Bunny and I got back from Macon about 8PM and she went straight to bed - exhausted from the weekend. I had been working on the sermon all week,and even got some notes in at the nursing home. But some of the experiences we had this weekend drove the message as much as anything else.
It was "Sanctity of Life" Sunday all across the SBC yesterday, and normally that guarantees a lot of pastors preaching against abortion. Thing is, that just reinforces our image as people who live their lives standing in judgment of others rather than kneeling to serve them.
So I was determined to bring a message about the worth of life being determined by God, not by man and challenge people to not just focus on abortion but on the whole list of life related causes - including the aged.
Satan must have not liked that plan, because I had a horrible time with the power point to support the message. In fact I never got the presentation I had crafted to work and had to copy and paste from my background notes during the 45 minutes immediately preceding the worship.
I used a visual prop of an old worn out file that used to belong to my father. He left it at my house once when he came over to look at my lawnmower years ago. I can still picture him sitting on the concrete sharpening the mower blade by hand with that file. It has a wooden handle he carved himself. The usefulness of that file is gone now, but it's worth will never diminish to me, because it was crafted by my father and held in his hands.
We are made by God in His image. Though we are weak and helpless as infants, or worn out and feeble in old age, our worth to God is still such that He calls us His masterpiece. To allow any society to cheapen the worth of a human is then to rebel against God. We as followers of Jesus cannot be silent.
Babies die from lack of medicine, food,or water when we have all the money in the world.
Old people are warehoused in nursing homes and want for basic human kindness and we are just too busy to care.
It has to stop. First within the church and then through our example and influence in society.
More later. But here's what we did in worship this Sunday.
O Worship the King - LOVE THAT SONG
Your Grace Is Enough - Likewise
Jesus Paid It All
We only did two songs because we just didn't have a good practice Wednesday on the others so I decided to only do what we could do well. God deserves our best.
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