I’ll have to admit, when the task is to find hymns to complement a service focused on the passage “God is love” (1 John 4:8), the difficulty isn’t finding suitable material—it’s trying to narrow the material down! See if you notice some of the fantastic descriptions of God’s love in our hymnody this morning: it is “ineffable,” “wondrous,” an “immortal…
By this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. —1 John 3:24 Today, along with the rest of the Western church, we remember the events of the day of Pentecost. Known as Whitsunday in the English-speaking world, this celebration focuses on the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church. Red is…
When I was 8, my younger sister and I shared a queen-sized bed. Our sharing was not without its bickering, though — she was always on my side of the bed or wanting more covers than I wanted. I distinctly remember one August night when I layered the bed with blankets just because I knew it would make her hot.…
The central theme of this morning’s service is the doctrine of “double imputation.” In salvation, our sin is imputed (attributed) to Jesus while His righteousness is imputed to us—in the language of the old hymn, He both “saves from wrath” and “makes me pure” (Rock Of Ages, Cleft For Me). Throughout the service, we’ll declare that He is our shield…
In this morning’s sermon text, John contrasts truth with lies (1 John 2:21, 27). Addressing a fearful audience that is opposed by deceitful “antichrists” in the “last hour,” he urges his readers to hold fast to the truth of Christ, and comforts them with the knowledge that “what you heard from the beginning abides in you” (1 John 2:24). Because…
Many of the hymns we sing this morning point to the eternal, unchanging nature of God (“Him who is from the beginning,” 1 John 2:14). We declare that “Our God forever shall abide” (Within Your Temple, Lord—Psalm 48) and that His grace “never fails from age to age” (Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken). We are grateful that He “changest…
In today’s scripture passage, John makes a clear distinction between the way of light and the way of darkness. Light brings clarity. Darkness brings confusion. Light brings life. Darkness brings death. We live in a world that thrives on twisting truth yet fractures at every new ideology and perspective. Man’s ways seem right in his own eyes, yet we worship…
The Scripture passages we read this morning, as well as the psalms and hymns we sing, point to the living Jesus Christ as the source of all life. We are called into worship by Psalm 16, declaring that the Lord “make[s] known to us the path of life.” We respond with two exuberant psalms that thank God for His life-giving…
Q. What doth the resurrection of Christ profit us? A. First, by His resurrection He has overcome death, that He might make us partakers of that righteousness which He had purchased for us by His death; secondly, we are also by His power raised up to a new life; and lastly, the resurrection of Christ is a sure pledge of…
I always look forward to Palm Sunday every year. The sight of the church decked out in greenery puts me in the mood for celebration, thinking of springtime and the promise of Easter just a week away. But given the events that took place here in Middle Tennessee this past week, I know I’m picking up my palm branch much…
