Hymn of the Month

This was our hymn of the month for April.

I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVES — BRADFORD

I know that my Redeemer lives,
And ever prays for me;
A token of his love he gives,
A pledge of liberty.

I find him lifting up my head;
He brings salvation near;
His presence makes me free indeed
And he will soon appear.

He wills that I should holy be:
Who can withstand his will?
The counsel of his grace in me
He surely shall fulfil.

Jesus, I hang upon thy Word:
I steadfastly believe
Thou wilt return and claim me, Lord,
And to thyself receive.

Poem based on 1 Cor 15:49

I Corinthians 15:49

I look just like my father,

The first rebellious man,

But thanks to grace and mercy

According to His plan,

I shall be like my Savior,

His image bear at last,

When death has worked me over

And this sad world is past.

Or when He comes in glory

In twinkling of an eye,

Made like unto my Savior

No more to sin or die.

When death is dead forever,

and there is no more grave.

Blest be the Second Adam

Who died my soul to save.

                                                April 2013

by D. E. Young

And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. 1 Cor. 15:49

Dorothy is a friend and member of Covenant Presbyterian Church here in St Johns county. She is the author of In Sorrow and In Joy, a collection of her poetry published in 2012.

Psalm 96

PSALM 96

Oh, sing to the LORD a new song! Sing to the LORD, all the earth. Sing to the LORD, bless His name; Proclaim the good news of His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations, His wonders among all peoples. For the LORD is great and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols, But the LORD made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before Him; Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.

Give to the LORD, O families of the peoples, Give to the LORD glory and strength. Give to the LORD the glory due His name; Bring an offering, and come into His courts. Oh, worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness! Tremble before Him, all the earth. Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns; The world also is firmly established, It shall not be moved; He shall judge the peoples righteously."

Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; Let the sea roar, and all its fullness; Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it. Then all the trees of the woods will rejoice before the LORD. For He is coming, for He is coming to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness, And the peoples with His truth.

a Will Wilimon article

I do not embrace all of Mr. Willimon's theology but I sure am in agreement with him on this subject.

That God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.  2 Cor. 5:19a

God in Motion

Posted on April 5, 2013

Most people in our society appear to want God to be generic,
abstract, vague, distant, and arcane. “God? Oh, can’t say
anything too definite about God. God is large and indistinct.”
For many of us God is this big, blurry concept that we can
make to mean about anything we like, something spiritual,
someone (if we have any distinct notions about God)
whom we can make over so that God looks strikingly like
us.Ruin’d nature now restore, Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

In Jesus of Nazareth, God got physical, explicit, and peculiar,
and God came close—too close for comfort for many.Jesus
Christ is God in action, God refusing to remain a general
idea or a high-sounding principle. Jesus Christ is God in
motion toward us, God refusing to stay enclosed in God’s
own divinity. Many people think of God as a vaguely
benevolent being—who never actually gets around to
doing  anything.

It is as if we are threatened by the possibility that God
might truly be an active, intervening God who shows
up where we live. We’ve designed this modern world,
controlled by us, functioning rather nicely on its own,
thank you, everything clicking along in accord with
natural laws, served on command by technological
wonders of our creation.So who needs a God who
relishes actually showing up and doing something?
We modern people are loath to conceive of a God
who is beyond our control or a world other than the
one that is here solely for our personal benefit.

This is the deistic God of the philosophers, a
minimalist, inactive, unobtrusive, noninvasive, detached
God who is just about as much of a God as we moderns
can take. There’s a reason why many thoughtful modern
people seem so determined to sever Jesus from the
Trinity, to render Jesus into a wonderful moral teacher
who was a really nice person, someone who enjoyed
lilies and was kind to children and people with disabilities.
To point to a peripatetic Jew from Nazareth who
wouldn’t stay confined within our boundaries for God
and say, “Jesus is not only a human being but also God,
” well, it’s just too unnerving for us enlightened modern
people to handle. Note how frequently many people refer
to “God” and how seldom they refer to “Christ,” and you
will know why the statement “in Christ God was
reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor.5:19) is a
threatening disruption to many people’s idea of a God
who stays put.

From The Best of Will Willimon (Abingdon, 2012.  
Check out Will’s novel,Incorporation, a wild ride through
 the contemporary church – satire and slapstick with 
serious theological intent.  Available from Cascade 
Press https://wipfandstock.com/store/incorporation.

Reminder

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit"; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor (mist) that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that." But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
James 4:13-16