I am so glad to be back with you this weekend at Crossroads! I was away serving at the Resolved Conference in Palm Springs last weekend, and although it was a wonderful weekend of stellar preaching and gospel-saturated, moving worship singing, it was not my church family!
I'm blessed to have Dan lead you when I'm gone, and I'm thankful for the great job I hear he did.
This Sunday is the fourth of July! In case you missed the memo, we're only having ONE service this Sunday at 10:00am.
We're starting off with "Before the Throne of God Above" to help wake us up the the reality of the gospel, and what it means to have true freedom, not just from governments or nations, but from sin and death; as the song says "my soul is purchased by his blood, my life is hid with Christ on high..."
Then Pastor Todd will come and lead us in corporate prayer and welcome any Independence Day visitors we might have. Then we'll show a quick video recap of the two VBS programs we held last week at the URM and over in Newhall. I was able to be at the URM for two of the days, and what a wonderful, and exhausting time of ministry!
Next we'll sing a couple songs that remind us of the free gift of salvation that we have been given through Christ; a timely reminder in the wake of the VBS programs where several children gave their lives to Christ. "Alive in Christ" and the new song that Dan taught last week: "By This We Know Love."
These songs both touch on the sin that held us in bondage, and had indeed rendered us spiritually dead. Pastor Todd is preaching from Nehemiah 3-4 this week where the Jews encounter significant opposition to their efforts to rebuild the city. They continue to trust God, and pursue his will for them, despite the despair and hopelessness that they suffer. This is such an important truth about the Christian life, one where we daily fall short of God's holiness and struggle with sin, but are called to walk as children of the light, and be holy as God is holy. We encounter discouragement when we fall to sin and fail to eradicate it in our lives, but when we faithfully confess that sin, we are confident that God is faithful to forgive it because the cost has been paid by Christ's death on the cross! Our sin causes us to cling to the gospel more tightly!
Pastor Todd will come and preach God's word to us at this point. Something I've been realizing lately, is that no matter how many people hear God's word preached on a given Sunday, or how deeply they understand and interact with it, God is still honored and pleased when his truth is expounded, and that is reason enough to do it, and Pastor Todd is so faithful to do just that. I'm thankful for his commitment to the Scriptures. CLICK HERE to read Nehemiah 3-4 as you prepare.
Then we'll celebrate communion together and I'll share a song I shared a few months ago, and have been burdened to have us sing together since then. It's called "Confession Song" and really deals intimately with the struggle of feeling like sanctification isn't taking place quickly enough, and our sinful nature still rages within us. You can download the song from the Crossroads website by CLICKING HERE.
Then after communion, we'll revel in the fact that though "a thousand times I've failed, still Your mercy remains. And should I stumble again, I'm caught in Your grace!!!!!" with the song "From the Inside Out." I hope that in my own life, these songs and God's word will affect the way I live after participating in them with you all!
That's what's going on, happy preparation! See you Sunday for ONE Service at 10:00am.
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