Bible Verse for Sunday Service Service May 19, 2024
Psalm 72:18
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,
who alone does wondrous things.
Isaiah 26:3-4
You keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on you,
because he trusts in you.
Trust in the Lord forever,
for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.
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. This is the only planned meeting, so anyone planning on helping, please attend.
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.
Our missionaries, the Runias whom we support want to thank us for the support we have provided over these past months, financial and through prayer and encouragement. They report that their online training continues to include more and more national media technicians from many countries. God is glorified through bringing His Word through different media.
Sermon:
Reverting to his series in Hebrews, Pastor Jim preached on Hebrews 12:5-11 in a sermon he titled “God’s Kids.” Having concluded his coverage to the heroes of faith, Pastor started to cover Hebrews chapter 12. This chapter starts by reminding the Hebrews that God disciplines us His children just we disciplined our own children. John 1:12 confirms we are children of god, adopted upon belief in the work of Jesus on the cross. Pastor spoke about God’s discipline, far superior to human discipline in three points.
To begin, Pastor asked us to consider what God’s chastening reveals about Him. It shows His love for us. He never disciplines out of anger or a sense of punishment. Instead, with love in mind He wants the best Christian life for us so He helps grow in the right direction with correction. We can take pleasure in the sense such chastening shows that we are His. God’s word is clear that for sure He corrects the believer, but not the unbeliever. In this respect, we should rejoice in His correction.
When we are chastened, the question becomes how do we respond? We have a choice here. Appropriate choices are things like respect for His wisdom in the correction. Unlike our own experiences as children or parents, we can be sure His correction/discipline is the right thing. Because we can be sure in Him, we must submit to His wisdom in the correction that we receive. Pastor mentioned the bad example of King David with his son Adonijah in contrast.
Next consider is the result of God’s chastening. We receive a blessing. God cares for us and is fixing us, giving us a chance to correct. By accepting this correction, we gain God’s peace. It is certainly true that this correction can come through some pain. An experience not pleasant at the time. But, if we focus on looking to Him the perfect father, we should learn from this and do better in our Christian life.
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.
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