Journey of Worship

We began a new series this week that will take us through Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter. The series, called “Do You Believe?” is designed to help us again consider the claims Christ made about Himself and the evidence that proves those claims. In hearing the truth about Christ, we have to occasionally stop and ask ourselves, do we believe? Because if we believe, it will affect how we live, what we think, and what we do.

For the people who walked with Jesus during the final weeks of His earthly life, they discovered some amazing things about Him as He spoke and demonstrated God’s glory. Those same things can be as significant for us today. In this first week, we looked at the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John 11 and His declaration that He is the resurrection and the life.Our service flowed like this:

Welcome/Announcements
Our God Saves (Baloche/Brown)
Video: Evidence, Part 1
Comments about the new series
Video: Evidence, Part 2
Message
Video: Redeemed
Reflection/Prayer
Jesus Paid It All (Hall/Nifong/Grape)
Jesus Messiah (Tomlin/Carson/Cash/Reeves)
Because of Your Love (Baloche/Brown)
Offering
Jesus Saves (Cottrell/Moffitt)
Responsive Reading based off Ephesians 2
Closing

This Sunday was a bit different. We deviated from our normal flow, but I was also the only pastor in town. Our senior pastor has traveled to Thailand for a missions event for about 10 days, and our youth pastor was away at a youth ministry conference. That left me. I got the privilege of preaching, as well as caring for the regular parts that I am responsible for. It was a full week in preparation, and we also hosted a simulcast on the Saturday before and had an unexpected memorial service in the middle of the week.

We based the series graphics and opening off this video we found at WorshipHouseMedia.

How’s that for a flashback? School-House Rock, anyone? We split the video in half and introduced the series in between the parts.

It was a great beginning to the series. I enjoyed being able to tell the story of Lazarus and the implications of Jesus’ revelation as the resurrection and the life. During the prayer and reflection time, I took the opportunity to again explain to people how they could gain the full life Jesus offers or else renew their life in Christ. The story of Lazarus offers a great spiritual metaphor for us in that just as Lazarus was dead and needed Jesus to bring him back to life, we too need Jesus to bring to life the spiritually dead part of us. Yet, when we place our faith and belief fully in Jesus, we discover that physical death is not the end of life.

We closed the message portion of the service with this video as I asked the question, “Who do you believe Jesus is?”

We were a bit down in attendance this weekend. It seems that there was a lot of stuff going on. We probably had the lowest attendance of any weekend thus far in 2010. Despite that, people seemed to sing and worship together well. We placed most of our singing after the message this week because it seemed like a natural response to again being reminded that life and resurrection is found fully in Jesus alone.

At the end of the service, we introduced the Travis Cottrell/David Moffitt song “Jesus Saves.” This is a great song that captures the story of the Gospel. I pulled this song out at the last minute, and we worked on it at practice with no one really having heard it before. The team did a great job with it on short notice, and we hope that the congregation grabs a hold of it strongly in time for Easter.

If you were there, it would be great to hear your thoughts. I’ll probably post some video in the days ahead.

Thanks for stopping by. Head over to The Worship Community to find out what other church’s did this week.

Related posts:

1. Worshiping Together: 4/4/10
2. Worshiping Together: 5/16/10
3. Worshiping Together: 3/28/2010