Worship
Service for August 8, 2021
Special Announcement:
I
began this blog site a few years ago, even before COVID-19, to give members of
our two partnership congregations, who are homebound or aren’t able to come to church,
a way to connect or at least receive the sermon on Sundays. It was relatively easy to be able to expand
that when the pandemic hit so that ALL (or most) of our members would be able
to continue to stay connected to a weekly or daily message.
This blog’s audience has grown
since then reaching outside the congregational membership to include
others. We are blessed and happy to
provide this opportunity. As you know,
finances can be tight for congregations and any non-profit. Our churches, at both Bethesda and Olivet,
provide meaningful ministries to our local communities; afterschool programming
for kids, the local Food Bank, Elizabeth’s Guardian Angels, etc…. If you have found this blog and our worship
services/meditations helpful, it would be a great blessing to us if you’d help
with those ministries by providing a monetary contribution to either
church.
Olivet Presbyterian
Church
726 Fourth Street Box 526
West Elizabeth, PA 15088
Or
Bethesda United
Presbyterian Church
314 S. 3rd
Avenue
Elizabeth, PA 15037
Click here (when
highlighted) for the YouTube link for the recorded service.
Prelude
Announcements:
·
Please feel free to join us for in person
worship at Olivet (West Elizabeth, PA) at 9:45am or at Bethesda (Elizabeth, PA)
at 11:15am.
·
Church Picnic and worship service will be held
on Aug 22 at Round Hill Park and for anyone interested there will be a joint choir
singing for that service. One practice
will be held at First Presbyterian Church on Aug 15 at 12:30.
Sounding of the Hour (at Bethesda only)
Call to Worship
L: You have been waiting long enough. It’s time to listen for God’s voice.
P: We have been waiting many a long night.
L: Well, the day is here and the time is now
to find new hope in God alone!
P: It is God!
It is Jesus Christ, God himself, who is finally saving us!
L: Then come and join in the hope we share of
God’s never-ending love.
P: We will celebrate by singing and praising
God!
Opening Hymn – Seek Ye First
Prayer of Confession
O God of
compassion, if You kept a record of our sins, who could stand? We come before You with our brokenness and
our wounds for all to see. We bring our
anger, our bitterness, our unwholesome talk, and our deceitfulness. We try to do good, but sometimes fail. We choose to do evil, and sometimes
succeed. Keep Your promise to forgive us
when we confess to You completely.
Without You, we have no hope. (Silent
prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: If we confess our sins, God is faithful
and will forgive us. God provides
freely, pouring out a full measure of grace and all we need for life
everlasting. The good news is
forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ.
P: Thanks be to God. AMEN
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer
Do
we really dare to believe in Jesus Christ? That is a question that often goes unspoken
but does rest in our hearts. Lord, help
us in our unbelief. Help us to be
courageous enough to accept the love that You have for us and the power You
have to forgive and heal our souls. We
live in a time of great hostility, fear and strife. It is easy for us to succumb to the terrors
and forget that You are with us at all times, seeking peace and hope. You have asked us to be instruments of peace
and justice. To do this we need to
change our attitudes and practices to reflect Your love and compassion and not
be vehicles for our greed or need for approval. Jesus taught us the importance of serving
others, and in that service we will do honor to You. Create in us hearts that are eager to serve
and witness to Your love. Open our lives
this day and pour Your healing mercies into them, that we may be messengers of
hope to all whom we meet.
We
lift up to you all of our friends, family members, and loved ones in need of
Your strength and healing today. We especially
pray for….
And
now hear the beating, pleas, and echoes of our hearts with all the burdens we
bear today in a moment of silence…
We
pray all this in your Son’s name who taught us to prayer together saying…
Our Father, who art in
heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – Near to the Heart of God
Scripture Reading(s):
OT – Psalm 130
NT – Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Sermon –
Be
Imitators of God
(Based
on Ephesians 4:25-5:2)
When Tyler was in 8th grade, he
was having a rough time getting along with his fellow classmates, he wasn’t
doing that well in any of his classes and he seemed to have very little
motivation. He had however gotten
friendly with one of his classmates who picked on other kids, was always
getting into trouble, and often seemed able to convince Tyler to do things that
he shouldn’t do.
As a parent, it was difficult to have those
honest Father/Son advice type talks without it just going in one ear and out
the other. Because, when you’re 13 or 14,
you know everything, right? One late
afternoon, after having spent an hour or so in the principal’s office again,
with the principal explaining to me why Tyler would be receiving an in-school
suspension for the next three days – Tyler and I had a serious chat.
I said to him, “There are all kinds of kids
at your school. There are kids who don’t
want to be there, who don’t want to take tests or do their homework, but there
are also kids that can’t wait to get to school everyday, that actually enjoy
doing homework and will even do the extra credit projects or problems, just for
fun. And there are all kinds of kids in
between that do what they have to do and work relatively hard to get go enough
grades. There are also kids at your
school who do really well in music or sports or art, math, or science and there
are kids that struggle a lot with some of those things. And there are lots of kids in between those
extremes. There are also kids that don’t
ever get in trouble, that might seem to be the teacher’s pet (do you know what
I mean by that? – Tyler rolled his eyes and nodded) and there are kids that get
in trouble all the time. But there are
lots of kids in between that aren’t really the teacher’s pet, but they also
don’t really get in trouble either. Why
do you think this is? Why do you think
there are different kinds of kids? I
asked him. And in that young adult
wisdom, Tyler shot back an answer he thought I wanted to hear. “Because God made all of us to be different.” I chuckled a little and said that this was
true, that God had indeed made all of us to be different. And that was certainly true of things like
naturally abilities. At least we were
engaging, which was a good sign.
“But there’s another aspect/dynamic going on
here,” I said. “And that is, we become
most like the people we are around.”
