• No men’s ministry tomorrow morning. We’re going to rethink this to try to accommodate a greater number of men in the church, especially those in younger families who are currently unable to attend. Sorry, brothers, for not getting this word out sooner.
• The document in which I store quotes I’ve gathered over the years now extends to around 30 pages. Since I have a growing concern for the breakdown in what you could call “spiritual disciplines” or “habits of godliness,” I’m passing on another thought on worship. It’s a continuation of my life-long rant against baby-boomer spirituality, in which we thought freeing ourselves from structure would somehow magically make us spiritually alive. It didn’t. All it did was give us a self-congratulatory laziness.
• This is James Stalker, a wonderfully sweet-spirited, and very bright, Scottish minister of 100 years ago:
“One sometimes hears professing religious people disparaging public worship, as if religion might flourish equally well without it; and, for trifling reasons or for no reason at all, they take it upon themselves to withdraw from the visible Church as something unworthy of them. This was not the way in which Jesus acted. The Church of his day was by no means a pure; and he, if anybody, might have deemed it unworthy of him. But he regularly waited on its ordinances and ardently loved it. There are few congregations less ideal perhaps than that in which he worshiped in Nazareth, and few sermons less perfect than those he listened to. But in that little synagogue he felt himself made one with all the piety of the land; as the Scripture was read, the great and good of former ages thronged about him. Nay, heaven itself was in that narrow place.”
• Pray for this. Pray that we would have heaven itself in our own narrow place this Sunday.