Prayer & Preparation for June 4th, 2023
This Lord's Day
Hey church,
Here are some details about this week’s services:
Songs: “Worthy Worthy,” “My Worth Is Not in What I Own,” “All Glory Be to Christ,” “The Lord Almighty Reigns”, and “Hear the Call of the Kingdom”
Sermon text: Haggai 1:1-11
Sermon title: If God’s Against Us
Cross-references: Ezra; Matt. 6:25-34; Rom. 8:28-34; 1 Cor. 15:10, 58; 2 Tim. 3:16
We’ll start studying the short book of Haggai this week, the Lord willing. I think it will take us five weeks. We also get to meet in the evening this Lord’s Day for our communion service. I plan to respond to the morning sermon title by spending time in Romans 8, where Paul asks, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” We’ll also spend some time considering God’s chastening in 1 Corinthians 11.
But in the morning service, our attention will be on those times when God seems to be against us, as in Haggai 1. Here are a couple of passages that helped my thinking, preparation, and prayers for our time in God’s Word this Lord’s Day:
“We are to ask, ‘What is God saying to us?’ before we ask, ‘What is God saying to me?’ …The word of grace is to be performed corporately and not just interpreted individually…The point of the Bible is to shape a people under grace who will be a people of grace…We are to interpret the Word in the sense of becoming a living, visible interpretation of the Word, a community in which the Word of Christ is lived out and made concrete.”
Christopher Ash in The Priority of Preaching
“The ‘ultimate concern’ of [some] church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission…but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to the secular hub. It is a departmental subconcern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Church members who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God. They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their ‘church obligation’ by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor’s teaching.”
Richard Lovelace in Dynamics of Spiritual Life
Whether hearers this week are believers under God’s chastening (because of his unfailing love), or unbelievers for whose repentance God is working patiently, please pray that I preach as one who has received from God both reconciliation and the ministry of reconciliation. As one entrusted with the message of reconciliation, please pray that God will make his appeal through me as Christ’s ambassador and that I will implore hearers on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).
Jeff Tague
