Monday Morning Musings | January 6, 2019
It is not Monday morning. It is Monday evening, but I still wanted to take some time today to touch base because it has been so long since I have written one of these! Between ministry and family obligations, this Christmas season has been a flurry of activity. Let me share some highlights!
Our Advent sermon series was certainly a highlight for me. I loved digging into the five women who were represented in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ family tree: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. I also loved that Pastor Tami and Pastor Sharon were able to put their own perspectives on the significance of two of these women. The lessons we learned from their lives and examples were compelling, to say the least! I am hopeful to get the video for each of them (sadly, with the exception of the first installment) uploaded in the next couple of weeks.
The Christmas Eve service was once again one of the most meaningful services of the year for me. I especially loved how the Adventure Club and Youth Group kids were able to participate in the readings! And there is just something about singing “Silent Night” in the candlelight that inspires me every time.
The week after Christmas was also special because I was able to attend our denomination’s international youth conference, Follow 2019, with Pastor Tami and three of our youth. The fantastic speakers challenged the nearly 5,000 teens at every session, the music and activities were phenomenal, and our kids came home having made decisions to follow Jesus wherever he might lead.
One particularly poignant part of the Follow conference was the Freedom Center, a museum dedicated to the history of slavery and the Underground Railroad. Our group was able to see and hear about the atrocities of slavery, both past and present, and we all walked away sobered by the need to stand against slavery even today.
Yesterday, I entered the worship service feeling like it had been forever since I been there. In fact, over the last month, if you were counting, you might have noticed that I was out of town twice, and Pastor Tami preached on a third Sunday. So it was a real joy to enter the pulpit again and bring the word of the Lord! We began a new sermon series entitled “One-Chapter Wonders,” in which we will examine the five books of the Bible that have only one chapter: Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude. We started by looking at Obadiah, where we found that, if we will commit to following God from this point forward, no matter how far we have wandered from him or how deep a hole we have dug for ourselves, he will deliver us and use us to begin setting the world around us right again.
Finally, we also talked during the worship service about the One-Hour Challenge. This is basically a challenge to spend an additional one hour per week in personal Bible study and prayer. Thus, if you have never had a regular time of personal Bible study and prayer, you would give yourself to one hour per week. Or if you spend thirty minutes daily in Bible study and prayer – for a total of 3.5 hours per week – you would up that total to 4.5 hours per week. Broken down, that means an extra 8.5 minutes of Bible study and prayer compared to what you have been doing (or not). We spend more time in the bathroom per day! If you want an idea how this One-Hour Challenge is going to work, check out this video I made to explain the whole thing.
This week, we are getting back to the normal routine. Wednesday-night activities are resuming, including Adventure Club, Youth Group, and Discover Group. In case you have not heard, our Wednesday-night Discover Group is digging deeper into Sunday’s message and then looking ahead to the next couple of weeks. Everyone is welcome! And this Sunday, we will be digging into Philemon. I do not recall ever preaching – or even hearing a message preached from – the book of Philemon, so I am rather excited to be visiting this, the shortest of St. Paul’s surviving letters.
So there you have it. Now, I think I will go to bed early. I am exhausted!