Worship
Service for September 19, 2021
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.
·
We will have a joint service together on Sept 19
at Olivet at 9:45am followed by a provided breakfast – Donuts, Bagels, Cream
Cheese and Fruit.
·
Both Congregations will have a Congregational
Meeting following their worship services on Sept 26.
Call to Worship
L: Fools say in their hearts, “There is no
God.”
P: But we rejoice, for our wisdom flows from
Jesus who strengthens us and judges us faithful.
L: God looks in vain to see if there are any
who are wise, who seek after God.
P: But we rejoice, for the lives of the
faithful overflow with mercy and grace, and the love of Christ himself.
L: Let us worship God who has graciously
gifted us with that love.
P: To the King of the ages, immortal,
invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever. AMEN.
Opening Hymn – Open My Eyes That I May See
Prayer of Confession
Merciful
God, Your joy reflects a love so broad that it enfolds all people. A love that despairs when people, for
whatever reason, lose their way in life and feel lost and rejected. Forgive us when we contribute to that despair
by our lack of persistence to do as Jesus did – to seek out and save the
lost. When we hold on to judgmental
attitudes and neglect people we believe do not measure up to our standards of
righteousness – those who have lost faith are not found. When we fail in our commitment to support
those in our society weakened by poverty and illness – those who have lost a
sense of worth are not found. When we
fail to welcome or reach out to the stranger, the uprooted, the refugee – those
who have lost family and friends, home and even country, they are not found. We acknowledge, most merciful God, the times
when Your mercy has sought us out in our lost-ness and picking us up, has held
us tenderly and rejoiced when we have been healed. Strengthen us to do as Jesus did – to seek
out and save those who are lost and to love them as unconditionally as He did. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: The mercy and grace of God overflows in
Jesus Christ, “who came into this world to save sinners” and so we rejoice that
in Jesus Christ we are found, we are forgiven, and we are loved.
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
Gracious and loving
God, our souls sing as we contemplate your awesome beauty, your matchless
grace, your all-encompassing mercy, your unparalleled love. We thank you for being who you are to us, a
God who relates to us even when we are undeserving and whose bond with us is so
strong that even our rebellion does not create an irreparable breach between
us. Like the apostle Paul, we too are
convinced that nothing can separate us from you through faith in Jesus Christ –
not life or death, not angels or principalities, not earthly powers. Nothing in the heavens, nothing on earth,
nothing in the future, nothing in our past, nothing at all can separate us from
the love you have for us in Christ. Your
Son is truly our Savior. What a blessing
beyond words this is.
He reaches out to us at
all times in life. Sometimes we hear his
call clearly and strongly, reaching out our own hand and heart to take
his. Sometimes that call is muffled by
the world around us, by circumstances that seem hopeless and beyond
repair. Even then, as silent as the call
might be, our spirits feel it’s tug and we are eventually found.
We draw near to you, O
God, Source of all understanding, and ask you to draw near to us. Teach us your wisdom from above, that we may
bear good fruit in our lives. Root us
beside the streams of your wisdom, that the green leaves of our goodness, fed
by Your insight, may not wither. We ask
for Your wisdom, O God, not the earthly wisdom that we hear and see every day. Let Your understanding flow through our lives
like a stream, so that we may bear the good fruits of welcome and compassion. Teach us that our true dignity is found in
honoring You by serving others. Thank
you Lord for never abandoning us, even when you seem very far away and
distant. We also gives thanks for your
love and care, as we pray for our own loved ones. Continue to reach out to those who are alone,
who feel abandoned right now. Comfort
those who are in distress and hurting.
Surround those who are ill with your compassion, understanding,
strength, and healing. We especially
pray for….
In this time of silence
we ask that you look deep within our hearts, minds, and souls; strengthen us
Lord, for our daily living. Give us
comfort in the areas of our lives that need tender care and peace in the areas
that are in turmoil…
We pray these things
because Jesus is Lord and he taught us to pray 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 – Come,
Thou Almighty King
Scripture Reading(s):
OT – Psalm 1
NT – James 3:13-4:3,7-8a
Sermon –
Draw
Near to God
In
order to know God, you will need to put forth some effort. But if you come to love God, it won't seem
like any effort at all. For example, for
those of you who are married, when you met your spouse, did it seem like an effort
to get to know him or her? Or when you
became friends with someone you really liked and found out that you had a lot
in common, did it seem like an effort to get to know that person? Probably not, your new found relationship
flowed easily. It was comforting to get
to know them. Regarding love Buddhists
say, “If you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees
go weak…that’s not the one. When you
meet your soulmate, you’ll feel calm. No
anxiety. No agitation.” I think this is true of falling in love with
God, as well. It’s not all
emotional. It’s the combination of head
and heart. Our relationship with God
makes us calm with no anxiety, no agitation.
But when we fall in love with God, we want to know everything about God.
We want to get to know God better, to
understand, to honor and cherish. Of
course, we could live a million lifetimes and there would still be more to
learn about God.
If you
look back at the Old Testament, we find one particular character who really knew
nothing about God until God made Himself known.
And that was Moses. Having grown
up in the household of the Egyptian Pharoah, having learned the spiritual ways
of the Egyptians, and worshipped the multiple gods of sun, moon, harvest,
water, he knew very little of the Hebrew God.
