~ New Beginnings ~

Praise the Lord, I have finally found a Church to keep here in Orleans! How uplifting it is to be part of a community of believers here in my home-town. My new church is called Bilberry Creek Baptist Church (BCBC). The people there are very welcoming and made me feel right at home. I went for the last two weeks, and met some really nice ladies, the pastor, the worship leader, and a few other "College & Career" aged people. I will definitely go back for Thanksgiving. What drew me there was the sermon title the week before I went (From Fear to Faith). Since this was a lesson that I identified very personally to, I felt a call to try it out. The past two messages have been really challenging, especially last week's. He was talking about real worship. A couple of things really struck me. The first was that Satan tries the best he can to distract us from really worshipping God and instead shifting the focus on ourselves. How true...I surely struggle with this (losing all sense of self-awareness every time I worship 0n Sundays). The second was that worship puts our world back into perspective, helps us to see ourselves with "sober judgement", allows us to receive the joy of forgiveness because God doesn't leave us down, and automatically prompts us to serve from a grateful heart. The pastor challenged us and asked us what we thought the world would look like if every churchgoer left the Church every Sunday with their hearts totally fixed on God, realizing that the universe revolves around Him...not us. In Luke 19:37-40 when the Pharisees tell Jesus to quiet his disciples on Palm Sunday, Jesus tells them that if there was nobody to sing praises to God, that the stones on the ground would cry out. What a profound statement! I never really gave it much thought before, but what Jesus is saying is that God doesn't NEED us to worship Him...creation itself does that enough because of His glory. However, God knows that WE NEED worship to center our lives around the only thing that matters...Love. God is love. We were made to worship. What we worship is what we are living for.

What are you living for?