Pastor's Corner

I have been reading C.S. Lewis' Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. As Lewis is discussing prayer, he says, "We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us . . . I have no doubt at all that if they are the subject of our thoughts they must be the subject of our prayers . . ."

In his book, Blended Worship, Robert Webber says, "Worship is indeed the source of personal change as we who worship find ourselves touched by God's transforming power. Our personal repentance and renewal, however, then lead us to a life of evangelism, Christian education, committed spirituality, and active social concern.

The hardest part about freely giving things away is that we want to claim that they are ours. We convince ourselves that we are entitled to what we have, that we have worked hard for our stuff, and that no one deserves any of it unless they prove worthy. Thank goodness that God did not feel this way when contemplating whether to send Jesus Christ to us.

In Doug Pagitt's book, Church Re-Imagined, he says, "In many ways, becoming Christian is much like learning our native language; we pick it up when we are immersed in it. I would guess that nearly all of us spoke and communicated long before we started our formal education. What we then learned in school was not the beginning of language use, but the refining of it.

This past Sunday I said that I hope that we never become so attached to our devices of worship (type of music, clothing, prayer style, etc.) that we lose sight of the God that we worship. How we worship is only important to the extent that it helps to communicate God to us.

We are the church. Holy and Apostolic. Existing everywhere to make disciples of all nations.

Language matters. Do you remember as a kid reciting the below poem and doing the hand gestures?

Here is the church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the doors,
See all the people.

Kids laugh about 400 times a day, and adults only about 15.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"