Welcome
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Call to Worship (Psalm 138:1-8)
I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole heart;
before the gods I sing your praise;
I bow down toward your holy temple
and give thanks to your name
for your steadfast love and your faithfulness;
for you have exalted your name and your word above everything.
On the day I called, you answered me,
you increased my strength of soul.
Opening Prayers
Eternal God,
you are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow,
and yet you come to us afresh each new day.
You breathe new life into what has grown tired and discouraged.
You offer healing for what is broken and worn.
You restore hope for what seems impossible.
You are the source of life and love for us and all your creatures,
And so we worship you as Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit,
one God, now and always.
Merciful God, we confess that we have strayed from your purposes.
You set a path for us to follow that is good for us,
but we conform to the ways of this world
that lead us away from you and your life giving ways.
You offer us your transforming love
to become stronger agents of your grace in the world,
but we cling to familiar patterns and habits
that inhibit our participation in your Kingdom work in the world.
You give each of us gifts to use for the work of your kingdom,
but we wait for others to do what needs doing,
rather than following your teaching and example of service to others.
Forgive us for taking the easy way out
For and failing to honor and love you
with heart, minds, spirits and strength.
Remind and assure this day (Psalm 124)
If it had not been for you who is on our side,
the weight of the world
would have crushed us by now.
If it had not been for you, who was on our side,
the weight of our lives
would have drowned us by now.
Thanks be to You O God, who is on our side,
Thanks be to You O God, whose mercies are lavished upon in Christ.
Amen.
Hymn: “10,000 Reasons”
Prayer for Understanding
Source of all wisdom and understanding,
in the midst of all our distractions, still our hearts and minds.
Amid competing voices, let us hear your word for our times.
By the gift of your Holy Spirit,
help us discern your will and follow your path.
In the name of Jesus Christ, your Living Word, we pray, Amen.
Scripture
Romans 12:1-2 – A Response to God’s Mercies.
Matthew 16:13-20 -Jesus asks a question about who he is.
Sermon: Living Sacrifices
Our congregation is named after the Apostle Paul. He had a profound understanding of the Grace and Mercy of God, brought about by numerous events in his life. When Paul speaks of the mercy God, he does so with deep reverence and great appreciation for what God has done for all of humanity.
Paul is amazed at God’s steadfast love, God’s unconditional forgiveness, and God’s mind boggling and heart grabbing, life transforming grace.
In his introductory treatise on the Christian Faith to the church at Rome, Paul carefully and systematically lays out what he believes about the nature and practice God’s mercy and grace that is contained in the Gospel of Jesus.
Paul spends eleven (11) chapters describing and celebrating the Gospel of Jesus Christ that is the focal point of the Christian faith.
Paul’s reasons for celebrating are extensive:
* Those who follow Christ shall live faith,
* The Gospel is the power of God for salvation
* All have sinned and fall short of God’s good intentions for them.
* We are made right with God or reconciled to God only through Christ’s work on the cross for us.
* We are united to Christ’s death and resurrection symbolized in our baptism.
* God delivers us in our midst of struggle to be faithful, even when we do not understand ourselves or our actions.
* God gives us the Holy Spirit, to keep our focus on God, to help us in our weakness, to give us hope, to pray for us, to assure that there is nothing in all creation that can ever separate us from God.
* God offers salvation to all people both insiders and outsiders who hear and respond to God’s merciful action in Jesus the Christ.
Now, in chapters 12-16, Paul encourages, prods and pushes his readers to respond to God’s mercy in specific ways.
LIVING SACRIFICES
Paul begins by appealing to the Romans to offer themselves fully to God as living sacrifices.
Paul was writing to people who were well acquainted with the sacrificial worship practices of the Jews, Greeks, and Romans. Animal and grain sacrifices were demonstrations of a person’s devotion to a particular god or religious belief. They were acts of love from the followers of those religions.
According to Jewish law, you always presented to God the best sacrifice you could afford.
Paul in chapter 12, calls upon all Christians to be living sacrifices. This sounds rather like an oxymoron which is a figure of speech pairing two words together that are opposing and/or contradictory, for example:
• Bitter Sweet
• Working Vacation
• Found Missing
• Random Order
• Growing Smaller
• Unbiased opinion
• Plastic Silverware
• Sound of Silence
At first glance “Living Sacrifice” does not make any sense at all. Once you typically sacrifice anything it is dead, and remains so, unless your name is Jesus.
Paul is using the expression to describe our on-going and never-ending sacrificial response to God’s mercy. It is based, in part, upon the Jewish understanding of worship
.
