Worship

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Thursday, November 19, 2015

For today’s blog- I found someone who stated some really great reasons why worship matters.    I can’t think of a better way to say them myself, so I think it best to just share his thoughts with you.  I pray that all of us will think on this and be worshipping together well before a Sunday morning service.  ~ Megann Graf  

 

6 Essential Reasons why worship matters

by Philip Wagner

(an article from churchleaders.com)  

Worship Matters

Worship matters to God.
Worship matters to you.

Often, we allow personal distractions to get in the way.

Sometimes we go to church, but we don’t worship.
We sing songs, but we don’t worship.
We listen to sermons, but we don’t worship.
We serve in a ministry area – but don’t worship.  

All of these things are elements of worship, but they are not worship in and of themselves, which means that you can do all of them and yet have failed to truly worship God. Worship is a lifestyle.  It’s the gathering of believers to practice our beliefs and celebration of Him.

Praise is the expression we give to the ‘worship’ we live.

Worship involves more than we realize.

 

1.  Worships Involves Surrender of Our Lives

“I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
Rom 12:1

2.  Worship Is Putting Our Focus on Him

True worship is based on the desire to honor God.  It requires a personal revelation of God as found in the Scriptures.  Worship is not based on my likes or dislikes.  It is not based on my personal preferences or priorities.  It is a focus on Him.

3.  Worship Involves ‘Getting Out of the Way’

We have to learn to remove our worries, our opinion, our questions, and ourselves – so we can worship with appropriate honor.  It’s letting go.  Sometimes, we get in the way of our own experience of genuine worship.

4.  Worship Involves Personal Sacrifice

Praise can be easier when times are good or we have had the big victory.

It requires a sacrifice of our own feelings and fears so we can give Him the focus He deserves.

“Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess His name.”  Hebrews 13:15

5.  We Must Worship in the Face of Pain & Loss

King David demonstrated what it means to worship in the face of loss and pain.  His baby died.  He prayed and prayed, but the baby died.  I can’t imagine the pain that would come from the loss of a child.  The loss of loved ones is too great to bare.

After the baby died, the Bible tells us –

Then David got up from the ground. After he had washed, put on lotions, and changed his clothes, he went into the house of the LORD and worshiped.
2 Sam 12:20 NIV

It is so important that in times of pain and loss, we move toward God rather than ‘away’ from Him.  David showed us that we have to say, “I feel so much pain, I’m in agony, but I’m going to go toward God because I need Him more now than ever.”

6.  Worship Is Celebrating Who God Is and What He Has Done

¹ Shout for joy to the LORD, all the Earth. 
² Worship the LORD with gladness; come before Him with joyful songs. 
³ Know that the LORD is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His  
   people, the sheep of His pasture.
⁴ Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise  
 His name. 
⁵ For the LORD is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues
   through all generations.

  Psalm 100:1-5 NIV

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A "Top Ten" List of Ideas about Heaven

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A "Top Ten" List of Ideas about Heaven
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Jeff Lampl

"For he must remain in heaven until the time for the final restoration of all things,
 as God promised long ago through his holy prophets." 
Acts 3:21  

“When the world is made new”   
Matthew 19:28

I have not read this book by Scot McKnight but he is a biblical scholar whom I greatly respect and I’ve read much of his thinking on various Biblical themes, so I expect this book is a really good one.  Below is a quick summary of his thinking on heaven and why it matters.   Jeff  

1.  If there is a just God, there must be a heaven.
To believe in a future, endless and human-populated heaven beyond the grave requires that one believe in a God who transcends all creation. The God of the Christian is a just God. And surely a just God creates a world designed for justice, but our world constantly reflects injustice. If this world is all there is, God must be unjust. But if God is just and this world ends for many without justice, this world will give way to a future world where all things will be right.
This is the heaven hope that motivates so many of us and that gives us hope for those who have experienced horrifying injustices – the tragedies of abused children, the holocausts around the globe – including the Ukraine, the Jews of Germany’s holocaust, the Kurds, and the Syrians. The heaven hope believes God is just and that therefore the just God will ultimately bring justice.
This just God turns a heaven hope into the heaven promise.

2. There is no heaven for Christians without the resurrection of Jesus.
To believe in a future, endless and human-populated heaven means death is not the final word. In the Christian heaven promise, there is one death-defeating moment: Easter.
On Easter God snapped the shackles of death, God overpowered the death-dealing powers, and God raised Jesus from the grave into an eternal life. The entire heaven promise for Christians is based on that one moment – that one day – that one morning. If there is no resurrection of Jesus there is no heaven hope or heaven promise for Christians.

