Worship Textfessional – November 11, 2007

Orangeville Baptist Church – Sunday, November 11, 2007
“Follow Me” – Luke 6
Our God Saves – Paul Baloche & Brenton Brown – C
How Awesome Is Our God – Chris Vacher & Craig Douglas – C
Blessed Be Your Name – Matt & Beth Redman – A
Message – “Obeying Jesus”
Communion
Jesus Paid It All – Trad. & Kristian Stanfill – Bb
You Are God Alone – Billy & Cindy Foote – A

As a whole, our gatherings on Sunday morning were fantastic. Being Remembrance Day we opened our service with a video and a moment of silence. For you RSS folks, the video is at the end of the post on the site.

The set of music before the message was very solid – “Our God Saves” is a new one for us so we did it as a prelude and the congregation caught on very quickly. Paul & Brenton write songs that are so easy for people so sing – they are a big help to us! That song led really nicely in to “How Awesome” which we’ve done a few times now and the congregation is pretty familiar with. Our worship leader (one of the three volunteer worship leaders we have) transitioned really nicely from those two songs in to “Blessed Be Your Name” in both services. Overall that package of music flowed really well together and the congregation was pretty engaged.

Earl’s message was solid. We are looking at what it means, in practical terms, to follow Jesus. After we “pray the prayer” what does following Him actually look like. Looking at what Jesus says about loving our enemies is always convicting but Earl brought it down to a very practical level. We all have that person in our life whose picture we place on “the dartboard” – we may not say or act out in negative ways to them but we may have thoughts and desires of negative things towards them. Earl’s comment was that to live out loving our enemies in practical terms means to take that picture off the dartboard, find the nicest picture frame we have and place that photo in a place of honour among the pictures of our family and close friends.

We came out of the message focused on God’s mercy – taking it back to the cross – and transitioned right in to communion. I loved the arrangement we did of “Jesus Paid It All” and moving to “You Are God Alone” was great. We did this as a presentation and brought the congregation in for the bridge and chorus at the end. People responded pretty incredibly in the second service to this song and we had some amazing moments of worship.

All in all, it was a great morning. The songs flowed very well, the team played together incredibly well, I had lots of comments on how good the mix was and we gave an opportunity for our congregation to give praise to God.

What more can you ask for?

Here’s the video produced by Veterans Affairs Canada a couple of years ago -