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.”
CONNECT people to Christ and POUR into their lives His teaching so they'll OVERFLOW for the glory of God
CONNECT people to Christ and POUR into their lives His teaching so they'll OVERFLOW for the glory of God
Blog (Page 33)
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.
As many of you know, I’ve been a worship leader in some capacity since 1999. I’m passionate about music, especially music that magnifies the Lord!
Today I want to reintroduce a weekly series that I’ve taken about a year-long break from, but since moving to pastor at Eastwood Baptist Church and getting to sing to the Lord under the leadership of our worship pastors Mark and Dana, I’ve felt led to pick the series back up again. I pray it will be beneficial to you.
The series is called “Wednesday Is for Worship,” and each week I’ll post a worship song to God. I pray you’ll use it first to sing praise to our great God and then to introduce it to others, hopefully even your congregation. Some of the songs will be new. Some will be old. But, all of them will extol the name and glories of God.
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Have you ever been locked up in jail? Whether we have or not, all of us have had the shackles of sin chaining us up. Today’s Wednesday Is for Worship song is a celebration of being released from the bondage of sin and condemnation. It’s called “I’m Going Free (Jailbreak).”
It may have been lost on us who hang out in only Baptist circles that our brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church (UMC) had a fairly serious dust up last month. For me, I have many friends in the UMC, some of whom are ordained by the church. In fact, it was one of my ordained friends that passively brought my attention to the situation when she posted on her Facebook page a request for people to pray for the situation. Furthermore, my wife and I have United Methodist ties in our past. So, I am always interested about what’s going on with that denomination. Indeed, all of us who are Christians should be concerned with what’s going on in the United Methodist Church because they are our brothers and sisters in Christ and stand as the largest mainline denomination in America.
The Southern Baptist Convention has certainly seen a mellowing out of what came to be quite a heated debate once again over Calvinism after the publishing of “A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation” in May 2012. Of course, Dr. Frank Page’s appointment of the Calvinism Advisory Committee the next month in June 2012 and the unifying document they crafted and published in June 2013 called “Truth, Trust, and Testimony in a Time of Tension” (aka, T5) has had a great deal to do with the mellowing out we are now enjoying, or at least I am.
Nevertheless, there are those still in the convention that are really concerned about the “problem of Calvinism.” In fact, I recently overheard a group of men eating breakfast before attending the Tennessee Baptist Convention discussing the issue of Calvinism in the SBC. One of them declared about Calvinism, “Why if I believed that, I’d never go out and share the gospel because it would already be decided who’s going to be saved!” Apparently this man understood SBC Calvinists to believe that people are saved apart from hearing and believing the gospel of Jesus Christ, which tells me that there’s still work to be done in communicating what SBC Calvinists actually believe. I thought to myself and almost chimed in across the aisle, “No, SBC Calvinists believe too that we’ve got to share the gospel if anybody’s going to be saved.” Unfortunately, that fellow had a misunderstanding of what SBC Calvinists believe.
We Southern Baptists are a Great Commission people. It’s in our denominational blood! As we come into the state convention season of SBC life, we will undoubtedly be challenged again and again to share the gospel, sHaRe tHe gOsPeL, SHARE THE GOSPEL! Indeed, I welcome that clarion call from Scripture because it captures the heart of God and needs to be sounded again and again, but the Bible doesn’t simply tell us to share the gospel. It also gives us principles for how to share the gospel.
One of the richest places to gain some vital principles for sharing the gospel comes from Acts 16. There were find the history of Paul preaching the gospel in Asia Minor and Europe on his second missionary journey, which led him to a seller of purple named Lydia. Five principles of evangelism jump out to me there in vv. 1-15 as Paul is heading for a divine appointment with this lady.