Are you gearing up for growth? Brothers and sisters, we are heading into the fall of the year, which is a prime time for church growth. I’m so excited to see what God is going to do!
Perhaps you’ve not thought about it in this way, but there are at least five different types of church growth. One type is
I once was lost but now am found. God’s grace found me. I wasn’t looking. He sought me out and found me. That’s definitely worth celebrating this Wednesday!
This week’s worship song spotlight is on “Your Grace Finds Me.”
We Americans are infatuated with sex. Perhaps not as much as our European cousins, but it nevertheless captures so much of the American fancy. Just look at the magazine covers of any checkout aisle. “32 Sex Moves that Will Blow His Mind.” Watch a few commercials. Do most folks even realize that GoDaddy.com is a web host? From their commercials, one could easily come to the conclusion that they are a porn site. Search the internet. On second thought, please don’t search the internet because things we can’t even imagine will be pulled up. We live in a sex-saturated society.
Undoubtedly God has created us as sexual beings, but our depravity has twisted our sexuality and our desire for it in serious ways. Much like a car whose front end has gotten misaligned will drift toward a ditch if you let go of the steering wheel, so goes our sexuality. Our sex easily ends up in a ditch.
Songs are powerful. As we often hear, music soothes the savage beast. They have the ability to affect us deeply on so many levels. They can capture and remind us of an intense moment in our life, bringing either joy or sorrow to the foreground of our hearts and faces. They can incite one to nearly every emotion imaginable. They are powerful indeed!
But on this Wednesday, we must be reminded that songs are also a powerful teaching tool. That’s one of the strongest reasons why Christianity is a singing religion. Through verse and melody, the faith is transmitted into the hearts and minds of Jesus followers. That’s why it’s so important for the Christian songs we sing to be biblically correct, but that’s another post I suppose.
A great example of how Christian songs teach is the Newboys recent release “We Believe.”
Are you ready to dance this Wednesday? Then I have just the worship song for you. This week’s worship song spotlight is on the song “We Will Dance”!
As laborers for Jesus, we are all working to reap a harvest through the gospel. We plant, we water, and we harvest. However, we don’t always get to do all three things with the same person. Sometimes we’re the one who plants the gospel in a person’s life. At other times we’re the one who waters that gospel so that it might take root, grow, bloom, and bear fruit. Still other times we are the one who gets to harvest that soul by leading them to faith in Jesus Christ. Of course, it’s God who brings the growth and the harvest, but He uses human agents to bring it about (Matthew 9:37-38). It’s a blessing to be part of all three phases with the same person, but I would guess that that’s actually fairly rare.
Our God saves! What sweet words to meditate on this Wednesday, and what better way to do that than to sing from the heart a song that has that exact title.