Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Emmaus City Liturgy | Sunday, October 5, 2014 – I Peter Sermon Series | Delighting in and Longing for Jesus: Searching, Serving, Speaking

Emmaus City Worcester MA Acts 29 Soma 3DM 1 Peter Sermon Series 2014 Network of Missional Communities

Emmaus City Liturgy – 1 Peter Sermon Series: Delighting in and Longing for Jesus: Searching, Serving, Speaking | 1 Peter 1:8-12


1 Peter 1:8-12 | Delighting in and Longing for Jesus Sermon Audio:


For previous sermon series notes and audio, click on the links below:


This post will feature themes, verses, hymns and songs (audio and lyrics), and prayers that complement the sermon text. Key notes from the sermons will also be included.

Curious to know more? Want to spend some time with us? Don't hesitate. Contact us and come join us. In the meantime, enjoy the readings and listening to the songs below.

THANKING GOD | WORSHIP THROUGH CELEBRATION, SONG, AND PRAYER

Sharing Good News
 
2005 A.D.


Speak, O Lord, as we come to You
 To receive the food
Of Your Holy Word! 
Take Your Truth,
Plant it deep in us; 
Shape and fashion us
In Your likeness, 
That the light of Christ
Might be seen today
In our acts of love
And our deeds of faith! 
Speak, O Lord, and fulfill in us
 All Your purposes for Your glory!

Teach us, Lord, full obedience, 
Holy reverence,
True humility; 
Test our thoughts and our attitudes 
In the radiance of Your purity! 
Cause our faith to rise;
Cause our eyes to see 
Your majestic love and authority! 
Words of pow'r that can never fail— 
Let their truth
Prevail over unbelief!

Speak, O Lord,
And renew our minds; 
Help us grasp the heights of
Your plans for us— 
Truths unchanged
From the dawn of time 
That will echo
Down through eternity! 
And by grace we'll stand
On Your promises, 
And by faith we'll walk
As You walk with us! 
Speak, O Lord,
Till Your Church is built 
And the earth is filled
With Your glory!

Prayer of Thanksgiving and The Lord’s Prayer
From Jesus in Matthew 6:9-13

Our Father in heaven, may Your name be kept holy.
May Your Kingdom come, may Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 
Give us today the food we need, and 
Forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from evil.
(For Yours is the Kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.)


RECEIVING JESUS | WORSHIP THROUGH LISTENING AND PRAISING

1 Peter 1:8-12 | 1 Peter Sermon Series: Delighting in and Longing for Jesus: Searching, Serving, Speaking


 Sermon Texts

Sermon Notes

What was the character in the picture story that you wanted your parents to read over and over again? What picture stories do your kids want you to read over and over again? What point or page do they get most excited about?

How did the prophets delight in Jesus before they even knew His name? What was the Spirit doing in them hundreds of years before that was still impacting them by grace then and impacting us by grace now?

1. Searching for Jesus in His Word

8 Though you have not seen (Jesus), you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully … 

“In Amos’s day the most severe punishment to fall on the people of God was a ‘famine … of hearing the words of the LORD’ (Amos 8:11). There is no calamity like the silence of God. We cannot know the truth or know ourselves or know God’s ways or savingly know God himself unless God speaks to us. Every Christian should feel deep in her or his bones an utter dependence on God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4).” – Taking God at His Word  

Supporting Sermon Text | Amos 8:9-12
9 “And on that day,” declares the Lord God,
“I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on every waist
and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son
and the end of it like a bitter day. 11 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine on the land—
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord. 12 They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord,
but they shall not find it. (Amos prophesied to both Israel and Judah’s kingdoms)