3. The best evidence about heaven is the resurrection of Jesus. 
To believe in a future, endless and human-populated heaven means Christians will think about that heaven by examining the resurrected body of Jesus. It means heaven will be an embodied existence and not just a spirit-y or soul-y kind of ethereal, spiritual existence.
It means heaven will include such things as eating (Jesus ate) and fellowship with those we know on earth (Jesus enjoyed fellowship with his disciples). The most common images for the Christian heaven are then not harps and wispy bodies but a city, a banquet, and God in the middle of it all receiving worship.

4. Near Death Experiences and Out of Body Experiences are unreliable guides.  
While it seems to be a new trend to believe in heaven because of the stories of near death experiences or out of body experiences, those who study those stories know the common features are defeated at times by differences.
Reports about near death experiences have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Those reports tell us about what people believed before entering into that near death experience. They are, after all, an experience of an already-existing and functioning brain and what was in that brain is what is experienced as a person enters into that near death experience.
Since death by definition is medically or physically irreversible, near death experiences are encounters not with what is beyond death but what is pre-death.  Hence they don’t tell us about what happens after death but instead what happens to the human brain as a person enters into the dying process. They are then unreliable guides to what lies beyond death and unreliable guides about heaven.

5. Heaven will be full of surprises: #1 The first hour.
If God is just and heaven is about God making all things right, the “first hour” in heaven will be a time when all things are first made right. Realization of this ushers us into the essence of the Christian heaven promise: that first hour is when we will be made right with God, with ourselves, and with one another.
That “first hour” in heaven will mean mass reconciliation at the deepest levels: realization of truth, reception of truth, and reconciliation with others in that truth. It will mean some kind of admission and confession and embrace of God and others as we experience grace and forgiveness and reconciliation.
Heaven will not be heaven until that first hour of realization awakens us to God’s deep truths about God, ourselves and our fellow humans. In the first hour in heaven our innermost life will be as clear to God and others as glass.

6. Heaven will be full of surprises: #2 Who will be there.  
The Christian heaven promise, rooted as it is in a just God who will makes all things right, sometimes gets twisted into cajoling and coercing our fellow humans into doing this or saying that or confessing a set of lines and believing a few certain truths just so . . . or else!
The more we focus on what we have to do to get into heaven the more we miss the whole point: the heaven promise is not rooted in what we do but in the resurrection of Jesus. So when we ask who will be there, the only answer is “Jesus!” The Christian heaven promise presents a heaven where Jesus is in the center of everything. So, heaven is designed for Jesus and all those who want to be connected to him. Heaven is not about what we do but about who Jesus is.

7. Heaven will be full of surprises: #3 What it will be like?  
Someone I know told me he hopes in heaven we won’t be aware of others; he said he hopes we will be so focused on God that everything else will fall away into non-existence. He was hoping not to meet up with some of his enemies and he feared they’d all be in heaven! He hoped it would some kind of eternal individualism. I reminded him that the vision of heaven in the Bible is not quite like that.
Yes, God is central but the image is not just of individuals absorbed in a beatific vision of ecstasy but a thriving, flourishing city. And if so, heaven will be a flourishing city centered on God, but still a society.
The heaven promise means this: God created this world to work right; heaven will mean that world working right; this world is a society, not cells where individuals go at it alone.

8. Heaven is about our deepest happiness.  
The heaven promise lays before us the hope that we will experience joy and happiness at the deepest levels: in our love for God and for self and for others and for all that God has created.
Our yearning for and quest for joy and happiness and deep contentment is God’s gift to us now of what someday will be a settled and growing reality: we will be happy and will grow happier and happier endlessly into the joy of God’s own joy.
Heaven is about pleasure, our deepest pleasures that will abound and abound into deeper pleasures.

9. Heaven will be more like our present earth than like the ethereal heaven found in so much Christian art and thinking.  
Unfortunately, for too long Christians have imagined heaven in exclusively spiritual or spirit-y terms. That is, God designed us mostly as souls and these bodies of an encumbrance that needs to be shed like a lizard’s skin. Heaven is not whispy but earthly. Jesus shows us that: his resurrected body was not a soul but a body.  
The heaven promise of the Bible starts not with bodiless souls or disembodied spirits but with embodied spirits and souls that identify who we are and how we are made. The heaven promise imagines a global fellowship that is more like a grand city – the New Jerusalem – than an ecstasy of spirit. 
The heaven promise means our bodies will function right, our social institutions and social forms will be right, and our society will be the way God designed it.

