If you’ve been around the last few weeks, you know that things are changing at SGC.  We provided a set of Frequently Asked Questions a few weeks ago and are posting them below. What questions do you have?

No one is exempt from feeling overwhelmed with life, responsibilities, family, and other good things like caring for others’ needs.  It can be difficult to sort through what we should and shouldn’t be doing. That’s why the title of chapter 4 of Kevin DeYoung‘s excellent book Crazy Busy grabbed my attention.  One of the points he makes in the chapter is this:

Can doesn’t always mean should. Care doesn’t always mean do.

We recently finished a series on stewardship called “Numbering Our Days.” Stewarding our time is a challenge for all of us.  It is not easy.  We often wonder if we should do this or that to help someone.  Certainly we care, but is the only way to show that by doing something about it?  DeYoung brings up an important and helpful point for us to think about.  Here’s why:

First, what you can do is not always what you should do. Ability should never establish priority. Should is a priority word. To say you should do something is to say you should not do other things. You might have the time and personal capacity to do more things than you should actually be doing. We need the humility it takes to admit our limitations and to say “No.” That will free us to focus on the important things. How can you know what you should be doing? You have to first identify what’s most important (prioritize). That comes from knowing to what and to whom God has called you.

Second, there’s a whole lot more that we can care about than we can actually do something about. Our capacity to care will always be greater than our capacity to do. Care is a heart thing that can expand or contract, that can grow and deepen, or shrink and close up. Christians can and should grow in their care for other people. But “Do” is a time thing. That means it is limited by 24 hours in a day. Time won’t grow or stretch to accommodate our caring hearts. There’s almost no limit to how much you can care, but there is a definite limit to how much you can do. Don’t let people pressure you into thinking “if you really cared you’d do something about it.” That’s just not true. We can care about a whole lot and care deeply. But we won’t always be in a position to actually do something about the things and people we care about. That’s just a reflection of our human limitations.

You can probably think of a number of things right now that you really care about. If I asked you which of those things are you actually doing something about, it would probably be a small percentage. But this should not lead you into guilt. It’s okay!  It would be manipulative to say “you must not truly care about the other things because if you did, you’d be doing something.” The fact of the matter is that you may genuinely care, but for a number of (hopefully) legitimate reasons, you can’t always do something about it.

If you’re faithfully fulfilling your priorities, as a mother for example, you’re doing what you should be doing. If you can do other things that you care about without hindering your ability to be faithful with the most important things, then more power to you! But if you’re guilted into doing something just to prove you really care, and doing that leads to less faithfulness in your primary calling, then you have succumbed to the lie that care must always mean do and can must always mean should.

As we’ve been learning this summer, the Psalms are far more than just good poetry or passages to be read on special occasions. The Psalms are divinely inspired songs worship and prayer. Yet they are even more than that. The Psalms teach us how to think about God and man in a fallen world. But they don’t just stop with helping us think correctly. The Psalms are also meant to shape our feelings about God and man and the world. How should think about the reality of evil in our fallen world? What about the anger, retaliation and vengeance we can feel when we see evil being done in the world? Even more, how should a Christian think and feel about those who have wronged him or her—perhaps in terrible ways? How should that person pray?

Psalm 69 is part of a group of psalms in our Bibles that are called imprecatory psalms.  Imprecation means to call for a curse or a judgment to fall on an enemy.  In the Psalms we see them as curses, judgments against God’s enemies.  Psalm 69 is an example of one of these Psalms going so far as to ask God to blot out evildoers from the book of life. When you have been the victim of crime or evil or persecution, isn’t there something inside you that really likes these verses? If the Psalms are supposed to shape how we think and feel and pray, are these Psalms saying that we can join in with David and start calling down curses and judgments against our enemies? Then what do we do with what Jesus taught us, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27-28). It sounds like these psalms are doing the opposite of what Jesus said and did. It is important to understand how the New Testament used and explained this psalm. And we get a lot of help here because seven of the verses of this psalm are quoted explicitly in the New Testament, including the parts that are imprecatory.

In light of New Testament teaching (listen to the sermon to hear this explained), here’s what this Psalm can teach us: When we see or experience evil in our world, we should pray that God be glorified through the deliverance of the victim, mercy for the sinner, and God’s justice not our vengeance.