" … many times when we pose our deepest and most pressing questions to God, we are brought into the heart-wrenching waiting that purifies our souls. Waiting is never easy. But if answers are gifts, we cannot demand them. We have no entitlement, no claim on God such that He owes us answers for His actions or inaction. By assuming a posture of trustful waiting, we surrender our requirement that God meet us on our terms and open ourselves to His questioning of us. We learn in our waiting to respect God's freedom, to remember that God is a person and not an answer or favor dispensing machine. … Waiting expectantly is not passivity; when we wait, we redirect our attention away from the immediacy of our situation and toward God Himself. We orient our lives toward the promise and live within its domain. Waiting is a posture of the heart that establishes an atmosphere of trustful dependence regardless of the activities we are called to undertake. As a theme, waiting on God pervades the … Prophets. The most famous is probably from Isaiah 40:30-31. Waiting upon the Lord may feel like despair and darkness, but it is in waiting that our youthful vitality finds its renewal. Yet the renewal often comes through pain and mortification. Cultivating a dependency upon God for 'answers' often involves confronting the sinfulness of our hearts. We do not see, in part, because we are not ready to see: we have not the 'purity of heart' that is necessary for our sense of God's absence to be replaced by the gloriousness of God's presence. Consider Psalm 130:3-6, which frames waiting in the context of the psalmist's confrontation with sin. Our eager longing and expectation for God cannot be divorced from the word of His faithfulness to us. … It is true, as John the Baptist said, that 'I must decrease and he increase.' But the 'increase' costs us everything, for the one who unites himself with Christ will also find himself hanged on a tree. To take this terrible good into our lives is to enter into death and through it, the life of Christ. Waiting upon this God undoes our world. His story makes us, not the other way around: 'For I have died, and my life is hidden in Christ with God.' 'To live is Christ and to die is gain.' 'Come and die,' Christ bids us. In surrendering our demand for answers and waiting for them to be given, we submit our questioning to the one who has searched out all things. Our exploring happens in the shadow of the cross, which is a judgment that makes us questionable while manifesting the answer of God. But by questioning our questions, the cross sets them free. Questioning interposes a gap between ourselves and our beliefs, which makes us strangers and unknown to ourselves. Such a distancing is a form of death, as the question brings us to the end of ourselves by focusing our attention on what we are not. That sort of exploration, though, is liberated when we live within God's knowledge of us, a knowledge that extends even to our sinfulness in Christ's work on the cross. We are free to be strangers to ourselves precisely because God is intimate with us, because He is God with us, because He has been God with us in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” – The End of Our Exploring 

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him … “ – Job 13:15
 
2. Searching for Jesus in His Word Will Lead to Serving Others with Jesus Despite Suffering

10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you …

Supporting Sermon Text | Jeremiah 6:13-16
13 “For from the least to the greatest of them,
 everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. 14 They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
 saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
 when there is no peace. 15 Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
 No, they were not at all ashamed;
 they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
 at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,”
says the Lord. 16 Thus says the Lord:
“Stand by the roads, and look,
 and ask for the ancient paths,
 where the good way is; and walk in it,
 and find rest for your souls. 

Supporting Sermon Text | Jeremiah 15:16-21
16 Your words were found, and I ate them,
 and your words became to me a joy
 and the delight of my heart,
 for I am called by your name,
 O Lord, God of hosts. 17 I did not sit in the company of revelers,
 nor did I rejoice; 
I sat alone, because your hand was upon me,
 for you had filled me with indignation. 18 Why is my pain unceasing,
 my wound incurable,
 refusing to be healed?
 Will you be to me like a deceitful brook,
 like waters that fail? 19 Therefore thus says the Lord:
 “If you return, I will restore you,
 and you shall stand before me. 
If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless,
 you shall be as my mouth.
 They shall turn to you,
 but you shall not turn to them. 20 And I will make you to this people
 a fortified wall of bronze;
 they will fight against you,
 but they shall not prevail over you,
 for I am with you
 to save you and deliver you,
 declares the Lord. 21 I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,
 and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.”

Supporting Sermon Text | Jeremiah 20:14-18
14 Cursed be the day on which I was born!
The day when my mother bore me,
let it not be blessed! 15 Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father,
“A son is born to you,”
making him very glad. 16 Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity;
 let him hear a cry in the morning
and an alarm at noon, 17 because he did not kill me in the womb;
so my mother would have been my grave,
and her womb forever great. 18 Why did I come out from the womb 
to see toil and sorrow,
and spend my days in shame? (Elijah does the same in 1 Kings 19:1-14)

Because Jeremiah is able to endure, he can share this new promise from God for the people.

Supporting Sermon Text | Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

“We have to keep getting up as an imperfect person giving glory to God through active submission to the Word of God by the power of the Spirit. Sometimes God will use failure to fuel ministry. We are a resurrection people. We get up broken. He uses broken people to reach other broken people.” – Pastor Doug Logan, Epiphany Camden


3. Searching for Jesus in His Word While Serving Others with Jesus Despite Suffering Will Lead to Us Speaking of Jesus in Suffering

12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

What is the longest chapter in the Bible? What is it about? Praising God for His Word. “Psalm 119 is filled with action verbs illustrating the Spirit-prompted uses for the word:

  • we sing the word (vs. 172) / speak the word (vv. 13, 46, 79) / study the word (vv. 15, 48, 97, 148) / obey the word (vv. 8, 44, 57, 129, 145, 146, 167, 168) / praise God for the word (vv. 7, 62, 164, 171) / and pray that God would act according to his word (vv. 58, 121-123, 147, 149-152, 153-160)


