Worship: Confession, Gratitude, and Sanctification

When is the last time that you studied the book of Leviticus? I hear many people complain about Leviticus, about how boring it is or about how it is a bunch of rules and regulations that don’t apply to modern man. I kind of felt that way until I actually studied the book of Leviticus and understood what the Lord is communicating to us through the beautiful book of the Bible. Take a look at what the great Apostle Paul has to teach us about the Old Testament, including the book of Leviticus.

Do you value people over things?

I am working on my lesson for our Connect Groups that will meet this coming Sunday at Southern Calvert Baptist Church. As a church, we have been walking through the entire Bible over the previous two and a half years. I am so excited to see how all of the things that we have been learning are all coming together in the person of Jesus Christ. This week, our journey takes us to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 12. What do you value in this life? What do you spend the majority of your time doing? What do you invest your time and energy into the most? For many humans, we invest our precious time and energy into acquiring wealth and possessions. In and of themselves, wealth and possessions are not a bad thing. Money is simply a tool in the hands of God that He uses to reveal our priorities. We all have a choice; we can use the precious gift of time to invest in temporary things, like wealth and possessions or, we can use the precious gift of time to invest in eternal things, like the souls of our fellow human beings. Jesus challenges us to pick one or the other because we cannot do both. In other words, we cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve wealth accumulation and God both at the same time. We will give lip service to one and really devote ourselves to the other. This is what Jesus addresses in Luke 12.

The Word, Confession, and Dedication

Nehemiah is a great book of the Bible that demonstrates the connection between the Word of God, confession of sin, and dedication to the Lord. This is a question that many are asking today, that is, “why are there so few dedicated people to the Lord in our society”? Have you ever asked that question? Have you ever heard someone else ask that question? Well, according to Nehemiah, dedication comes as the result of the Word and confession of sins. In this article, I would like to examine Nehemiah 8-10. This is the study for next week’s Connect Groups here at Southern Calvert Baptist Church.

Nehemiah’s Prayer

I have been studying Nehemiah chapter one today as I prepare a lesson for our Connect Groups this coming Sunday morning. We are continuing to walk through the entire Bible over a three year period and we have arrived at the end of the Babylonian captivity. God is stirring among His people because, just like He had promised, they were going to return to Israel after seventy years of captivity. We know that God always does His part because He has bound His existence to His Holy Word. He must keep His Word or He would cease to exist. That does not negate our part in the process. God is seeking to use a leader to motivate the people back to a right relationship with Him. Nehemiah is the man. He has a heart for God and because of his heart for God, he has a heart for the people of God. Chapter one opens with Nehemiah living a very comfortable life. He lives in a very metropolitan area. In fact, the book opens with him living in the capitol of the world empire. He is in Susa, the capitol of Persia. Not only that but, he has a nice job, serving the king of the world’s most dominate empire at the time. But, Nehemiah is not satisfied with his comfy, cushy life.

Mercy and Grace through Judgment?

Is it possible for God to show mercy and grace even in the midst of His judgment? Can judgment/discipline be a positive event in our lives? Is it possible to view judgment in a positive light? Let’s discover the answers to these questions and more as we turn to the book of Hosea. Here at Southern Calvert Baptist Church, we have been walking through the entire Bible over a three year period. Currently, we are in the book of Hosea. Our goal is to examine every book of the Bible and discover how each book points to the person of Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind.

Solomon’s Prayer

At Southern Calvert Baptist Church, we are continuing to walk through the Bible, book by book, over a three year period. We are covering I Kings 8 this week. This is when King Solomon dedicates the Temple to the Lord. His prayer is a beautiful prayer and that is what we are going to study this week. As we observe this prayer, I want us to keep in mind the outline of the Lord’s Prayer. One version of the Lord’s Prayer is found in the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 6.

9 “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’]

David experiences mercy, grace, and forgiveness

As we continue looking at the life of David and his walk with the Lord, we are reminded of why he is called a man after God’s own heart. He has a teachable spirit, a servant’s heart, and he was quick to obey. David is a man who has experienced God’s mercy and grace and he has been quick to extend that mercy and grace to others, even his enemy, King Saul.

In this lesson, we are going to see how David experiences God’s forgiveness. David, although a man after God’s own heart, was not perfect. Like all of us, David was born with a sin nature. His heart was inclined to sin, just like my heart is and just like your heart is. As we study this, just remember, no matter what you have done, God’s mercy, grace, and forgiveness is available.

David takes a stand for the Lord

We live in a world where people are afraid to take a stand for the Lord because of political correctness. People have been trained to keep their heads down when it comes to social issues, like gay marriage, because if you take a stand and speak out, you get noticed and being noticed causes problems to your daily life. This is not something new. The Bible teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Almost 2,000 years ago, during the lifetime of Jesus, the dilemma of taking a stand for the Lord was just as complex as today.

Set Apart by God for Good Works

This coming Sunday at Southern Calvert Baptist Church, during our Sunday School hour, we are going to cover how God sets us apart to be a Royal Priesthood so that we can walk in the good works that He prepared from before the foundation of the world was laid. We have been walking through the books of Exodus and Leviticus. Previously, we looked at the daily sacrifices that we offered in Israel on a daily basis. There were 5 sacrifices and 2 of those 5 were dedicated to reminding the children of Israel to be grateful to God and to be grateful to each other. If you do the math, that equates to roughly 40 percent of the sacrifices, dedicated to reminding people to be grateful.

Remember Christ’s Sacrifice (Exodus 12)

Once again, I am preparing to teach our Sunday School lesson at Southern Calvert Baptist Church. I am excited to begin teacher training soon because I love studying the Scriptures with others. There is great fellowship that comes with sitting around the Word of God and discovering Truth directly from the mind of God. Our church has some great Sunday School teachers and I am excited to be part of such an amazing team. As a church, we are walking through the book of Exodus. So far, we have covered the following topics:

• Moses answers God’s Great Calling
• Pharaoh’s Response to God’s Great Calling