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Week Of: January 4, 2009
Title: Acts of Worship: Lord’s Supper
Series: Ministry of Worship – Part 1
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 11: 17-33
1. There are two ordinances in most Baptist churches: One, Baptism, the other Lord’s Supper.
2. In the history of the church, what we are about to do here today has been observed under various names: Lord’s Supper, Memorial Supper, Eucharist, Communion, and Mass.
3. The term Lord’s Supper is very old, and is mentioned in our scripture today by Paul.
4. Memorial Supper is based on 1 Corinthians 11:24 in which Paul tells us Jesus’ words, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
5. The Eucharist is the term that our Catholic and Episcopalian brothers and sisters are fond of using which means thanksgiving. Mark 14: 22-23 says that Jesus took bread and blessed it and then gave thanks for the cup.
6. The term Communion is based on Paul’s use of the term in 1 Corinthians 10:16 when he speaks of “a sharing in the blood of Christ.”
7. But whatever Christians may call it, we must remember it is an act of worship. As Baptists, we call it an ordinance or a commandment that Christ has commanded us to do but really it is more. The way Christians are supposed to observe the Lord’s Supper is more than just something we are told to do – it is an act of pure and simple worship.
8. But how are we supposed to worship during the Lord’s Supper? First of all, the word worship means worthy of our supreme reverence or honor. As Christians, we worship God as we honor him with our supreme honor, reverence, and love in our songs, in the reading of scripture, sermons, baptism, and the Lord ’s Supper. Everything we do here is meant to be a means of God’s grace to us, in which we worship Him.
9. If you don’t worship today, guess what? It is your fault. I am not going to take responsibility for it. It is your relationship with God and if you don’t choose to pay attention it is your fault, not mine. I love to say that, not because I want to be insulting but because it puts the responsibility squarely on your shoulders where it belongs.
10. The Lord’s Supper is the same. It is a means of God’s grace in which you have the opportunity to worship God. And if you don’t worship during it, if you don’t pay attention, if you don’t fully appreciate it once it is explained to you, then it is your failure not mine.
11. Now I will admit this, part of the failure to worship during the Lord’s Supper as Baptists is that I think we don’t fully understand what the Lord’s Supper means. We think of it as just being symbolic. Mere symbolism that expresses what has already occurred in our lives. Something that just happened in the past to us, which has left an impression on us.
12. In worship, symbols like the Lord’s Supper must stand for spiritual realities. We come to know God in a deeper, more direct, more personal way by a response of faith based on the knowledge gained through these acts of worship that we do.
13. Let me explain it this way: the Lord’s Supper points to the redemptive action of God though the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His body is broken for you, His blood is shed for you. And for as long as you live, He will continue that spiritual reality in your life.
14. In others words, Jesus has saved you. He is continuing to save you and by the grace of God He will continue His great work in you until you die or He comes again. The Lord’s Supper is about the continuing reality of your salvation. It is not just about you honoring Jesus for what he did years ago in your life, but it is about honoring and worshiping Jesus for what He continues to do in our lives. It is not just about symbolism, it is about continuing the ongoing reality of God saving you and me. It is about us participating every day in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that His sacrifice has made possible. It is not old news! It is current news! It is not about the past! It about us remembering and honoring Jesus for what He is doing today in our lives….
15. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that if you don’t worship God in the various acts of worship that He gives us you won’t continued to be saved. That is another sermon for another day…
16. I am just saying that if you want to deepen your spiritual life and the quality of your life on earth, then you will learn to worship, and participating in the Lord’s Supper is one way that you do so.
17. But if you expect me …to magically make your spiritual life better by giving you better sermons or better worship experiences then you are barking up the wrong tree.
18. Your better worship experiences begin with God’s grace and your prepared heart….
Week Of: January 11, 2009
Title: Peace On Earth
Series: Study of Spiritual Formation – Part 19
Scripture: Luke 2:13-16
1. How many of you watch the news faithfully? How many of you are paying attention to the fighting going on in the Gaza strip?
2. The Gaza strip is a coastal strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the north and east. It is about 25 miles long, and about 7.5 miles wide. The area is not recognized internationally as part of any sovereign country but is claimed by the Palestinian National Authority as part of the Palestinian territories.
