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Hello and welcome to DisciplesNet. We are so glad that you've joined us for worship.
Feel free to sing along with the hymns and pray with us and share in communion later.
We also invite you to explore our website and our Facebook page for further interaction with
our pastors and for additional items to help you in your life of faith. Now let us prepare our hearts
for worship.
Beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.
Christ the Blessed, what gives to all, wonderful words of life.
Hear this to the loving call, wonderful words of life. Also freely given, moving us to heaven.
Beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.
Beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.
Sweetly echo the gospel call, wonderful words of life.
Offered light and peace to all, wonderful words of life.
Jesus only saviour and sanctify forever.
Beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.
Beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life.
Will you pray with me? Holy God, we come before you today to offer our prayers and seek your
guidance. We confess that we are frequently occupied by the busyness of our daily lives,
leaving little time to reflect on the truly important concerns.
We thank you for this day and this time of worship, knowing that you will help us find
enough peace and patience to seek deeper wisdom to live our lives more fully.
Send your healing grace to us and through us to this troubled world.
Among us there are those who suffer greatly from disease, from the evil that others bring
to them through war and violence, through floods and other natural disasters.
Bring them healing and comfort in their trials.
Give them hope for a better future and always hold them in your protective hands.
We pray also for the troubled souls among us who bring pain and suffering to others.
Come into their hearts and transform their anger and hatred into an understanding of
oneness with all your creation.
Grant them a vision of the world to come when all live together in peace.
Bring them to an understanding that they are part of the dream to make this vision real.
We lay our hopes and our dreams before you now.
Guide our paths that we find ways to realize all that is best within us.
That glory that you embedded in our souls before we were born.
Give us the energy and the will to reach deep within ourselves to become the persons
that you alone can see now.
Help us understand that there is always more than we see in our day to day lives.
We give you our praise and thanks for the beautiful world you have created for our well-being
and for our pure pleasure.
We are truly blessed even when we fail to recognize it.
Having received so much, we dare to ask one thing more.
It's ever grateful for all the wonder that surrounds us in your creation and in your creatures.
We dare offer our prayers in the name of your loving Son who gave us the vision of what we could become
and who taught us to pray.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy glory come.
Father, as it is in heaven, give us the day of our day to pray,
and ever give it some heart to dance, and as it be for the day of our heart to dance,
and ever give it some heart to temptation, but I will never rust from evil.
For by night is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.
Amen.
I would like to take just a moment to introduce the Scripture for the day.
Sometimes it's important to put the Scripture in context if we're going to be able to worship and preach
and draw meaning for our day-to-day life.
The passage we are reading today is part of Moses' farewell speech to the people of Israel.
They have been hundreds of years in slavery in Egypt.
They have been 40 years wandering in the wilderness,
and they are now on what is called the Plains of Moab ready to enter the Promised Land.
Moses will not enter the Promised Land with the people.
The leadership will go to Joshua, and Moses is making his farewell speech.
So we need to understand that peace.
This is a truly lynch-pin moment in the history of Israel,
and Moses is demanding of the people that they say yes to God and enter covenant with God.
When we are looking at a text like Deuteronomy,
it is also important to go forward a few hundred years
and look at the context of the time when this long traditional oral story finally got written down.
This had been part of oral tradition for centuries,
and when the author of Deuteronomy, pretty much as we have it today,
when that author finally wrote this down, Israel was in great distress.
The Northern Kingdom had been defeated.
The Southern Kingdom was threatened on all sides.
The people were anticipating being defeated and going into exile.
And the idea that they would look back at this time,
at this marvelous speech that Moses makes,
filled with hope as they enter the Promised Land,
gives the people of Deuteronomy's time hope
as they might enter the Promised Land again someday.
I think those two pieces are important,
and I hope that is enough for us today
that we can now be ready to look at our own lives
and our own world in the 21st century
and try to find meaning for you and me in this text.
Today's scripture is found in Deuteronomy chapter 30 verses 11 through 20.
Surely this commandment that I am commanding you today
is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.
It is not in heaven that you should say,
Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us
so that we may hear it and observe it?
