Monday Morning Musings ...

Summer Sundays are always unique, in the very least in the fact that you rarely know what to expect in attendance with vacations and other summer distractions. With that in mind, and knowing of a couple dozen regular attenders who would be gone, I instructed my set up guy to set up about 20 fewer chairs than normal. Then people started coming, and coming so we grabbed extra chairs and added them to our set up. I am not complaining about this, just commenting on it. We had a surprisingly good attendance for the middle of July. The wife filled in for our vacationing Worship leader, she did very well (as she always does) and our congregational singing was good. There was a good spirit in the whole service.

I did make a big mistake, I cut off my associate pastor from praying. He was to pray just before my sermon and I just got up after a special in song and started to preach. I was so excited to get this sermon going that I just forgot and went ahead. I have since apologized to him, and he laughed about it. Now don't get in snit (is that even a word?) we had a couple of prayers in the service. I just blew that one.

The message was about commitment (see previous post) and I equated it to buying or renting. With one you invest and are in it for the long haul, with the other you invest much less and know that it is not going to last. Too many church attenders have not really committed themselves to Christ. They have decided that they would like Christ to a part of their life, as long as it doesn't inconvenience them. I preached from Revelation 3:14-22, the letter to the church at Laodicea. The Lord said they were lukewarm and he was about ready to vomit them up. He would rather that be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm. I was really pumped about this message and have processing it for at least 3 weeks, but I felt like I didn't get the true passion of it across. My wife thought I did, but I was not happy with myself when it was done. Part of that was to have not much response to the call for commitment at the end of the message. I know intellectually that is not a great way to measure whether it was received or not, but emotionally I can't help it.

Sunday evening was another of our Summer Celebration services where we are to share what God has been doing through our service projects and care ministries. It really fell flat, the one last month was very good, this one not so much.

Here is hoping you have really bought into Christ in your life, that you are not looking at it as a flexible or temporary thing.