A Day to Recharge

The best of all days in the week, Sunday. I look forward to Sunday all week long, the 24 hour reprieve from my six other days of labor is so refreshing.

This morning I woke up a half hour late because I forgot to reset my alarms. I had to change them for the men's breakfast yesterday morning and did not think to reset them last night. The first order of business was ironing my clothes. I decided on more casual since I didn't feel like ironing my slacks, so I wore jeans and a brown, long-sleeved button down. Everything went well until I was putting the shirt on and realized that I had forgotten to iron the sleeves, oops. After fixing that I had a bowl of cereal and granola and some peach-blueberry tea.

Church was great, I was very encouraged. Sunday school was on the good works of believers. There were two things that were especially helpful for me. First, it brought back to my mind and developed for.me the truth that believers need to pray for good works to do. Our works are planned by God, empowered by God, and rewarded by God. All we do is get the credit. There isn't anything in any human that could enable him to glorify God in his works. Because God is the One who provides us with good works to do and then gives us the ability to carry them out, we should pray that God would give us more opportunities to glorify Him in our actions.

The other thing I was encouraged by the remembrance of is the fact that our "good works" are only such through the grace of God. In and of ourselves we are totally incapable of pleasing our Heavenly Father, but He does not see that. He sees the atoning blood of Christ making our works acceptable in the sight of God. It is a very humbling reality that there is nothing we can do to please God; it is also a very awesome reality that Christ continually merits all of our works for us and gives us the credit for them. The service was on the parable of the growing seed in Mark 4. It was great to learn about the growth of Christ's kingdom.

This evening we met at the church an hour early and had semi-congregational prayer time. Only a third or so of he church showed up, but we just spent some time praying for many of the needs of the church. The message was on 1 Peter 2:4-10. My golden nugget was the new concept that as a believer I am built into a temple which offers sacrifices. The new temple that Christ is forming offers spiritual sacrifices, the building does. I've had the knowledge that we Christians are a temple for the Lord and that we offer spiritual sacrifices to God, but I never connected them. No longer do we have priests offering sacrifices in the temple, He has made us to fulfill all of these things at the same time! God is good.