Bible Verse for Sunday Service April 28, 2024
Revelation 12:11
And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.
Psalm 146:2
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.
Announcements:
This summer in VBS we will be going on a “Great Jungle Journey.” As usual, we will need adult and teen volunteers. We set the dates as June 10-14, beginning each day at 9AM. If you can help in any way, let us know by filling out the insert in today’s bulletin and leaving it on the foyer table or giving it to Natasha or Pastor. We are having an organizational meeting for everyone on May 22 at 6:30PM.
Children attending VBS will enjoy special snacks made every day. But what about snack items for the leaders? If anyone would like to donate these items, we would appreciate it. We would like to receive items such as crackers, cheese, fruit, veggies, donuts or cookies. If you can help with this, or have questions, please speak with Carol Roncelli.
Kasey Weschenfelder has invited everyone to her bridal shower held at the church on May 4th from 1-3PM.
LaVie’s Baby bottle campaign will run again this year from May 12th through June 16th. We can support LaVie in its work at its clinic providing compassionate medical care for early pregnancies. Funds donated during this Spring campaign go to assisting women with unplanned pregnancies through education and services. All of this is life affirming. We will host the baby bottles in which you can place your donation.
Sermon:
Today, Pastor Jim preached on Heb 11:32-40 in a sermon titled “The Hallmark of Old Testament Heroes.” In today’s sermon, Pastor discussed some of the unsung or unknown heroes of faith covered in this section of Hebrews. He analogized it to the military cemetery in his home town. Rows and rows, perfectly aligned in every direction, bore the names of veterans who died serving our country, but unfortunately some of them are marked unknown. So it is with some heroes of faith. Pastor elaborated in three points.
To begin, Pastor remarks that these heroes of the faith had strength out of weakness. A hallmark of God is His use of the weak to bring glory to His name. In this way no one is confused as to who the actor is. Our writer of Hebrews illustrates this by starting his list of these heroes with Gideon, not by any measure a strong or fearless man. Pastor used this to remind us that our weaknesses do not disqualify us from the Lord’s service. He further illustrated this point by a quote from the famous missionary Hudson Taylor: “All God’s giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.”
This section of scripture also illustrates that faith provides something better than life itself. Our Hebrews writer makes this point by commending those who raised people from the dead or resuscitated them to die again. These are wonderful miracles, but Scripture teaches us not to fear death as there is something more wonderful than life, eternal life after death.
Lastly, Scripture hear teaches that faith provides a connection beyond today. Pastor pictured these heroes of faith from the past as the audience in an athletic event where we are racing or competing. They cheer us on to be strong in our faith, and win just like they did. Also, Pastor reminded us that we have so much to be thankful for today. So we do have every reason to be faithful. We can too have confidence when we fail that the Lord can forgive us our unfaithfulness.
What encouraging words! Let’s hold on to them as we live our lives this week.
Accessing the Service, Bulletin and Sermon Outline:
Here are the pages from the bulletin, click on the images below to see them full size:
If you would like to have the sermon outline, you can download it here, a pdf file.
If you would like a link to this service you can find it here. Perhaps you would like to share it with your friends. You could also share that link on social media, if you use any of the providers. We use Rumble, a safe alternative to Google’s YouTube.