Church Blog

Church Blog

March 2024 – Call and Benediction

Call to Worship Psalm 100:1-5, A Psalm for giving thanks Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!2     Serve the Lord with gladness!    Come into his presence with singing! 3 Know that the LORD, he is God!    It is he who made us, and we are his;    we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,    and his courts with praise!    Give thanks to him; bless his name! 5 For the Lord is good;    his steadfast love endures forever,    and his faithfulness…

February 2024 – Call and Benediction

Call to Worship Psalm 136:1-3 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,    for his steadfast love endures forever.2 Give thanks to the God of gods,    for his steadfast love endures forever.3 Give thanks to the Lord of lords,    for his steadfast love endures forever; Psalm 136 is unique in the book of Psalms in that it contains a refrain, repeated after every line. This kind of structure implies that it was originally intended to by sung antiphonally – with the leader singing the…

Beginnings and Endings

When novelists write, they labor over the first and last sentences. You probably know some of these already. Dickens started off A Tale of Two Cities with the now famous line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Orwell ended his prescient work 1984 with the ominous line, “He loved big brother.” There’s also a reason (nearly) every Christian knows Genesis 1:1 by heart. Beginnings and endings frame everything in between. All I need to…

January 2024 – Call and Benediction

Call to Worship Psalm 147:1-6 Praise the Lord!For it is good to sing praises to our God;    for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting.2 The Lord builds up Jerusalem;    he gathers the outcasts of Israel.3 He heals the brokenhearted    and binds up their wounds.4 He determines the number of the stars;    he gives to all of them their names.5 Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;    his understanding is beyond measure.6 The Lord lifts up the humble;    he casts the wicked to the ground. This is…

Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery

Come behold the wondrous mysteryIn the dawning of the King;He the theme of heaven’s praises,Robed in frail humanity.In our longing, in our darkness,Now the light of life has come;Look to Christ, who condescended;Took on flesh to ransom us. Come behold the wondrous mystery:He the perfect Son of Man;In His living, in His suffering,Never trace nor stain of sin.See the true and better AdamCome to save the hell-bound man;Christ the great and sure fulfillmentOf the law; in Him we stand. Come behold the…

Order of Service

Dear GCC, as you come to church this week you’ll notice a change to our order of service, namely, the beginning of our service will look like this: Announcements Call to Worship Prayer of Worship So why are we making this change? It’s not just to ‘shake things up’ or ‘try something new.’ Rather, it’s for practical and theological reasons. Practical Reason The practical reason is that announcements can be disruptive – right after a song of heartfelt worship, instead…

Introduction to Ruth

The book of Ruth is primarily concerned with two things: land and lineage.[1] It begins with the story of a famine and a man, Elimelech, who took his wife and sons (lineage) from the Promised Land into a foreign land in which he and his sons died, leaving Naomi without a lineage. The book of Ruth is about how Yahweh brought Naomi back to the land and provided her with a lineage through Ruth and Boaz. In chapter 1, Yahweh…

O King (Psalm 45)

Lyrics “O King” is a paraphrase of Psalm 45. Because I have matched the lyrics up with the verses they paraphrase, I have bolded the line of each verse in the song, so the stanza division is still visible. Though this song is a paraphrase, it follows remarkably closely to the meaning and sometimes even the wording of the Psalm. Psalm 45 My heart overflows with a pleasing theme;    I address my verses to the king;    my tongue is like the pen…

Izban, Elon, & Abdon

Once again, and for the last time, we encounter more minor judges as we walk through this book: Izban, Elon, & Abdon. Together with the previous judges, they bring the total number of minor judges to 6, equaling that of the major judges. These three serve as a bridge between the Jephthah cycle (chapters 10-12) and the Samson cycle (chapters 13-16). The account is so short we can quote it in full: After him Ibzan of Bethlehem judged Israel. 9…

Tola and Jair

As we continue our walk through the book of Judges, we come to two more “minor” judges: Tola and Jair (Judges 10:1-5). We should note that we call them “minor” judges only because they occupy such a small space in the book, not because they were insignificant in their time, similarly to how we call the books of Hosea-Malachi “minor” prophets because their books are shorter than the “major” prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, & Ezekiel), but their ministry was no less…

Shamgar

After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed 600 of the Philistines with an oxgoad, and he also saved Israel. Judges 3:31 As we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the book of Judges recounts a cycle of sin, judgment, and deliverance in Israel, and each time God works deliverance by the hand of a judge. The major judges are Othniel, Ehud, Deborah/Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. They each receive a full cycle and, in some cases, multiple…