We typically think of worship only as something you show up at a building to do, do some religious stuff and then go back to your regular life.
This is different from our how Jewish forebears, thought of worship. Worship was something they did in their daily lives. Besides going to synagogue, their work was an expression of worship, as was their family roles, leisure activities (if they had any), theire service to others and their actions in the community. People worshipped six days a week and rested on the seventh as God rested from his labors, knowing God would provide for them.
Notice that Paul does not encourage his readers to attend worship services more often, or to increase their financial support of the congregation, or serve on a committee, or pray and study the Bible for a longer periods of time.
Paul is calling his readers to respond to God’s love and grace through their daily words and actions.
This ways of thinking about worship transforms Work from simply being a way to make money to a way to serve God and others.
Relationships are transformed into opportunities to celebrate God’s love and grace together, to encourage each other in our faith, and to help others make deeper connections with God.
Serving others becomes an act worship as we see Christ in face of the person we serve.
Serving is an opportunity to move beyond our natural tendency toward selfishness and to grow toward a greater understanding, appreciation and witness of God’s love and mercy to others.
When we allow our lives to be lifted out of the mundane and are seen as our acts of worship, they become a primary way for fulfilling God’s mission to honor and love God, love our neighbors and to make Christ known. We become living, breathing, serving, and sacrificing examples of God’s mercy to the world, just as Jesus gave people a clear picture of God’s mercy.
Paul is pushing us to be Followers of Jesus Christ who, from the moment they wake up in the morning until they time they lay down to sleep, respond to God’s mercy by giving the best of their time, talent, treasure and trust to Him.
TRANSFORMED NOT CONFORMED
Paul then calls his readers to be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit into the image and character of Christ, rather than molded into the image of the world.
J. B. Phillips, an English Bible Scholar and translator, translated Romans 12:2 in this way
Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.
We are surrounded and literally bombarded daily with thousands of messages, images, encouragements of our culture that wants us to squeeze into the shape of the moment that too often contradicts with what who and what God’s calls us to be.
Sorting through all those messages to determine what is good, right and honoring to God is exhausting.
There is a constant pressure of our society to see our purpose in life as being consumers and hoarders of goods and services, rather than stewards and sharers of God’s gifts to us.
There is a constant pressure to think about yourself and no one else. There is pressure to believe that you are wiser than anybody else. Look how far that is getting our world these days.
There is a constant pressure to believe that you are the center of your personal universe and normal rules of good behavior don’t apply to you. That is until someone records you being a jerk on their cell phone and makes your selfish and harmful behaviour public on social media.
If you want to respond to God’s mercies by being a living sacrifice, then Paul says you will need to open yourself to the transforming power of God. Paul tells us we combat the negative influences of our culture by renewing how and what we think about.
The word that Paul uses for “renewing” our minds could also be translated “Renovate.” How many people have watched a “Home Renovation show on TV?” How many have tackled a “Home Renovation Project.”
It is a lot of work, it’s messy, but in the end, it is all worth it when you see the finished product.
Our minds are the “Renovation projects of the Holy Spirit.”
What we allow into our heads ultimately shapes who we are and what we become. We have a choice as to who the contractor for renovating our minds is going to be: The World or Jesus.
I don’t believe that the advertisers pushing their various wares on us, or politicians, or proponents of the latest fads care as much about us as God does.
Whatever we think and reflect upon will ultimate shapes how we feel, what we are passionate about, and what we do.
The Holy Spirit who knows both God and us, works to push us and prod us where we need it toward a life more in step with the wishes of God our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.
Paul, the overly-confident, self-righteous, former persecutor of the church, needed a dramatic Damascus road experience with God to turn his life upside-down-and-right-side-up.
Paul in his letter to the Philippians speaks of leaving his old life behind in order to embrace the new life with Christ that offered him.
Often it takes something dramatic, like a pandemic to get us to listen to God, to see how our culture is negatively affecting how we think in order for us to do the hard work of embrace more fully God’s timeless, practical and life-giving ways revealed in Christ. We do so because we want to respond to God’s mercy and to live in God’s good, acceptable, and growth promoting will.
In hard times you learn to determine . . .
• what is helpful to our relationship with God and others and what is not.
• What promotes peace and well being from what promotes anxiety and fear.
• What helps us to treasure what is important from that which has no or little value.
At a pivotal moment in his ministry, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples answered what they had heard from others in their travels.
And then Jesus asked the greater question, “But who do you say that I am?”
