Worship Services

The Traditional Worship service featuring organ music and hymns takes place each Sunday at 8:00 AM. It is not live-streamed.

The Blended Worship service, which combines traditional hymns with praise music, takes place each Sunday at 10:00 AM. It is live-streamed on our YouTube channel, which is linked below. 

Our YouTube channel offers playback of all previous services. It also features Shorts - shareable clips of our ministry staff, limited to three minutes or less. 

The countdown has begun, we are one week away from the Super Bowl. The mecca of all football games. Where the best of the best of this year play against each other to take home a trophy, a ring, a title. It’s always an exciting game to watch. But for some of us, we enjoy another aspect of the day, and that is the commercials. I mean the Superbowl commercials have given us classics like the Coke commercial featuring Mean Joe Green from 1980, where he gives his jersey to child fan who gave him his Coke and a smile; to the Wendy’s 80-year-old asking, “Where’s the Beef” (1984), and the 1995  Budweiser frogs (1995). Remember all those?

And while originally one would have to wait to purchase such food the following days after the Super Bowl, now the commercials remind you to call Uber Eats, Door Dash, or Instacart, and get such enticing snacks delivered to your house within 30 minutes. Definitely feeds the instantaneous sensation of our society. 

Putting all that aside, today I want us to talk about hunger of the soul. The kind that makes your focus narrow, your priorities clear, your distractions disappear. And we will pair that hunger with meekness, both of which receives the applause, the recognition of God. 

We are continuing our sermon series that reveals the applause of God given to those named in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, more specifically, in the Beatitudes. Eight persons who though in our world are struggling, or even ignored, Jesus says, they are seen, lifted up, and blessed by God. The first week we looked at the poor in spirit and those who mourn. Today we look at the meek and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. 

So let’s start with the recognition of the meek. In the Bible, the word meek often refers to one who accepts God’s guidance, and never grows resentful toward anything life throws at them. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was known to be meek when asked to bear the son of God, she simply  said, “Let it be”. Then there was Saul who gives into God’s redemption in Acts 9, and goes from being a persecutor of Christians, to a leading Christian renamed Paul, he was meek. As was Jesus when he says “Not as I will, but as God wills” when he prays in the garden of Gethsemane. To be meek is to surrender oneself to God’s will, God’s guidance, and Jesus says they will inherit the earth, meaning they will surrender themselves to experience the life that God has promised and only God can give. A life they know will reveal grace and hope. 

Let me share another example from the Bible. Consider the feeding of the 5,000. Now all four gospels offer their version of this story, of people who gathered to hear Jesus speak, and they were so focused on his words that they were there for hours, before they realized they were hungry. So, Jesus wants to feed them. 

Now my favorite version of this story comes from John 6 where the food they use to distribute comes from a child, a boy who has 5 loaves of bread and two fish. This young child, who saw and heard Jesus that day, was the only one of 5,000 willing to put into action what Jesus had taught him. He was willing to give up all that he had for Jesus to use and bless others. Which he did. From that lesson we can clearly learn that: To be meek is to be willing to give what you have to God, so God will bless others in Jesus’ name. 

Which ties in well with the next beatitude: 6 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. . The meek are the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is they want things to be made right as defined by God’s will.  Consider Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus. Joseph finds out his fiancé, Mary is having a child, that he knows is not his. So we read in Matthew 1:19: 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly.

Joseph was willing to protect Mary, her baby, and ultimately God’s will, which he did by staying married to her. That is why he was called righteous. 

You see, Righteousness is to trust God is redeeming the wrong, even beyond what we see or what we know. But it is also to do our part to make certain righteousness can occur. To open our eyes to the work of the Lord, and join it, is to be filled, as Jesus states. 

While this is the 60th Super Bowl, this is also the 36th anniversary of the The Souper Bowl of Caring.

This ministry event began in 1990 in Columbia, South Carolina, after a pastor and his youth group decided that they should be mindful of the hungry during the Super Bowl. When most people have parties and enjoy various foods, there are so many without. Together this pastor and his youth group decided to collect soup and money for the local food bank during the Super Bowl, calling it the S-o-u-p-e-r Bowl. The event went statewide in 1991 and nationally by 1997, involving thousands of churches and groups. Last year it raised over $220 million in food and funds for local hunger-relief efforts, making Super Bowl Sunday a significant and impactful time for giving in our country.

Friends, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are the meek, are the ones who yearn for God’s world to be made right and they do something about it. And when they do, Jesus says God and heaven are cheering them on, to keep going, to keep becoming, to keep transforming, because that will bring blessings to all.

View on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2CVSy0vBHBE