And yet, when God revealed Himself to Moses, Moses became filled with
purpose and insight, a hunger for knowing and understanding God. Moses realized that nothing else in the world
could compare to the experience of being with God. Moses had a passion for His presence. Moses had lost his appetite for other people
and other things, for wealth and fame. In drawing near to God, he found what it was
that he’d been looking for all along.
And as Moses drew nearer to God, God drew nearer to him.
However,
it was James, the brother of Jesus, who wrote our New Testament reading this
morning to the believers in Jerusalem, "Draw near to God, and God will
draw near to you. Cleanse your hands,
sinners, and purify your hearts, double-minded people!" (James 4:8). If we draw near to God, God will reciprocate
and draw near to us. Drawing near to God
is spending time with God, worshiping God, praying and talking to God, and
living more and more into God’s expectations for us and our lives.
James
then gives us the formula for drawing near. If you've committed sin – if you’ve wronged
another person or done something wrong in the eyes of God, confess it, get rid
of it, and put it behind you. In other
words, don’t let those wrongs go for too long because they will either
festering and become more and more irreconcilable or they become a person’s
habit and much harder to break. Next,
ask God to examine your heart, your motives, and the things that make you do
what you do. Bring all that you’ve done
to the Lord and ask for a clean heart. May
our actions be manifestations of a clean heart and conscience. In last week’s lectionary reading we read
Psalm 19 and in the final verse of this prayer to the Lord, the psalmist pleads,
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to
you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”
It is only through God that we find the centering of our hearts, for our
words to others and our actions in all that we do to be clean and pure.
Notice that James finishes verse 8 with
this instruction. "Purify your
hearts, double-minded people." What
does he mean by "double-minded"? A person who is double-minded is drawn in two
completely different directions. That
person’s loyalty is divided and they vacillate between knowing what is right
and bad behavior or wrongful thinking. A
double-minded person is unstable in all their ways and their spiritual walk is
inconsistent because they try to serve God as well as their own interests at
the same time. I hope that we've all
learned that this kind of living never works. Scriptures tell us over and over again in
various ways that we cannot serve two masters.
God
sent Christ into the world, in order that we might know the nature of God more
fully. At Christmas we often focus on Jesus
as Emmanuel, God with us, God in the flesh, God incarnate. But we should really keep that in mind all
year as we read about Christ’s activity in the world while he was here and the
work of the Holy Spirit after he has gone.
God is with us this very day, in this very room – at work, at play, at
home, at school. Through Christ, God opened
up a new and living way to draw near to Him. Jesus opened up a permanent and perpetual
access to God by living here on earth, sharing his teachings with us, and showing
us how to reconnect with God. But the
knowledge of God or Jesus Christ and what God has done for us is not the same
as being in relationship with God.
Paul
is probably one of our best examples of knowing all about Christ, but not fully
grasping the meaning of God incarnate, God made flesh, God dwelling with us
until Paul had his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul writes in Philippians, “Yet whatever
gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all
things, and regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be
found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but
one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection
and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow
I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
Paul
isn’t talking about book knowledge, or an intellectual discourse about Christ,
but rather about a relationship. This
isn't knowing about the facts and figures of Jesus' life. Paul is pouring out his heart about drawing
near to God through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul is talking about hungering for God's
presence. Like Moses, he wants to know
the Lord in a personal and experiential way. He wants to draw near to God in order to
experience that personal fellowship with Jesus in order for it to be more
intimate, beyond what he had known up to that moment.
To really
know Jesus on a relationship level and to understand Christ’s nature, to fully grasp
the wonder and awesomeness of God, will require us to draw near to God. We draw near by listening to God’s Word,
following the leading of God’s Holy Spirit, responding positively to God’s
dealings with us when it comes to spiritual matters, as well as carrying on the
cause of God’s great gospel. In the words
of the prophet Micah, drawing near to God requires us to do justice, to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with God.
If we
want to fully comprehend the power of Christ’s resurrection, then we must
experience the renewal of our own lives by drawing nearer to God in these ways. It is necessary for us to be free of the
bondage that held us captive to a double-minded spirit, to confess our sins
before they fester, to cleanse of our hearts, and to become more in tune with
God’s desires. It is necessary for us to
bring before the Lord, both our words and our deeds, so that they may be found
acceptable. And like Moses and Paul,
like James and the prophet Micah, like the Psalmist and all the countless
characters laid out for us in the Scriptures, we should have a hunger for God,
a desire to be in relationship with Him.
And the closer we draw near to God, the more God draws nearer to us.
Thanks
be to God. AMEN.
Offertory - Ashley
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
You, O
Lord, are the generous one, full of mercy and goodness for Your creation. Send Your wisdom with these gifts, that they
may reach those who need Your love and welcome.
Bring about a harvest of goodness through these gifts sown in peace. Amen
Closing Hymn – How Firm a Foundation
Benediction
Go in confidence and peace, joyfully serving
the Lord who walks with you. Bring hope
to the hopeless, joy to those who sorrow, peace to the afflicted. Be true witnesses to the love of God through
Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Postlude
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