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1.
Upcoming WIC (Women in the Church)
Activities
April: WIC has scheduled a workday on Saturday, April 12th, beginning at
9:00 a.m. No breakfast will be served. This is not a meeting, but a
workday so come prepared to work. We will be cleaning the kitchen and
the chairs in the fellowship hall. If you are able to come please see
the sign up sheet on the vestibule table.
May: “Miss Mary” from Grace Presbyterian Church will speak at our Mother
Daughter Tea. She brings many years of serving “High and Low” teas to
women in our area. Come and join the fun of “Talking All Things Tea” and
enjoy seeing an old fashioned tea party set up before you! Our
Mother-Daughter Tea will be on Saturday, May 10th, from 3:00 p.m. to
5:30 p.m. Please watch for the sign up sheet coming soon. Your name on
the sign up sheet and the number of guests coming with you will be your
reservation for this special event. We can only seat 72 mothers and
daughters this year so sign up early. The cost will be $5 per person or
$15 per family. If you have any questions on what a “High Tea” or a “Low
Tea” is please feel free to contact Avone Blasiman.
2.
NORF (Northern Ohio Reformed
Fellowship) will host a Reformation Day Conference October 24-25, 2008.
Pastor Mark Scholten is organizing the conference to be held at Grace
Church in Hudson. If you know of anyone who is not a member or regular
attender of Faith Church, but would be interested in the conference
please give their name and address to either Pastor Mark or the
secretary to add to the conference mailing list. More information on the
conference will be made available at a later date.
3.MESS
Hall (ages 13-18) will meet at the Scholten’s home on
Thursday, April 10th and April 24th at 7:00 p.m. Don’t forget to bring
your blue notebook on Ephesians and your Bible!
The Young Adults Group (ages 18-25) will meet at Covenant Fellowship
Church on Friday, April 4 and April 18, at 7:00 p.m. Don’t forget to
bring your study book and your Bible!
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4.
Deacon’s Tidbits
The church tithes and offerings for the year 2007 were $131,063 which
was approximately $14,000 over the 2007 budget of $117,000. The
benevolence amounts were returned to the 2005 amounts. For the year 2007
the total tithes and offerings exceeded the expenses by $2,157. The
church tithes and offerings for the two months of 2008 (ending Feb. 29,
2008) were $20,959 which is less than the budget amount of $22,528.
A church workday is being planned for Saturday, May 3, 2008 from 8:00
a.m. until we are finished. Lunch and drinks will be provided. Please
mark your calendars. There will be projects of varying sizes and any
help will be greatly appreciated.
5.
Birthday! Two special
birthdays to remember:
Carolyn Mealy’s birthday is April 3rd. I know she would appreciate a
card. You can send one to her at: Rose Lane Health Center, 5425 High
Mill Avenue NW, Massillon, OH 44646
Harriet Butler’s birthday is April 8th. She will be 86 years old. If you
wish to send her a card here is her address: P.O. Box 5312, Gallup, NM
87305.
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6.
The Need for True Worship
All Christians need to cultivate a life with God that is growing and
developing. If we are not growing, we will stagnate or die. The
corporate, official worship of God’s people is a crucial and essential
means God has given to help us grow. Think of the words of Hebrews
10:19-22:
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy
Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us
through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great high
priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere
heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse
us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure
water.
This passage calls Christians to draw near to God through Christ since,
even as Christians, we experience a distance between ourselves and God
that only the work of Christ can bridge. We need to draw near to him
personally and individually in devotion, meditation, and prayer; but we
also need to draw near to him by meeting with him in the fellowship of
his people, where God promises to be especially present (Matt. 18:20).
We meet with God when the people of God meet together, pray together,
sing together, and listen to his Word together.
Christianity is a religion in which individuals become an integral part
of Christ’s body. We are not just an association of individuals, but we
are organically connected to one another (1 Cor. 12:12-27; Eph.
1:22-23). We express that we are the body of Christ, especially when we
meet God together in public worship.
Worshiping False Gods
John Calvin rightly called the human heart “a factory of idolatry,”
meaning that faithful worship does not come naturally to fallen human
beings. Sinners become idolaters because God has so deeply planted the
need for himself in human beings that when we do not know the true God,
we invent false gods, false religion, and false worship. God warns
against such idolatrous worship in the first commandment: “You shall
have no other gods before me.” The idolatrous worship of false gods is
condemned throughout the Bible.
Worshiping the True God Falsely
We need to listen to the call of Scripture to promote holy worship and
flee idolatry. But the worship of false gods is not the only kind of
idolatry condemned in the Bible. The second commandment teaches us that
idolatry is not only a matter of worshiping false gods, which is
prohibited in the first commandment. It is also a matter of worshiping
the true God falsely. The second commandment says, “You shall not make
for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the
earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or
worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the
children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation
of those who hate me, but showing love to thousands of those who love me
and keep my commandments” (Exod. 20:4-6).
This commandment clearly forbids the use of images of God in worship,
but it also implicitly forbids all human invention in worship. The
prohibition against images means that we must worship the true God only
in ways that please him. The people of Israel claimed they were
worshiping the Lord as the true God when they fashioned the golden calf.
They regarded the image as Jehovah (Exod. 32:5-6). But such false
worship offended God and brought judgment on the people.
The story of the golden calf reminds us that God’s own people can fall
into idolatry in their worship of him. We may want to be creative and
inventive in worship, but that creativity can lead to idolatry.
Repeatedly in the Old Testament God judged his people for false worship.
Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu were struck dead for offering “unauthorized
fire before the LORD, contrary to his command” (Lev. 10:1). Jeroboam,
the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, and his heirs were
consistently criticized as idolaters because of images and false temples
and services dedicated to the Lord. The people of God were rebuked in
these instances not for worshiping false gods, but for worshiping the
true God falsely.
The New Testament also warns against pleasing ourselves with false
worship. Paul wrote to the Colossians condemning their novelties and
experiments with “self-imposed worship” (Col. 2:23). Jesus warned
against allowing traditions to dominate and subvert the Word of God:
“Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition” (Matt.
15:6). Jesus was not speaking about worship when he made that statement,
but then he used Isaiah 29:13, which is about worship, to support his
words:
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from
me.They worship me in vain;their teachings are but rulestaught by men.
(vv. 8-9)
He was saying that our service to God, whether in life generally or in
corporate worship, must not be determined by tradition but must follow
the teaching of God in the Bible.
Paul specifically warned the Corinthians against false worship in the
way they were administering the Lord’s Supper. The sins and errors that
infected their worship led Paul to charge them with destroying that
sacrament: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat
(1 Cor. 11:20). In fact, God cares so much about worship that Paul
records that God visited judgment on the Corinthians for their abuses in
worship related to that sacrament: “That is why many among you are weak
and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep” (v. 30).
The Bible reminds us that neither our instincts nor our traditions nor
our experiments are reliable guides to worship. The Bible itself is our
only reliable guide. One of the ironies of our time is that many
Christians who affirm the inerrancy of the Bible do not really study it
to find out what it says about worship. We must search the Scriptures to
find God’s will to guide us in our worship. The Cambridge Declaration
made this point: “The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our
salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior
must be measured.”
– Dr. Robert Godfrey
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Jennifer
and Geneva, our newest covenant child.