| SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2007 - GUTSY GRATITUDE |
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The weekend after Thanksgiving is always an interesting one, as many people are returning home from the holidays. This made for some absentees, but we had a good crowd today of 154 in both services, and it was a good day!
As a matter of fact, that fits in with our focus of today, the goodness of God and coming before Him with thanksgiving and praise. We wrapped up our look at Psalm 100, focusing today on verses 4 & 5, which read: 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. 5 For the Lord is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation. The two big concepts that we touched on were how we can offer sacrifices of thanksgiving and how all of our praise, worship, and thanksgiving is geared around God's goodness, love, and faithfulness. Someone came up to me after the second service and asked me to elaborate some more on how we can bring a sacrifice of thanksgiving, which is offering thanks to God for the things in life that hurt us and would try to defeat us. I might try to do that this week as I have some more notes on this that I can share from Ted Stewart's booklet, Levels of Worship. But one of the things that I challenged those in our 2nd service to do is to say "Blessed be Your Name, Lord" this week sometime when something has gone wrong or we have experienced hurt, to actually offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving that thanks God for considering us worthy to suffer, and that is an extension of an attitude that trusts that God will provide an answer because He is good! One other wonderful aspect of our services was at the end of our 2nd service, we just had a time of thanksgiving as people independently offered up small prayers of thanksgiving to God. I wish it would have just gone on, as it was an annointed time - probably the best part of the day. We did have some return visitors (Amy, Kathy, and Scott), as well as a new visitor (Amy's husband, Chip). I am always grateful to see the Lord bring new people our way. It was a good day at the Journey, although there was some flatness early in the day. I THANK GOD that He has brought us together as a church. I pray for we will continue learning more and more what it means to be part of this body of believers, and that we will grow in our ministry to each other and as a church.
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