Preparing for Worship: July 11th, 2010

As you can see, we have a really cool weekend coming up at Crossroads! Sunday night is our annual church barbecue! Come by Northbridge Park in Valencia from 6-8pm and hang out with us!

Sunday morning we're going to be having a congregational vote to affirm the calling of Ed Boness to be our Student Ministries Pastor. If you've taken our membership class, we need you to be there to vote! If you're not a member, we still would love for you to participate in affirming Ed for this ministry, so be sure you're here this week!

The rest of the morning is going to be great, and I pray God will be honored by everything we do, say, and think during the service. We'll start off with a super upbeat set to help wake us up! "Better is One Day" is a helpful song of refocusing and refreshing as we realize that we are coming to worship the Lord together and be refreshed by being in his presence. Encountering the presence of God should always lead to an honest look into our own souls and an awareness of our sin; it's the light of God's holiness and righteousness illuminating the dark and sinful parts of our hearts, and it's a good thing! "Because of This" is an outright celebration of the fact that though we were born into slavery to sin and death, we've been made free and alive because Christ died and rose again!

Then Pastor Todd will lead us in prayer, and do the official welcome thing, and give a few instructions to visitors. Then we'll all participate in the vote to call Ed Boness as our student ministries pastor; have I mentioned that we need YOU there??

Then after a greeting time, we'll continue the singing! The old hymn "Jesus Paid it All" continues to examine the idea that our sins no longer count against us because Jesus paid the price in full for them on the cross. This is the theological idea of "justification." That God did not just say "oh well, I guess I'll forgive your sins" because his holiness demands that payment be made for those sins. He did not take that payment from us, because we could not make that payment sufficiently enough to satisfy his righteous standard, it would have required our utter and complete death and demise; we had no hope of heaven. But now, because of Christ's death in our place, we can trust that God is perfectly just in forgiving our sins because perfect payment has been made on our behalf! Our God is both a perfectly loving and perfectly just God.

It's this idea, coupled with Pastor Todd's sermon text, that helps us understand God's heart for justice in our world. Though injustice will inevitably exist because of the curse of sin, as God's children and ambassadors to a lost world, we are called to pursue justice and righteousness in all things. Nehemiah finds out about some injustices that are going on within his people, and he responds well to the situation (you'll have to come to hear how he does it!). How do we respond to the injustice around us? How do we respond when we hear about people suffering in other countries, or even in other cities? What do we do? We come to church and sing and pray to God that our lives would honor him, but in Micah 6:8 God lists his requirements for worship:

1) to do justly
2) to love mercy
3) to walk humbly with Him

Simple, and extremely difficult at the same time. That's why we're learning "You Have Shown Us" together this week. That we might be more aware of this in our own lives, and that we might learn how to carry this out in everything we do. If you guys have any thoughts to add to this, I'd love to hear them; click the comment button at the end of the post of you'd like to share...

Then Pastor Todd will come and teach us from Nehemiah 5, and you'd do well to CLICK HERE and prepare your hearts for the authoritative preaching of God's Word.

Then we'll close the service with "Glorious and Mighty" to remember that though injustice will always plague us in this life, that "over all the plans of the nations, Your judgments reign!"

That's what's going on this week at Crossroads, so hopefully we'll see you there, and you'll be ready to jump right in!

See you Sunday; happy prep!