Good Friday morning Church Requel!
First off - both the pastor and his wife wish each one of you a most joyous 4th of July weekend. We know that many of you will be traveling and celebrating this weekend. We wish you safe travels and a most happy time spent with friends and relatives.
This is my favorite time of the year, long warm, sunny days. The other night Mary Kay and I drove down to Clearfork Reservoir just to take in the sunset. Fireworks are wonderful, but nothing replaces God's daily sunset show - in my humble estimation.
Glorious Freedom - Sermon! Because it is Independence Day weekend, we will continue our Hymns 4 Him summer sermon series with "Glorious Freedom" by Haldor Lillenas. Many of you may not know this hymn as well as I do. Lillenas became a publisher later in his life and for those with a Church of the Nazarene background - Lillenas was THE publisher of record for the church. His hymn, "Glorious Freedom" was one I sang in church at least once a month for ten years when I was a kiddo growing up.
In writing this Sunday's sermon, I spent a great deal of time in Galatians 5. I thought through the reason for our ongoing sin struggles. Why do we continue to sin when we are told that Jesus has freed us from our sins? Two words came to my mind: selfishness and emptiness. Of the two, I'm not at all sure that the latter - emptiness inside - isn't the stronger of the two. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you on Sunday.
For those of you who would like a head start, you can check out my sermon in your Bible app OR just use this link - http://bible.com/events/48916272.
Because many of our praise team will be traveling this weekend, our worship leaders will be fewer but every bit as enthusiastic! Here are the songs we are planning to sing this Sunday: "Dwell In The House," by yours truly; "All Things New" by KXC Worship; "Graves Into Gardens" by Elevation Worship; and "Freedom" by Hillsong.
For those of you want to watch online (and I hope all of you traveling will do so!) you can link up with us on our Facebook page or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/o_FH6b9gu30.
Training for our new in-ear monitors went extremely well this past Sunday. We enjoyed eating lunch together first. Fellowship together is always such an important part of any team!
Then we gathered up front - each one of us with our own mixer in front of us. I put a camera over my own mixer so everyone on the team could see what I was doing. We talked about how to mix, how to make sure we could hear our fellow team members, how to pan each of our channels to one side or the other, and how to mute the channels. At one point Brandi muted her entire mixer and it took us a while to figure out how to get it working again. We were so glad that happened during our training session and not during church!
Then we took our classroom training and put it to work - we sang several songs together. This gave us plenty of time in between each song to make adjustments and to ask questions. We finally finished up around 4pm. So it was a very full day for your worship team, who also showed up 2 hours early before church began! To all of you who gave sacrificially on Sunday to learn this new sound system: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
And to all of you who gave your money so sacrificially so we could purchase this new gear: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
One of the cool new things that has also happened is that we have replaced the two old and very large speakers that face the congregation with two much smaller and much newer speakers. We think it looks and sounds so much better. What do you think? Let us know!
That wraps up this week's pastoral newsletter. I pray that each one of you continues to enjoy both your political freedoms as well as your spiritual freedoms. And I thank each one of you for continuing to pray for my dad. We continue to be amazed at how well he is doing with his very serious illness. God has been good to our family! Blessings! My love to each of you! Pastor Mark