Neither is it beyond the sea that you should say,
Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us
and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?
No, the word is very near you.
It is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity,
death and adversity.
If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God
that I am commanding you today by loving the Lord your God,
walking in His ways and observing His commandments,
decrees and ordinances,
then you shall live and become numerous
and the Lord your God will bless you in the land
you are entering to possess.
But if your hearts turn away and you do not hear
but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them,
I declare to you today that you shall perish.
You shall not live long in the land that you are
crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today
that I have set before you life and death,
blessings and curses.
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.
Loving the Lord your God, obeying Him and holding fast to Him
for that means life to you in length of days
so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give
to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.
This has been the Word of the Lord.
All the ground is sinking sand, all the ground is sinking sand.
It's always done as His blood supports the end of the moving flood
and all the ground lies so His way, He is of my hope and stay.
All Christ is all that God Christ said, all of the ground is sinking sand,
all of the ground is sinking sand.
O live, we shall come, get from this land,
O may our death in Him become, rest in His righteousness alone,
long as this can be for the world.
All Christ is all that God Christ said, all of the ground is sinking sand,
all of the ground is sinking sand.
In 1977, I was 30 years old, I was the pastor of Bulletsville Christian Church
in northern Kentucky near Cincinnati, Ohio.
I was also an emergency medical technician and firefighter
with the local volunteer fire department.
In 1977, there was a tragic fire at a building called the Beverly Hills Suffer Club
and I'm not going to tell you the details of that story.
But I will tell you my own small piece of it was this.
It was the job of our volunteer fire department
to spend the night at the grounds patrolling the grounds of that huge tragic fire.
In a building that size and a fire that large,
it sometimes takes days for everything to be put out completely
and the fire that you think is out springs up again.
Anyway, it was our job to patrol the grounds.
This was a full day after the fire.
As I was walking around the grounds that night,
I walked into a room which had been a bar.
I looked on the countertop, there was a box.
In that box was money.
To this day, I do not know how much money was in that box.
It occurred to me that the proper thing to do with the box of money
was to go to our fire department's fire chief
and he passed it on to the police officer
who was also patrolling the grounds.
When I have told that story,
some people have wondered if I was not tempted to take the money
or at least to even see how much money was there.
And I actually think that I was not.
And it occurred to me as I thought about it after the fact
that I did not resist temptation that night.
I did not make a decision that night
so much as what I really did was act upon a decision
that I had made almost 20 years before.
On the day of my 11th birthday,
at the end of a worship service in my home church,
I walked down the aisle in response to the invitation.
And the pastor asked me,
Bob, do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God?
Do you accept Him as your Lord and Savior?
And I said, yes.
And actually, as I look back upon it now,
I realize that on that day, I made the decision
that when I was confronted with a box of money that was not mine,
that I would not take it.
I didn't know I was making that decision that day,
but in a very real sense,
I spent almost 20 years preparing to make the decision
to do the right thing with a box of money.
All I really did was act upon a decision that I had already made.
We are talking today about a very special kind of decision making.
We are talking about a one-time, major, life-changing decision
that affects, even dominates, smaller decisions
that a person will make for the rest of his or her life.
We are talking about what it means to enter into a covenant.
When Moses talked to the people on the plains of Moab,
he demanded of them, choose.
He was insisting that they enter a covenant with Almighty God.
He says to them, I have set before you this day
blessing and curse, life and death.
Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants might live.
And their part in that covenant was simply obedience to the Word.
Obedience to God's Word.
God says to the people of Israel, through the mouth of Moses,
it is not too hard for you.
You can do it. It is not too far away.
No one has to go over the sea and get it for you.
It is near to you. It is close to you.
Sometimes following the Word of God is not nearly as difficult
as we want to make it.
It is attributed to Mark Twain,
and I honestly do not know if Mark Twain is really the one who sent this.
But apparently, according to the story,
Mark Twain once said that the problem he had with the Bible
was not with how hard it is to understand.
He said, the problem I have with the Bible
is with the parts that I understand entirely too well.
Sometimes it is simpler than we think it is.
