Bible Verses for Sunday Service November 20, 2022
James 1:17
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Psalm 126:3
Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
Announcements:
Our church will celebrate Thanksgiving with a meal after church today. We welcome everyone to stay and enjoy the blessings of food and fellowship. After the meal, we will have a short time of giving thanks to the Lord through Music and Testimonies. We would love to hear what everyone is thankful for!
We won’t have Awana this week due to Thanksgiving. Thank you leaders for your service. We trust you will enjoy the evening off with your families.
It is that time of year again, time to update the church directory so please fill out the insert in the handout today if your contact information was wrong or is changed. If you are not listed in the directory and want to be listed, please fill out the form and let Pastor Jim know.
Here are some Thanksgiving Thoughts: It’s not happy people that are thankful, but thankful people who are happy. Also, Thank you for the food before us, the friends beside us, and the love between us. And on a lighter note, no need to count the calories today, just your blessings.
Special:
The church choir performed the most appropriate song of worship for Thanksgiving, “Count your Blessings.” We tried something new today, editing the video file from service and extracting the portion of the choir singing. The sound isn’t the greatest, but I hope this will be blessing to your families that you might like to share with:
Sermon:
Pastor continued in the prophet Isaiah, covering the chapters 11 & 12. In these chapters Isaiah looks forward to a future time when the Messiah, the branch, is righteously ruling and reigning, and how that is a cause for praise of Him, chapter 12. Pastor analogized this to a future Thanksgiving Day, calling on the framework employed by Charles Dickens in the book “A Christmas Carol.” We could think about Thanksgivings past, present and future.
After considering past Thanksgivings and thinking about what we will have soon, we can then move on to think about the future day of the perfect Thanksgiving that we enjoy with Lord. Isaiah provides a sense of “that day” in helping us understand what we can anticipate. Pastor suggested we could think of the atmosphere of that day, a day of glory. In thinking about that, Pastor preached on two aspects of that atmosphere. First, he covered the glory of creation that we will clearly see. Isaiah in 2:4 spoke of this re-creation of Eden by describing the world then, were the lamb lies down with the lion, and there is peace. We find the same idea in the New Testament, Paul in Romans 8:21-22 speaks of the world free of the current burden of the curse. While we think of creation in its glory, we can also think of the glory of our king, Jesus. The apostles got a taste of what we have in store in the transfiguration, Mark 9:3. For us in that day, this glory of God will be permanent.
Pastor also asked us to consider what we can do to duplicate that attitudes of that day. His answer is that firstly we can have an attitude of gratefulness, which we can demonstrate personally in thanking the Lord ourselves privately, but we can also thank Him publicly, like we intend to celebrate after lunch. Members of the congregation provide personal testimonies of thanks that each shares. In sharing we show our attitude of joy. Pastor asked us to think about this from two aspects in scripture. In John 4:14, the woman at the well wanted the water that always satisfied, and was joyous at finding Christ to give it to her. The opposite of this is found in Jeremiah 2:13 where the Lord leveled two charges at Israel, they had forsaken Him, and created their own substitute for the Lord.
In closing pastor related a story that illustrates true thankfulness, and the kind of joy found only in the Lord. He told of a pastor leading a mission to lepers. In a service where a female leper who was severely disfigured asked for the hymn we heard today, Count your Blessings, the contrast of her problems yet gratefulness truly humbled the missionary. So let’s try to emulate this attitude a true joyous heart towards Him who gave everything, including Himself.
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.