me to say that even with great house comes great responsibility.
I also talked about Akira Toriyama’s passing and I was surprised to see how, in his passing, I saw the impact of his work in my life. I did not know the guy, but he had such a great influence on me.
When I asked questions like, shouldn’t I have the same impact with my works? Shouldn’t Christ have such an impact on me? Shouldn’t I make such an impact on others for Christ? – And this is where we went into the Word and realized that whether we feel it or not, we have our own impact in our own lives, and in our own communities as well.
I didn’t point it out at the time, because I was still busy summarizing, but the basis for my next claim comes from the 2nd Chapter of Acts:
Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
Acts 2:36-41
Regardless of all we’re going through, all we’re up to, what we are, where we are: What we all have in common, as we see in this Scripture, is (1) the grace of God, (2) the finished work of Christ, and (3) the power of the Holy Spirit.
Last week I pointed out how we have this in the absence of good things happening in our lives, or in the absence of good people in our lives. This week, I learned another side of the coin. Starting immediately during Monday, things happened… and from Monday through Friday I didn’t experience the absence of good things, but the presence of bad things.
But all the same, it all points to what we have in common: (1) The grace of God, (2) the finished work of Christ, and (3) the power of the Holy Spirit.
I pretty much reiterated what I shared last Sunday, and just provided another perspective to it: It remains the same, we have all these wonderful things, we could say we are blessed with the Grace of the Father, the Finished Work of the Son, and the Power of the Holy Spirit… whether we experience the absence of good, or the presence of bad.
Earlier today our Media team member who exhorted for giving quoted Matthew’s gospel, particularly where it says, ‘Seek first the kingdom of God’… And I went ahead and picked up on that, because we can say that we can do the seeking, or we are able to appreciate God’s kingdom seeking us – All because of God’s grace, Christ’s finished work, and the power of the Holy Spirit.
I then shared the title of the song we sang a while back… and while it’s okay for us to sing that we look to God, it’s also just as nice for us to appreciate that He was the one who looked for us, and sought us first.
God I look to You
God You look to me
You are always thinking of me.
At this point I ended the message, and prayed for everyone before having them pray for each other.
The question now is, in the light of this message, what can we share for this coming Palm Sunday?
Until the next post, God bless us all.
85079/365000
#Reflections #Revelations #Doxology #Praise #Worship #Perfection #Sanctification #Salvation #BenefitsOfSalvation #PracticalChristianity #Comfort #GodOurFather #JesusChrist #HolySpirit #Bible #RealBlessings
JB's Personal Brain Defragmenter 
Leave a comment