10. A heaven hope reshapes all of life.  
Another unfortunate element in the history of the church has been the occasional rise of the person who gets so enthused about the future heaven they become useless for life in the here and now.  
The heaven promise prepares us more for life now than anything that life provides. The heaven promise that makes us want to die is not the Christian heaven promise but something else – perhaps some kind of Platonism or Gnosticism. 
The heaven promise, since it is glimpsed in the resurrection body of Jesus and in the flourishing city, reveals to us the kind of future that makes a radical difference today. Those who most believe in the heaven promise are most prepared for a life of significance now. And to turn that around: those most committed to making the world right now are most in tune with the heaven promise.

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Worship Tomorrow @ CLC

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Saturday, November 14, 2015
Jeff Lampl

.Worship Tomorrow @ CLC

“Do you see what we've got? An unshakable kingdom! And do you see how thankful we must be?   Not only thankful, but brimming with worship, deeply reverent before God. For God is not an indifferent bystander.    He's actively cleaning house, torching all that needs to burn, and he won't quit until it's all cleansed. God himself is Fire!”
Hebrews 12:28-29 (MSG)

   

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Be the cup you want to see

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Friday, November 13, 2015

Be the cup you want to see
Blog by Megann Graf  

**Disclaimer- this is a very opinionated blog**  

First off, I have to say how ridiculous this whole coffee cup thing has been for the past week. I mean seriously, we have nothing more important to discuss than this?  Are you kidding me??!   It seems like one of the stupidest news stories, but then, there are a lot of them these days.  So, as much as it irritates me, it does in fact open a door for discussion, so I will indulge.  

If anyone of us feel like a cup should do our work to proclaim the truth about Christmas, or
love or anything, we are really out of touch with reality.   Seriously, Jesus didn’t ask for signs to be put up, he didn’t command large notices to be displayed.  He told people, actual real live people, to go and share the gospel.  Why??  Because He is about a personal relationship! I believe the biggest, most important thing I know to be true about Christianity, is that it’s not about religion, it’s about a relationship.  How the heck is a cup personal?    What if we stopped telling people how angry or upset we were about a certain companies marketing strategies, and instead, we used our breath and our words to show others how God’s love has and is helping us journey through this life. What if instead of hoping that some cute cups or t-shirt or hats explained our beliefs, we told someone our story, in person, with feeling. What if we started to make things personal so that we could truly feel the pain, hurt, joy, and love with those around us.  Don’t you think that makes a lot more sense than hoping a cup would do that for us?  Because, if we don’t start to get personal here on earth, how will we ever understand what it might be like to spend an eternity worshipping God and loving others?  

#BeTheCupYouWantToSee

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Adoption Information Night this Sunday, November 15

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Thursday, November 12, 2015
Jeff Lampl

.Adoption Information Night this Sunday, November 15

   

"But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law,  to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”  So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God."     Galatians 4:4-7 (ESV)  

The Bible tells us that each of us is a child of God by adoption through Jesus Christ.  There are thousands of children much closer than you think who need a home and parents to love them.  If God is nudging you toward adoption, check out the table in the lobby and save Sunday, November 15 at 6pm for an information night with Kelly Myers of Bethanna Adoption Services and Pastor Jeff and plenty of popcorn and an informative movie.  

There nothing closer to the heart of God than His desire to adopt each and every one of us into his forever family.   Nor is there anything closer to Kathy’s and my heart than adoption.  

Kathy, Kelly and I  hope that you not only join us for the information meeting Sunday evening, but that you spread the word to others who may be interested.  

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An Invitation

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Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Jeff Lampl

 

“he who builds on the foundation must be very careful.  And no one can ever lay any other real foundation than that one we already have—Jesus Christ.  But there are various kinds of materials that can be used to build on that foundation. Some use gold and silver and jewels; and some build with sticks and hay or even straw!  There is going to come a time of testing at Christ’s Judgment Day to see what kind of material each builder has used. Everyone’s
work will be put through the fire so that all can see whether or not it keeps its value, and what was really accomplished.  Then every workman who has built on the foundation with the right materials, and whose work still stands, will get his pay.  But if the house he has built burns up, he will have a great loss. He himself will be saved,
but like a man escaping through a wall of flames.”
1 Corinthians 3:10-15 (TLB)  

Obviously most people would prefer to go to heaven when they die rather than to what is popularly called hell.   But how do we know who goes where?  