3. Since the June 2007 the actual control of the area is in the hands of the Hamas de facto government.
4. A six-month truce between Hamas and Israel ended on December 19,2008, after Hamas blamed Israel for not lifting the Gaza Strip blockade and for continuing raids in Gaza, and Israel blamed Hamas for the rocket and mortar attacks directed at its southern cities.
5. Israel's stated objectives in this conflict are to defend itself from Palestinian rocket fire and prevent the rearming of Hamas. Hamas demands the stopping of Israeli attacks and an end to the Israeli blockade. ( information above supplied by Wikipedia)
6. Who knows, when, if ever this conflict will end? There are those who believe that it will only end in the Battle of Armageddon—which is the site of the final battle between the forces of God and Satan, mentioned in the later part of the Book of Revelation.
7. I personally believe that there are only two ways in which peace comes, and only one of these is truly permanent:
8. One is a peace that is imposed from outside influences, and at best is temporary.
9. By that I mean War World II came to an end when Allied Forces, by brute force, forced the surrender of Japan and Germany.
In other words, one side overcomes the other, and forces the surrender or the annihilation of the other. It is generally the way the world sees that there is going to be peace. We’ll fight, one side will win and the winner will take all. And as long as people believe that there is something to be won there will be wars and people will die.
10. Some see the Battle of Armageddon as being this kind of war…but this war is different. To me it is a Holy War...a spiritual war that really will somehow wipe evil from the face of the earth, and will lead to the Great White Judgment. Violence breeds violence, war generally breeds more violence and more evil.
11. It is like a surgeon operating on a tumor, and then having it spread. They think they got it all, but depending on the type of cancer, it is the surgery that often spreads it.
12. But the Battle of Armageddon is to be such a Holy and Spiritual war that all evil is overcome.
Evil is totally eradicated from the face of the earth, judgment comes, and then Heaven will be on earth.
13. But sometimes peace comes because people just lose interest in fighting, or come to the realization that war is not really a sane alternative to living in peace (something like nuclear war).
14. I just think too many don’t care or don’t know how horrible war can be, until they are exposed to its horrors. Wars are generally fought by politicians and young people, one doesn’t seem to care and the other doesn’t seem to know.
15. In our scripture today, you would generally think that peace had arrived upon earth. After all a heavenly host of angelic choirs surround a group of shepherds in a field at night and break out in song saying: “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”
16. Two things strike me about this song. One, how can God be pleased with human kind?
What have we done to please him? Nothing!!!! This is just an example of the grace of God—the unmerited favor of God that He decided to send His Son into our world.
17. The other is if heaven is proclaiming peace on earth, then where is the peace? Why would peace be announced by the heavenly angels if God knew that after the birth, life, and death of Jesus there would be so much war?
18. Because the peace that the angelic hosts proclaimed wasn’t peace between men, but between men and God.
19. Jesus came to make peace between men and His heavenly Father. But not on our peace terms but on God’s peace terms. Not by God becoming unholy and like men, but by allowing men to become holy like God. Jesus comes to make peace between men and God by transforming the human heart into the image of His likeness. Jesus came to make all men righteous!!!
Not self-righteous which people believe about themselves even in the most terrible of wars and most ugly of conflicts, but true righteous that is really of God, and not of the world. It is a righteous by God’s standards, not by our own self-imposed standards of what right and good.
20. Righteousness must come before true and lasting peace! When mankind grows up (if we ever do) and truly learns and appreciates what God wants them to be, then there will be a true and lasting peace.
21. Peace comes from the righteousness that God teaches each of us to live by. World peace will come when enough men and women have the righteousness of heart and the peace of mind that Jesus Christ gives. War then will become unthinkable.
22. World peace starts in every Christian’s heart and spreads to every other heart….
Week of: January 18, 2009 Church closed due to BLACK ICE.
Week Of: January 25, 2009
Title: True Confessions
Series: Study of Spiritual Formation – Part 20
Scripture: James 5:13-16
1. You’ve no doubt heard that “confession is good for the soul,” but do you realize just how difficult that true confession is?
2. Someone once said: “After we have offended God, the Devil labors to keep the mouth closed, and to prevent us from confessing our guilt. (Alphonsus Liguori, sermon)
3. What makes confession of sins or confession our wrongs so difficult? What lies does the devil tell us that keep us from confessing our sins? No one likes to admit they are wrong, do they? Embarrassed because we are wrong…? Afraid of the consequences...?
