Bible Verses for Sunday Service October 30, 2022
Isaiah 26:8
In the path of your judgments,
O Lord, we wait for you;
your name and remembrance
are the desire of our soul.
Announcements:
Our offering today is the fifth in the month, so as a default choice the offering goes to the fund for future projects to improve the church property. You can override this choice by indicating your preference for the general fund.
Our deacons will be meeting this Thursday 7PM at the home of the Witschis. We wish Phil was better, but until he can once again fully participate in church life, we are happy to go to him versus placing on him the demand of coming to us.
Don’t forget that by next week, your clock should be back one hour. So don’t arrive when we are all getting ready to leave.
November 8th is the election day. This election gives us a chance to deal with the last two years. Please go out and vote and let’s do what we can for our country, our neighbors and ourselves.
Thanksgiving will soon be here, and so will our annual Thanksgiving Dinner, November 20. We will have dinner right after church on that day. Besides enjoying a good dinner, we will give thanks through singing and testimonies. Please invite your family and friends to join us.
Lastly, Steve snuck a humorous announcement in at the end, congratulating Cody on his success as a coon hunter.
Special:
We were treated to real treat at the end of service today. Abby, Pastor and Gaylene’s daughter created a video retrospective for them celebrating 35 years of ministry. It is a wonderful, loving reminiscence from someone on the inside:
Here is the link to tribute on Rumble.
Sermon:
Pastor continued the ideas he preached on last week warning us of idolatry in “The Folly of Idolatry Continued,” informing us that this is in preparation for Thanksgiving. How can we truly be thankful for all He has done if we are simultaneously holding idols before him?
To address his concern over idol worship, Pastor first asked us to consider the failure of self-made gods in two parts. Firstly we can look at the actions of the idolator, all the work involved. In this passage, Isaiah focused the cost a rich man would bear in preparing an idol. All that expense and work for what? Pastor asked us to contrast that with the inaction of the idol in the second part. These idols don’t do anything. In fact Pastor pointed to an example of God’s sense of humor: Isaiah spoke of their inaction as if they were scarecrows in cucumber fields. What a vivid picture.
However we need to consider in modern times we are not making physical idols. We are create abstract ones, usually out of our hobbies. Do we spend all our time and money on firearms or hunting? Do we long to spend every waking minute on the golf course? Or do we just please ourselves, whatever we do? Could we invest some more time in the Kingdom?
Next, Pastor addressed Isaiah’s love of God, His remembering and celebrating the certainties of an all powerful God. He certainly asked the Jews to remember what God had done for them already in his actions. So Isaiah asked the Jews to remember. Pastor asked us to do the same, and to do it routinely. He gave the example of his bout with cancer. Surely, each of us has something to remember and celebrate to honor the true God?
Another way of putting this is think of the certainty of God’s description. We can and should think on God’s qualities. In fact God in Isaiah invites us to do just that. And in doing so, this will help us remember that He is God, and we are not.
We can also think on the certainty of God’s proclamation. Through His prophets, God makes predictions, prophesies of what will happen in future, like He does in these verses. Cyrus will come and destroy the Babylonians, and let the Jews free. In 150 years, this prophecy came true. God keeps His word. We can be certain of the prophecies that apply to us many years later.
Lastly, we can think of the certainty of God’s intention to come back, the second coming of Christ. Each day we live is another day closer to His return. Have we made the necessary commitment to Him? If we haven’t, get with the program! If we have, let’s make sure we are free of little – in every sense – gods so we serve Him well.
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.