Worship Confessional – Sunday, July 26, 2009

Alright – Fred’s throwing a big birthday party so I thought I’d join in!

This past Sunday at OBC we were talking about the cost of following Jesus – the ‘not-so-fine print’ that He tells us about. We walked through Luke 9 and read the story of the three guys who each have different reasons for not following Jesus in that moment. At the end of the message we were reminded that following Jesus and calling others to follow Him could look like this -

• Proximity – not just living close to people but being close relationally with them as well
• Presence – being the hands & feet of Jesus in our neighbourhoods
• Proclamation – deeds lived out for the sake of the Kingdom and not just as random acts of kindness

We closed our service by asking people to reflect on those three – Proximity, Presence, Proclamation – and to allow God to speak to them. Perhaps there is one of those concepts that they really felt God was calling them to explore and to expand in their lives this week. Closing the service that way was a little bit of an audible since the message went long and we weren’t able to do our expected response songs. Not the end of the world – just different than what we were expecting.

We opened our service with a solid set of 3 songs -

• Your Grace Is Enough – Matt Maher – F
• Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – Bb
• This Is How We Know – Matt Redman – Bb

The first two songs are real winners for our congregation – they love to sing them and join in right away. We did something a little different with “Everlasting God” and opened with the pre-chorus (“Our God, You reign forever..”) four times. We started that section with the band and vocals nice and full and as we went through that pre-chorus four times we brought the band back to a really simple, straight, four-on-the-floor feel and brought the vocals right out front. It was a nice little moment – one of those things that takes the band some work to accomplish and probably nobody in the congregation noticed :) But that’s okay – it helped with the flow of the songs and getting people engaged in what was happening.

“This Is How We Know” is a new Matt Redman track – it’s available on iTunes so check it out. We played the song last Sunday during communion and this week had the congregation sing with us. They got the chorus no problem and we’ll do it again next week to give them a chance to get real familiar with it.

So that was our morning – pretty straightforward, nothing too complicated. Great to be together with our church family, hear from God’s word, lift Him up in worship – love it.

We’ve got one more week of this series left and then we begin a five-week series through the book of Psalms. Really looking forward to that and talking about coming up with some opportunities for people to respond that will help make the messages and the words of that book really stick. Stay tuned!