4. Whatever the reason, no matter how difficult, confession is what the Bible commands of us.
5. For example, 1 John 1: 8 &9 says: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
6. You’ve all seen the bumper sticker that says: “I am not perfect, just forgiven.” This is absolutely true, but in every Christian’s mind perfection should be the thing we strive for, that we really desire.
7. Not a perfection, in which we can point to ourselves and say “look how good I am.” Or not a striving for perfection that we beat ourselves up because we can never reach it. But a perfection that ultimately depends on God to make us the right kind of person. Not of works less we fail miserably and beat ourselves down or have some measure of success that we boast of our own goodness. But a perfection that depends upon the cooperation of the human spirit with the Divine Spirit in such a way that God’s will is done.
8. But at last, even the best of us, with divine intervention will fail. Why? Because human flesh is weak. Even when we know what is right and what we should do it is very hard to do so. Yes, we are by the grace of God trying our best to do our very best, but only Jesus is perfect and He alone reached perfection in this life.
9. Therefore, John says that if we think we ever have reached perfection in this life—we are crazy or just plain liars. You’re nuts or you’re just a plain liar if you think you don’t sin. You can be a decent human being but you can’t be perfect.
10. So consequently, we all need forgiveness… and we learn to live under the cross. What does that mean? Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
Anybody who lives beneath the Cross and who has discerned in the Cross of Jesus the utter wickedness of all men and of his own heart will find there is no sin that can ever be alien to him. Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother. Living beneath the Cross is realizing and confessing how much you need the forgiveness of God that the Cross of Jesus Christ makes possible to each of us. And that regardless of what others have done we ourselves are the chief of all sinners.
11. And because we need to experience the joy of being forgiven—we need confession.
12. What is confession? Confession embraces God’s gift of forgiveness and restoration while setting us on a path of renewal and change.
13. It is a strong desire to surrender my weakness, faults, shortcomings and failures to the forgiving love of God and intentionally embrace the practices that lead to my spiritual formation. Confession is when I say to God “I am wrong. I know I am wrong, and with Your help I am going to do better.”
14. For a true confession of sin, there must be three things:
One, there must be an examination of our conscience that opens up our hearts to the “gaze of God.”
Such is an examination of conscience that deals with specific sins not just sin in general, but in detail. It is one thing to say you are a sinner it is another to name those sins one by one. Richard Foster writes: “A generalized confession may save us from humiliation and shame, but it will not ignite inner healing.” (Celebration of Discipline, page 151)
15. Two, true confession comes from a sense of sorrow. Sorrow doesn’t have to be a strong emotion, although it may involve strong emotion. But sorrow here is abhorrence at having committed the sin, a deep regret at having offended the heart of the Father. Sorrow is an issue of the will before it is an issue of the emotions.
16. Three, true confession is a determination to not sin again, at least in that particular way. True confession leads us to a deep yearning for holy living, and a deep hatred for unholy living.
17. But even though this deep self-examination of our lives begins in sorrow and guilt, it ends in forgiveness and joy. There is a celebration of the forgiveness of sins that results in a genuinely changed life.
18. There is another type of Biblical confession where we confess our sins one to another. Our scripture this morning, James says: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”
19. This type of confession can take two routes. One, if I do something to hurt you, I do need to be big enough to confess my sin to you, and ask for forgiveness. Two, often I need someone of flesh and blood to confess my sins to. The type of church that James envisions is a group of people who have such a wonderful relationship with each other that they can share their shortcomings with one another.
20. Now don’t get me wrong, you cannot share your spiritual failures with just anyone. Just anyone (unless they are a gossiper) doesn’t want you to air your dirty laundry with them. There are things that are the category of too much information.
21. But hopefully there are people who care about you, that you can trust enough to confide in.
22. Do you notice that James tells his readers that confession along with prayer brings healing? Someone once wrote: “Confession opens the door to Christ, for then the chamber of conscience is cleansed.” (Vincent Ferrer, Sermon)
23. The wound that conflict and transgression creates is cleansed by confession and healed by prayer. A wound will not heal properly unless you clean it out. Confession helps clean it out and prayer brings the healing that we need.