Sing, speak, study, store up, obey, praise, and pray … Remember, Psalm 119 is a love poem … The Holy Spirit is committed to working through the word. God promises to bless the reading and teaching of his word. … ” – Taking God at His Word

"Jesus uses the Scripture every time he is assaulted by the devil. ... According to the Bible, the heart is not just the seat of the emotions but also the source of our fundamental commitments, hopes, and trust. And from the heart flow our thinking, feelings, and actions. What the heart trusts, the mind justifies, the emotions desire, and the will carries out. If Satan can get you to consent with your mind to a God of loving grace but get your heart to believe that you must do X, Y, and Z in order to be a worthy, lovable, and valuable person, he will be most satisfied. This is why everything Satan says that insinuates or openly denies the promises and revelations of God is answered with Scripture itself. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, then 6:16, and finally 6:13. Even as he was dying on the cross, when he was in his deepest agony, he quoted Psalm 22:1: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' When you are in moments of pain or shock, the things that come out of your mind and mouth are the most primal things in your being. And when Jesus was in such moments, out came the words of the Bible. Something like 10 percent of all the things he says in the Bible are quotations of, or allusions to, the Hebrew Scriptures. ... If Jesus Christ, the Son of God, did not presume to face the forces of evil in the world without a profound knowledge of the Bible in mind and heart, how could we try to face life any other way? It's true that this takes a great deal of time and effort. Worship, daily reading, meditation and memorization, singing, listening to teaching – all of these are necessary to become as acquainted with the Scripture as we must be. And when we are under attack – tempted to sin, or to be discouraged, or to just give up altogether – it is then that we must wrestle the words and promises of the Bible into the center of our being, to 'let the message of Christ dwell among you richly' (Colossians 3:16). It will feel very much like a fight indeed. J.C. Ryle wrote: 'True Christianity is a fight.'” – Encounters with Jesus 

We see the prophets before continuing to rely on the Scriptures to keep them moving. The Word sustains them and comes out of them.

Supporting Sermon Text | Ezekiel 3:1-4 1 And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” 2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. 3 And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. 4 And he said to me, "Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with my words to them."


RECEIVING JESUS | WORSHIP THROUGH CONFESSION AND COMMUNION 


BEING SENT BY THE HOLY SPIRIT | WORSHIP THROUGH PRAISE, MISSION, AND BLESSING

2011 A.D.  


 Prepare our hearts, O God;
Help us to receive.
Break the hard and stony ground;
Help our unbelief.
Plant Your Word down deep in us,
Cause it to bear fruit.
Open up our ears to hear; 
Lead us in Your truth. 

Show us Christ. (2x) 
O God, reveal Your glory 
Through the preaching of Your Word
Until every heart
Confesses Christ is Lord. 

Your Word is living light upon
Our darkened eyes,
Guards us through temptations, 
Makes the simple wise.
Your Word is food 
For famished ones,
Freedom for the slave,
Riches for the needy soul; 
Come speak to us today.
 (Repeat Chorus) 

Where else can we go, Lord? Where else can we go? 
You have the words of eternal life. (4x)
 (Repeat Chorus)

1995 A.D.




How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure!
How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which
Mar the chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory!

Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders.
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers!
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished.
His dying breath
Has brought me life.
I know that it is finished!

I will not boast in anything,
No gifts, no power, no wisdom.
But I will boast in Jesus Christ,
His death and resurrection.
Why should I gain
From His reward?!
I cannot give an answer!
But this I know with all my heart –
His wounds have paid my ransom.


Early 1200s A.D.

 
  
All creatures of our God and King
Lift up your voice and with us sing
O praise Him! Allelujah!
Thou, burning sun with golden beam,
Thou, silver moon with softer gleam.

O praise Him! O praise Him! 
Allelujah! Allelujah! Allelujah! 

Let all things their Creator bless 
And worship Him in humbleness.
O praise Him! Allelujah! 
Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit, Three-in-One.
O praise Him! O praise Him! 
Allelujah! Allelujah! Allelujah! 

All the redeemed washed by His blood 
Come and rejoice in His great love.
O praise Him! Allelujah! 
Christ has defeated every sin.
Cast all your burdens now on Him. 
O praise Him! O praise Him! 
Allelujah! Allelujah! Allelujah! 

He shall return in pow’r to reign 
Heaven and earth will join to say 
O praise Him! Allelujah! 
Then who shall fall on bended knee? 
All creatures of our God and King 
O praise Him! O praise Him! 
Allelujah! Allelujah! Allelujah! 
 
Prayer for Transformation Road in Haverhill, MA

Benediction 

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused (you) to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” – 1 Peter 1:3

– Sully

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Location: Worcester, MA, USA

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