Closer Week 2 Sermon

Pastoral Welcome

Welcome this week to worship at Faith Chapel

I’m Pastor Lewis I serve as one of the pastors here at Ankeny First.

If you were hear last week you heard us talk about the length in which God goes to, to reach you. and this week we will explore a little bit of what our response to God reaching out to be closer to us.

Call to Worship

Your steadfast love, O Lord, is better than life. Therefore our lips will praise you. We will bless you as long as we live. We will lift up our hands and call on your name. For you have been our help and in your presence we sing for joy.

Pastoral Prayer

Oh God we seek you this morning. Above all of the noise in our life we listen for your still small voice. God with all of the places that our eyes tend to wander we search to see your face. With all of the things that our lips could speak, we sing of your praise. Oh God you are our God and we are your people. You pursue us even when we run away from you. Oh God help us to be close to you

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

Oh God we need nearness with you, and so often we confuse that with nearness to others. We know that you can offer us a closeness that no one else can. So we lift up in prayer our relationships with others. We pray for broken relationships, and in the same breadth we celebrate our ability to connect with each other in new relationships.

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

oh God our souls thirst for you, our heart longs for you. And yet we confess that our heart also longs for things that aren’t of you. God we confess that we long for power, that we long for control, that we long for acknowledgement and acceptance. Center our often busying hearts back on you once again our rock and our redeemer.

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

We lift up and we pray your hand of blessing this year on students preparing to enter the classroom. God we hold in prayer the backpacks, the buses, the classrooms, the new friends, and the recess times. Most of all God we pray for safety and for the ability to learn. We also lift up the teachers, faculty, administrators, janitor, driver, and maintenance that make learning possible. We pray that those in schools would know of their sacredness and become more and more aware of the love that you have for all of your people.

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

As we consider the great many of believers that have gone on from this life, our hearts are heavy. God we lament that our lives are mortal and temporary, and we grieve the losses of loved ones in our lives, in our families, and in this community. Lord God comfort us in our pain, and connect us in our isolation.

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

So often words don’t fully grasp the state of our hearts. And when they don’t we don’t just offer you more words, but rather Lord God we offer you our silence, and with it we offer you our own hearts.

Lord in your mercy, Hear our Prayer

Give us a closer walk with You we pray, and may my daily fellowship with You become my dearest priority in life. We pray all of this in the name of the one who has taught us to pray by saying:

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

Amen.

WCR Portion

Perfect time to celebrate those that are going back to school.

I would invite you to stand if you are student of any grade level coming back to school in these next couple of weeks.

I would also like to invite educators, former educators, administrators, staff, faculty, support staff, and all other that are involved in education to please stand.

As our children are headed back to school and college to learn anew, help us pass on to them the wisdom that has been given down to us from the generations before us.

Help our children as they learn their daily lessons to listen and learn.

Give teachers compassion to treat each student with dignity and respect,

remembering that every child has a story to tell.

Give teachers your love that reaches out to children on the margins,

remembering that we see Jesus in the face of the poor, the challenged, the rejected.

We ask for your wisdom to discern your ways and path for our own lives.

Offering

Sermon Intro

Sermon Intro about the water and hiking in Germany

set-up scene

walking

the river

out of water

Have you ever been thirsty?

I caved

It was a good idea now and was a bad idea later

When we are thirsty enough, we will drink almost anything

We are thirsty people?

We know what it means to yearn after something, to obsess over something

The desire for more and more and more

career

leisure

recreation

friends

family

Last week I talked about how God reaches out to us, and this week is all about our longing after God, our reaching out to God.

That image where the hand representing humanity and the hand representing God are meeting it is a little difficult to tell who is moving towards whom.

Scripture

Psalm 63:1–8 NRSV

1 O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. 3 Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. 4 So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name. 5 My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips 6 when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; 7 for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. 8 My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

When we are not thirsting for God, it is probably because we are drinking from other waters

If that is you right now, perhaps you have to think about what is it that you are yearning for?

To be honest about that. Am I yearning for (even good things)

If this isn’t you right now know that even David wasn’t here permanently

We all go through spiritual ups and downs, and sometimes when nothing is going on, is when you are most in danger spiritually

This desire for God, and for God’s pressence is a game changer in our own spiritual lives.

We need to desire closeness with God with the intensity that David is in this Psalm

remember what it used to be like

Or am I comfortable

It’s difficult for people who have so much else to rely on, to rely on God

When is the last time we yearned for God the same way we yearned for these other things?

The Scripture study

looking for God’s pressence with the urgency

of a thirsty person finding water

Of the downtrodden seeking song

As the hungry look for food

Longing for God brings us closer

When we think about this sermon series, God desires closeness with us

So if you’re like me your next question is that well what do I do with that information

What are the steps that I have to do to get closer to God?

What are the behaviors that I do?

I’m sorry to tell you, you are never going to find that list

The surprise in this passage is that David is being filled up by pouring out his heart to God

That it is by proclaiming of our need for God’s pressence

And we can’t really be thirsty if we are drinking from other wells

We have to be honest with ourselves and others about the things that we are currently putting our trust in

The things that are filling our cup right now

Some of those things are going to be bad things - sin struggles that we think are filling, and are actually destructive

But for many of us

Benediction

Go out today not being filled up, but as people that are longing. For our very longing for God brings us closer to God. Go now in peace to love and to serve. Amen.