And Peter responded with “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus then tells the disciples upon this important profession of their faith in Him, He would build his church. And nothing, not even the powers of evil would stop God from carrying his Kingdom desires and purposes on earth.
Today as we reflect upon our response to the mercies of God, I want to suggest we do two things this week:
1) Imagine each part of your day being done in the presence of Jesus. See how this affects or changes how you go through your day.
2) Every day this week read chapter 12 of Romans. Let Paul’s instruction guide you in how you respond to God’s mercies in one new way.
We do all this, being assured that God is guiding us to discern his will and that nothing, including this pandemic, will stop God’s mercy, love, and his Good News of Christ from reaching out to those need it through us.
To Father, Son and Spirit
be all glory, honor and praise.
Amen.
Song: “I know who holds the future”
Prayers of the People
We thank you, God,
For your daily mercies and provision.
We are humbled by the breath of your mercy shown to us in Christ life, suffering death and resurrection. We make no claim on love and your grace, but we welcome it as we need it.
WE thank you for Christ’s resurrection, we can live in the present with glad hearts, giving generously of all our varied resources, and look to the future, trusting the one who is with us always to the end of the age.
Holy Spirit we thank for your encouraging, convicting, comforting, guiding, transforming power and presence in our lives.
for the inspiration of those who have offered to us an example of faith, devotion, and Christ-like living.
For ourselves,
that our worship and our lives be Spirit-filled and joyful, and both an expression of the love and commitment we offer to Jesus.
for willingness to live for Jesus and with him in the nitty-gritty of every day.
that we take up the responsibility of sharing the glorious news of resurrection, which alone can comfort the grieving, sustain the suffering, and assure the dying.
For others,
for awakened awareness of need and calling for those who have lost a realization of the privilege and opportunity of worship you every day.
for those who struggle with the times we live in, for all struggle to remain emotionally and mentally healthy.
We especially pray for the mental and emotional health of our front line workers in this pandemic. Bring your quiet comforting peace to them.
Help us to take the important steps to keep ourselves emotionally and mentally healthy so we can serve, love, bless and witness to others in your name.
Schools, students, teachers, families, admin people preparing to help our children, teen and young adults return to school both in person and online.
Continue to the people of our communities to act wisely in these times, to continues to do those things that keeps others safe even our desire and will to do so fluctuates.
We pray for all who need your healing upon their bodies, relationships
For your church as continues to act as your hands, feet and voices during this time. We pray for guidance and direction to congregations preparing to return to in person worship.
Pause for silent prayer.
We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ who taught us to pray…
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name, your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory
are yours now and forever. Amen.
Please join me in humming
Song: Take my Life and Let it be
Charge and Benediction (2 Thess. 2:16)
We go now to carry on God Mission in the world,
To love and honor God in all we do, think and say,
To Love our neighbors as ourselves, and
To be and make faithful followers of Jesus the Christ.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself
and God our Father,
who loved us and through grace
has given us eternal comfort and good hope,
comfort your hearts
and strengthen them
in every good work and word.
Moment for Mission: World Humanitarian Day
Ravaged by almost three decades of conflict as well as recurrent droughts, Somalia’s population suffers from chronic food insecurity. Lacking access to basic necessities, many are vulnerable to disease and malnutrition. In response, Presbyterian World Service & Development (PWS&D) and Canadian Foodgrains Bank are providing vital humanitarian assistance to those in need. Pregnant and lactating women, as well as children under five, are being screened for malnutrition and receiving supplementary feeding. Additionally, the project is empowering vulnerable women with lessons about how to prevent further malnutrition, eat a balanced diet and maintain nutrition, providing them with the tools and knowledge they need to live a life full of nourishment.
PWS&D supports food security and nutrition
Prayer Partnership
Monday, August 24 We pray that we catch a glimpse today of God’s reconciling love so that we may not lose heart but get caught up in your mission for Christ’s sake.
Tuesday, August 25 We thank God for Canada’s fresh lakes and running rivers.
Wednesday, August 26 We pray for the PCC Archives staff as they endeavour to organize, preserve and make available the rich historical collection held in the archives, all of which serves to provide vital information to those within the denomination and also the general public.
Thursday, August 27 We thank God for ecumenical ministerials and councils. May the diverse gifts of the Body of Christ enrich and strengthen our ministry and mission.
Friday, August 28 We pray for congregations embarking on the New Beginnings congregational renewal process.
Saturday, August 29 We pray for The Presbyterian College in Montreal, Que., as it goes through a time of transition in leadership. May those involved be guided by the Spirit of God.