Sunday night recap – January 22nd, 2012

This is really a “Monday morning” recap, since I did not get to posting one last night. But, here it is.

I preached from 1 Peter 3:8-12 at the morning service. As his people, a “holy nation” (2:9), God calls us to be Christ-like in our dealings with others both within the church (v. 8 ) and outside the church (vs. 9-12). Since by nature we reflexively pay back reviling and evil in kind, I tried to point people to the grace of God that alone enables us to have a heart like that of Christ, who returned blessing for evil. I also said that if we as a congregation conform to Peter’s words, both in our fellowship and in our dealings with those outside the church, that will make the gospel we profess much more credible to unbelievers.

I couldn’t resist reading a passage from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain describes two families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, who have for years been slowly killing each off in a long-standing feud. Not only are these families upstanding “Christians”, they are even Presbyterians! Here’s what Huck Finn has to say about going to church with the Grangerfords on Sunday:

Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching – all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith, and good works, and free grace, and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.

The point here is, it is hypocrisy for us to come to church and worship with one another, when we refuse to seek reconciliation with a brother or sister in Christ. (I love Huck Finn’s “preforeordestination”! Though when I read this passage I think it sounded like I just stumbled over the word “predestination”.)

Back home in the afternooon, we enjoyed the fellowship of a couple of families from church.

At the evening service I spoke from Isaiah 45:1-8. In this passage, Isaiah names Cyrus as the one through whom the Lord will restore his exiled people to the promised land. Like so often in Isaiah, the message is God’s sovereign rule over all things for the sake of bringing salvation to his people.

Pastor Scott