More specifically, here are some practical ways to understand and apply Psalm 69:

 

There will be no adult, youth, or children’s Sunday school this Sunday, August 31.  Our morning worship service will start at its regular time of 10:30 a.m.

I wanted to whet your appetite for what we will be studying together this Sunday (August 17) at SGC!

Adult Sunday School :

“. . . especially that you may prophesy.” (1 Cor. 14:1)   This Sunday, we will begin to teach on the NT gift of prophecy and its blessing for the church today.  Why would Paul especially want Christians in NT churches to prophesy?  What does that even mean?  In popular Christianity, this a gift that can be largely misunderstood and misused.  What exactly does the NT teach about this gift?  Over the next few weeks, we will explore this topic from a Biblical perspective.  We will answer questions like the following:

• What is prophecy – it’s content and purpose
• Is NT prophecy different from OT prophecy? If so, how?
• Is the gift of prophecy for today?
• Does allowing prophecy today pose a threat to the authority of Scripture?
• What can we learn from Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth about the gift of prophecy?
• What would this look like in practice in the modern church and especially in our church?
• What about women and prophesying?
• What about women and “keeping silent in the churches”? What does that mean?
• Who can prophesy?
• Is there an office of “prophet” in the NT?

As you can see, we will be going into more detail than the book goes in to.  But we think this is important for us as a church and would love for greater expressions of divine grace through this gift.  We want to be a church that obeys Paul’s command to earnestly desire spiritual gifts, “especially that you may prophesy.”

Previous classes in the Gift and Giver series can be found here.

Sunday Service:

ISIS continues its bloody jihad in Iraq and beyond.  A commercial passenger jet filled with tourists, families, and business travelers is shot down over Ukraine.  Hamas spreads its terrorism.  Child abuse and molestation statistics continue to climb.  How should a Christian think, pray, and respond in the face of such evil?  Psalm 69 is a part of the Psalms known as the imprecatory Psalms, meaning Psalms in which the writer calls for God’s judgment to fall on his enemies.  How should a Christian view these Psalms?  Can Psalms like these help shape our hearts and our prayers as we witness or experience evil?   Psalm 69 will call us to trust in the justice of God to vanquish his enemies and unstoppably fulfill his plans, even in the face of evil and evildoers who seem to thwart them.  Psalm 69 will point us back to Jesus and and help us better understand how God’s justice and mercy are glorified at the cross.

Previous sermons in the Psalms series can be found here.

I can’t wait to worship, witness and learn together with you this Sunday!  God bless you!

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In a recent Sunday School class, Jeff Tyner taught on how God transforms people to make us more like Him. We learned that God begins this process by miraculously creating a new life inside of anyone who puts their faith in Jesus – by giving us new hearts with the desire and the power to love and obey Him. Here is how Jeff so beautifully and eloquently described the work of God’s spirit in changing us and the implications of this work for daily life:

God loves you! He chose you. That is why you are a Christian. It wasn’t your doing. It was His doing. When you were his enemy, he made you his friend. And he made you more than his friend; he made you his child. He adopted you. You were alone and without anyone in the universe to truly love you. He directed his love toward you and chose to make you his son or daughter. He has irrevocably written you into his will and made you an heir, sharing the inheritance with His firstborn, Jesus.

You were broken, disabled, and disfigured. You were unlovely. You were ugly. But He came and found you, picked you up, and took you home, lavishing you with kindness and everything eternally good you could ever hope for. Anyone else – if they knew as much about you as He knows about you – would have been sick to their stomach and walked away, rejected you and left you to die. But not Him! Knowing your ugliness, your sick secrets, and even your insane God-complex, he looked at all of it and didn’t flinch. He even smiled – and continues to smile – a tender, loving smile. No, as he studied every nook and cranny of your strangeness, ever fold of your deformity, every ugly, sinful bump and stain – He already knew them. How did he know them? He knew them because he had already carried every one of them to the cross of his love – the cross of your atonement.

The very birthmark of Adam that marked you as a deeply broken, totally stained, irreconcilable enemy of God, your loving Father has generously removed, paying for the operation out of his own inexhaustibly deep pockets. You see, Jesus has taken your stain to the cross and – holding it up to the awesome and terrible blast of God’s infinite, holy fury – He has destroyed it. No stain remains.