Moses is telling the people that there is no middle ground
with Yahweh, the Almighty God of Israel.
There is no such thing as partial commitment.
There is no middle ground.
This is before my time now, but my mother tells me,
and I looked it up later and I know it's true,
that in 1942, Bing Crosby and the Andrews sisters
did a song called, Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?
The song is not even very good, but what a title.
Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?
God is saying to the people of Israel,
Is You Is or Is You Ain't My People?
And you got to choose.
There is no middle ground.
You have to say yes, or you have to say no.
I believe that for a Christian in today's world,
our relationship with Jesus Christ,
our commitment to God through Jesus Christ,
is that kind of covenant.
It is a one-time, life-altering decision
which affects, which even dominates,
smaller decisions that we make for the rest of our lives.
Most moral and ethical decisions, I believe,
are far simpler than we make them.
If we put them in the context of the covenant
that we entered into long ago,
if we put these decisions into the context
of our relationship with Jesus Christ and Almighty God,
I think things get easier.
You see, it is not required of us to reinvent
the ethical or religious wheel a dozen times a day.
When we are weighed down,
when I am weighed down by what I call
the tyranny of decision-making,
I try to make it a little easier on myself.
And here's what I do.
I try to give myself a break.
I try to take advantage of the decision-making
that I have already done and only act
upon the decision that I made some 56 years ago now.
I say to myself,
I have decided to follow Jesus.
I have decided to follow Jesus.
No turning back.
No turning back.
And very often, I find things start falling into place.
I find tough decisions are sometimes simple after all.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Hello, I'm Deb Phelps.
Pastor Bob talked today about the last instructions
that Moses had for the people of Israel
before they entered into the Promised Land.
Last instructions I think are important,
very important to listen to, and you may agree,
because sometimes they have a way of condensing
all the instructions down into a nutshell.
This table that we gather at now is a lot like that,
the table of the Lord.
It's not just this place before me,
or as it extends before you,
whether it's a physical table or just a mental image.
But the table is that place in our minds where we gather,
as Jesus did on that last night with his disciples
in the upper room.
You see, he had some last instructions for them too.
It wouldn't be long before he would be put to death on the cross,
but the instructions, the memories that they would be left with,
I don't think Jesus wanted them to be of him hanging on that cross,
but of what he taught them,
of what he taught them about how to live.
He had washed their feet on that last night
to show about being a servant.
The greatest leaders should be the servants of all.
He had taught them about the commandment of loving,
one another and about God's love,
and then he gave some special words and broke the bread
and passed the cup to them,
as we will do now in remembrance.
Let us pray.
O gracious and loving God,
we thank you for your love.
We thank you for the choices that we have to follow you.
We thank you for showing us how to live,
making it so much easier for us in following your ways
and the things that you have taught us.
We especially now thank you for this bread, this cup,
that is before us now.
We thank you that we may take this in remembrance of your son Jesus Christ.
Please forgive us for our sins, dear Lord,
and we thank you for the Jesus that you sent
to show us how to do it right.
These things we ask in the name of your son Jesus.
Amen.
For Jesus, that last night while they were eating,
he took a loaf of bread,
and after he had blessed it, he broke it and said,
This is my body that's broken for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.
And after they had finished eating, he took the cup
and said to them,
This cup is the new covenant of my blood poured out for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup,
you proclaim the Lord's story.
You proclaim the Lord's step until he comes again.
Won't you join me now as we take this bread and the cup?
If you have these elements with you,
take them now if you haven't already.
If you have others around you,
you may wish to share them with one another.
If you don't have them with you,
you can take in your mind visualizing that last night,
sharing the bread, the cup,
as Jesus' disciples did with one another.
Remembering the Christ.
Remembering God's love through the Christ for the world.
Won't you come?
The body of Christ broken for you.
A couple blessing poured out for you.
Eat and never leave our grave.
Eat this bread, drink this cup.
Trust in me and you will not hurt.
Come to me and never leave our grave.
Eat this bread, drink this cup.
Trust in me and you will not hurt.
May your own covenant with Jesus Christ
dominate every aspect of your life,
give you joy,
and even give you simplicity.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Amen.
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