We know that those who trust in Jesus Christ for their salvation have free entrance into heaven.  However the passage above reflects a very big truth that we ignore to our detriment.  It is this:  heaven is where God is.   Heaven is where darkness is not.   Heaven is a place the blazing fires of God’s dispel everything that is impure.  

I have found myself reflecting on the story of the prodigal son.    After years of unholy living he came home to his Father (God).   There’s no concrete proof that the son had truly repented, we just know that he came home because it was better then being on his own, the Father took him in anyway.  Yes, he had a great party thrown for him, but what then?   His father’s house (metaphorically heaven) was one kind of life, his life in the far country was another kind of life.   The son had a dilemma on his hands.   He would discover that his old way of life can’t be lived in his father’s home.   Would the son stay and undergo dramatic change?   Would the son discover that he preferred his old way of life to the Father’s?   

Or consider the elder brother.   He refused to enter the party (heaven) because he was resentful.  He preferred being outside of (heaven) and holding onto his anger and resentment, believing he was right and the Father (God) was wrong”    He missed (heaven) by his own choice.   The door was open to him but he chose the “outer darkness”  

Each of us is wise to ask ourselves if and how we are becoming the kind of person who could stand living the fullness of the presence of God?  Where in our lives is there a darkness that we prefer over the blazing light of the love of God?

 

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Two Views on Tithing: Which One is Right? Part Two

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Two Views on Tithing:  Which One is Right?   Part Two
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Jeff Lampl

 

As I mentioned yesterday the question I get most often about Christian giving is the one asked below.  Today’s response come from David A. Croteau, author of Tithing after the Cross, Professor of New Testament and Greek at Columbia International University  

Question:  Is it robbing God to tithe on your after tax (not gross) income?
Answer:     No, put away the calculator

The question here assumes that tithing in some way is required for Christians. The word tithe means 10 percent, not necessarily “a tenth of my income.” The biblical definition of a tithe is “giving 10 percent of one’s increase from crops grown in the land of Israel or cattle that feed off the land of Israel.” It was consistently connected to the land of Israel. A tithe was done multiple times a year, probably equaling more than 20 percent of crops. No one was ever commanded to give 10 percent from their general income (just crops and cattle). So unless you are under the Old Covenant and have crops based in the land of Israel or cattle that feed off the land of Israel, you do not qualify to tithe (Lev. 27:30–33; Num. 18:21–24; Deut. 14:22–29).
Does the Bible teach that neglecting to tithe is robbing God? Sort of. The question refers to Malachi 3:8–11. But the word for tithe in Malachi 3 refers to the definition noted above. Christians live under the New Covenant, so our standard for giving has changed. It’s not necessarily a higher or lower standard, but it is different.
Some people may hear, “Christians aren’t required to tithe,” and think it means, “Christians aren’t required to give.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The New Testament gives many principles for giving, but it never mandates a specific percentage or addresses after-tax or gross income.
For many prosperous US Christians, giving 10 percent could be considered “robbing God” (in a sense) because it does not meet the standard of generous giving. For those who make a more meager income, giving less than 10 percent could be generous and sacrificial. If I’m asking the question with the intent to decipher how little I can get away with giving, then a serious heart issue is exposed. When we are driven by the principles of giving from the New Testament, the after-tax question becomes irrelevant. God’s people should try to find ways to give more, not less.
What are some of those biblical principles?
There are three driving forces for Christian giving in 2 Corinthians 8. First, it is grace-driven. Our giving is a response to the grace that God has shown to us through Jesus Christ. The more we recognize that we have done nothing to deserve salvation, the more likely we are to respond to God’s grace by giving generously.
Second, Christian giving is relationship-driven (v. 5). Much Christian giving today is taught in such a way as to drive the Christian to a calculator. You type in your income, multiply that by 10 percent, and give the total, rounding up to include an offering. But God wants you to seek a relationship with him, not with your calculator.
Third, Christian giving is love-driven. In verses 8–9, Paul provides an example of this type of giving: Jesus’ death on the cross, the ultimate demonstration of love. In this way, our giving is a barometer of the genuineness of our love for God.
David A. Croteau, author of Tithing after the Cross, is professor of New Testament and Greek at Columbia International University.

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