“Let’s say you wanted to learn how to cook. Will you learn how to cook by hanging out
with the guys on the basketball team, when they are practicing basketball all
the time, or talking about basketball and going to basketball games? No, but you’d learn a lot about basketball,
wouldn’t you?” The same is true about
your friend Jared. You spend a lot of
time with him and you’re going to learn a lot from him and since he is mostly
in trouble all the time, you will end up in trouble a lot too, because you’re
going to do a lot of the same things he does.
So, here’s my challenge for you, Tyler.
Pick someone in your grade who isn’t the teacher’s pet, but someone who
doesn’t get in trouble, seems to do pretty well in school and watch them. Who are their friends? Who do they hang out with? What do they do during school/after school? And after you’ve watched them for a while, imitate
them. Try to do the same things they are
doing. Try to learn from them and be
more like them.”
Honestly, I don’t know if Tyler took my advice,
then or not. But I can tell you that his
high school years were a lot calmer, his grades improved a bit, and he never
got in trouble again during high school.
A couple of years ago I repeated that same discussion with Tyler when he
found himself in trouble again and he told me that he remembered it.
We become most like the people we hang out
with, we become most like the things that we put into our minds, into our
physical bodies, into our psyches, and into our hearts, and spirits. Today’s New Testament reading tells us to be
imitators of God. That’s big challenge.
If you go into a restaurant wearing a
“Christian” t-shirt and treat the waitress rudely, what is going to identify
you, your t-shirt or your behavior? If you have a “Christian” fish on your car
and cut someone off, honk your horn and give them a hand gesture, what is going
to identify you, the decal on your car or your behavior?
If you played hockey and your coach expected
you to imitate Sydney Crosby, would you think that was an achievable goal or
not? If you were taking a cooking class
and the instructor challenged you to cook like Iron Chef Bobby Flay, would you
be encouraged or intimidated? If your
piano teacher expected you to play like Beethoven, would you think that was
fair?
The first verse commands us to imitate God,
but how in the world can we do that? William
Hendriksen, pastor and professor of New Testament theology was well known for
his Biblical Commentaries wrote, “We stand in awe before His majesty. How can we imitate Him whom we cannot even
fathom?” And in Job
11:7, 8 the mystery of who God is becomes the
central argument when the author writes in the dialogue exchange between the
mediator, God, and Job, "“Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens—what can you
do? They are deeper than the depths of
the grave—what can you know?"
How is it possible to imitate God when God is
so far above us, so much greater than we are, so awesome that we can’t even
understand Him?
There is no doubt that we cannot imitate everything about God. Afterall, God is the creator of the universe,
and we can’t imitate that. A school
child was working with her entire class under the supervision of her teacher to
put up a full wall size map of the world.
She came home one day and bragged to her mother, “My teacher is better
than God. We finished making the world
today and it only took two days for us to do it.” It’s both cute and funny because it is so
absolutely impossible for us to even imagine making the world. Our belief in God as the creating, triune God
who exists outside of time and place is a mystery far beyond our understanding.
We can’t imitate Him in that. God is our redeemer and in an amazing story
which began in the Garden of Eden and was completed at Golgotha, He has
redeemed all who come to Him through faith.
We can’t imitate Him in that.
But we aren’t called to imitate Him in these things. If we look closely at the text, we see that
we are called to imitate God in only one particular respect and that is in
love.
Ephesians
5:1, 2 says, “Therefore be imitators of God, as
beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us.” The call to that kind of imitation is not a
suggestion, but a command.
Whether it is shaving, dressing, mowing the
lawn, baking cookies, or having the same expressions or mannerisms, children
imitate their parents. The context of the
command to imitate God, makes this connection; that we are called to imitate
God because we are God’s beloved children.
It is more than motivation; it also
communicates what makes it possible for us to do. The reason we are able to imitate God in love
is because of how we’ve been changed. When
we have accepted our redemption back to God through Christ’s sacrifice for us
and allow the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts, minds, bodies and spirits, we are
changed; we become a new creation. And
that new creation turns its back on the past, on the old ways of doing things. The first part of our reading in Ephesians
from 4:25-32 says that our new being puts away falsehood, does away with the
old life of bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander, malice and instead
becomes kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving.
Yet, how is it possible for us to do this? It is possible because God first loved
us. I don’t know about you, but I often
find that my response to another person depends on their actions toward
me. If I sense that they are open and friendly
to me, I am likely to be open and friendly to them. If it is clear to me that they like me, I
find it easier to like them. And I
respond to being liked, embraced, cared for, and loved. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. But since God shows His great love to us, we ought
to respond in kind, to imitate God in this and love others. We can do this because we have an example to
imitate.
I find it very interesting how often actor’s
children also become actors, how musician’s children also become musicians, teacher’s
children become teachers, or doctor’s children become doctors, etc… Certainly, one of the reasons is that these
children have observed the practice, the use of the skills and the values of
these roles while at home and they follow the example of their parents.
It is possible for us as beloved children of
God to obey this command to imitate God in love because we have the example of Jesus
Christ. If we read through the gospels all
that Jesus said and did, we’d see that he demonstrated what it means to love. As we are changed, we move into God’s light,
we move more easily into expressions that imitate Christ, and we become more
loving.
Allow God’s light to shine within you and be
challenged this day to be imitators of God in the love that you have for one
another.
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic
is Your name in all the earth! We bow
before You and give thanks for the privilege of participating in Your acts of
kindness and love here on earth. May
these gifts truly become instruments of Your purposes here in our church, in
our community, and around the world. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – Abide With Me
Benediction
Go forth and live as Christ in
the world. Speak and live with integrity
as you journey through this new week, knowing that God will satisfy your every
need and lead you to a victorious life. AMEN.
Postlude
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