1 Chronicles 23-27

Every, every, every, function that supports the corporate worship service of your church is sacred, from the person singing to the person in the nursery!

Pastor Fred

Psalm 110

In this Psalm we find the reference that Jesus uses in Matthew 22:41-45 to declare His pre-existence, meaning life for Him did not begin within Mary. He presses the religious leaders who are questioning His divinity to explain Psalm 110. If David speaks of the Messiah as being his Lord, then how can they deny the divinity of the Messiah? The Messiah is the son of David through human lineage, Matthew 1:1-17, but His being as always existed, John 1:1-14 and Philippians 2:5-11.

How do you see Jesus? If it is as anything less than divine, press further into the Holy Texts given to us that we may all see Him as God!

Pastor Fred

Psalm 108-109

Imprecations. We need to understand that these texts are not given to us to give permission to us to seek the destruction of our enemies but rather instruction to us as to what we are to do with such strong feelings we will most certainly encounter at times in this life. An imprecation is a classification of Psalms where we speak of our feeling of deep hatred for another, our desires for their destruction. The only way we will ever be able to fulfill God's expectation that we love our enemies, as Jesus taught in the Sermon on The Mount in Matthew 5-7, is to take our feelings of anger and hatred to God. We give them to Him in prayer, prayers of imprecations, not because we hope to see them fulfilled, but rather to experience them being exchanged, hate for love, revenge for forgiveness, anger for mercy. We give Him the feelings we know do not belong in our hearts and He in turn gives us what belongs, the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-26).

Pastor Fred

Psalm 30

In verse 12b of this Psalm, we are pressed to an intriguing question. The text reads, "...I will praise your forever."

The question is, could doing anything the Bible commands ever become tedious, especially, in the context of eternity, once we breathe our last breath and find ourselves in heaven where we will most certainly be praising God forever, among many other things undoubtedly, but nonetheless, praise will be an integral part of our existence in our eternity with Him in the New Heaven and New Earth...could we grow board of the repetition of praise?

Revelation 21:5, we hear Jesus saying, "Behold, I a making everything new..." This most certainly is filled with meaning but in part I believe is this, He has the power to make everything He asks of us just as fulfilling the millionth time as it was the first. That He is not bound by the law of diminishing marginal returns! There is no sense of repetitiveness in Heaven because He makes all things new, always! I believe as well that if we obey the mandates of Scripture with the right motives, one to please God and embrace the abundant life that He longs for us to possess, that we bring that same promise of newness to us in this life...that the study of Scripture, prayer, generosity, accountability...never becomes monotonous because of His power to bring "first time fulfillment" to every moment!

Pastor Fred

2 Samuel 24/1 Chronicles 21-22

Here is a link found by our church's worship leader explaining the perplexity of these chapters...I would add as well, that here again we see Joab stepping in and pressing David as any good core leader must do, challenging respectfully the mistakes of the lead person, as he did for David in 2 Samual 19.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/604

Pastor Fred

Psalm 97-99

Ask yourself if the praise you are bringing at the next church service you attend rivals these Psalms... specifically 98:8, are you bringing a praise that rivals the river's clapping hands and the mountain's shouts? I don't exactly know what a clapping river sounds like or a shouting mountain... but I have been white water rafting, I have stood on on a precipice overlooking the Shenandoah Valley... and I would have to say together they conjure up images of something deafening, majestic, glorious, and inspiring to everyone present... is this the kind of impact our praise is brining in the service we attend?

Pastor Fred

Psalm 95

This is the Psalm that the writer of Hebrews references in Hebrews 4:3. What is the rest of which God speaks? It is the rest that comes from working to pursue our purpose, the rest these Israelites never knew because they were not allowed to enter the Promise Land and work to secure the nation that would give the world our Savior! It is hard to think of rest in connection with work, until we realize that the rest of our physical bodies is not the only sort of rest we were created to have. Hebrews 4 gives us four kinds of rest: Paternal Rest, Purpose Rest, Physical Rest, and Perpetual Rest.

Paternal is the rest that comes from being reconciled to God through Jesus, Purpose through using our energy and talents to build His Kingdom on earth, Physical by practicing a weekly Sabbath, and Perpetual by heading the call of Colossians 3:1 and being heavenly minded, living in light of the eternity that awaits us! With all four, we are WELL rested!!

Pastor Fred