And he did this knowing that you would often reject Him and His love. Be honest – Since becoming his son or daughter, in spite of the loving tenderness and care he has lavished on you, you still mostly refuse to believe that He loves you and has good, kind intentions toward you. Other times, you take His love for granted and fail to see how amazing, and unwarranted it is. Sometimes you decide to believe he loves you only based on your current performance – that His love for you waxes and wanes with how you’re doing these days – in spite of His repeated, clear statements to you in scripture that this is absolutely not the case. Any other father would have His feelings hurt. But not this one. He continues to lavish you with loving, fatherly care. He. loves. you!

And in his great, sovereign love, He continues to work all things for your good. He loves you.

You are safe in His love.

In His sovereign, fatherly love, He has erased your shame. I’ll say it again – Jesus has erased your shame. He has erased the shame of sins done against you and to you – and by you. And that includes not only the shame you feel from your life before you were a Christian – it also includes the shame you feel about your present life. He has erased the shame you feel about your mistakes, about your embarrassing sinful thoughts, and about your mediocre performance as a Christian. Maybe you can muster the faith to believe that your sinful life before you were saved is forgiven, but you can’t escape the feeling that He must be disappointed in your B- or C+ as a Christian. He has erased the shame you presently feel! In his perfect life and death, Jesus meant to consume and has in fact consumed the stain of your shame – and you bear it no longer. So, as your loving father invites you to his table, he sees no ugly mark on you! He knows you, and He loves you.

You couldn’t be safer in His love. In the safety of His love, He has given you His Holy Spirit, His very living presence, to be with you and help you and to remind you of all of this and to keep it before you and to HELP YOU BELIEVE IT! And His Holy Spirit uses the truth and the commands of the Bible and the ministry (or failures) of His people (called the church) to shape you into his image.

Proverbs 27:6 says “Wounds from a friend can be trusted”. God is far more than your friend, and if He wounds you in the shaping process, you can trust those wounds because His purpose in shaping you is GOOD! His purpose in shaping you is to grow your capacity to experience, and to reflect, and to share the enjoyment of this glorious, loving Father. That is, to drink deeply of Who He is and What He’s done for you in saving you, and to pour out what you’ve experienced from Him to others in both words and actions, causing you and them to experience – both as giver and receiver – the same kind of love that all His adopted kids have received from God in Christ, and to put His glory on display.

So, having said all that, when God undertakes to shape and sanctify you… You couldn’t be in a better place!!!

And in this place, there is no need to self-justify or be defensive.

You are safe in His love.

While most people are probably not thinking theologically about the singing a church does on a Sunday morning (or the people who lead it), many are bringing some expectation as they walk through the doors.  Unfortunately many people will choose to stay or leave a church based on how “good” the worship is.  It is tempting for pastors, worship leaders, and worship team members to be too aware of this reality – so aware that what we sing and who we have leading can begin to be shaped by what people want or expect.  Over the last few years, we have been seeking to clarify what worship ministry is all about and the theology that informs our practices as a church.  Here is what we want every present or potential worship team member to know:

The worship team exists to magnify the greatness of God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit with our songs and with our lives.  We believe that leading the gathered church in the worship of God is a ministry leadership role in the church and not a performance role.  To participate in worship leadership is to extend pastoral care by teaching, equipping, and edifying God’s people. A worship team member is not just a singer or a musician but a caregiver – on stage and off stage.  As such, all our worship team members must be believers in Jesus Christ.  Their commitment to Jesus should be demonstrated and lived out in their commitment to and care for one local church.  This is expressed through church membership and a signing of the church covenant – our mutual commitment to love and care for one another as a body.  Worship team involvement in any capacity is a matter of service, stewardship and setting an example.  We ares servants in the body of Christ with the specific task of helping people see and sing the greatness of God.  As stewards of this task, we are called to faithful commitment not simply to the team, but to this church as an expression of the local body of Christ.  Because of the public nature of this role, the lives we lead on and off the stage and the commitments we make together become an example for others to follow.

If you’d like more information on how to get involved with the worship team, please talk to a pastor or any one of the worship leaders.  Or, drop us an email and we can send you a worship team packet and application.  Let’s see and sing the greatness of Christ together for the glory of God.