Sunday Night’s

Hey y’all!  Well, here we all are, 2018 is officially well underway and most of us have recovered from the Christmas and New Year festivities.  I’ll confess, Sam and I spent the week between Christmas and New Year vegging out, mentally and physically recovering from all the busyness of December.  Our first Christmas and Hogmanay in Scotland was incredible though, and we are both so grateful to be serving the Lord here.

Last week (January 7th) we launched our long anticipated and much prayed over Sunday night services, and we had a great attendance and heard lots of positive chatter this week.  Of course I wanted to find a way to exercise my gift of hospitality, so we started out the evening with a soup and sweet dinner.  We’d also invited several other pastor’s from our community who do not currently have night services at their churches and were pleased to have many of them attend as well.  I know as someone who serves in a leadership role in church how nice, and important, it is to just be a part of the congregation and get fed spiritually.

We started the service with a great time of modern praise and worship; and while we don’t currently have a band we have been able to download new Christian praise and worship songs and videos from the Internet and use those to facilitate a great time of corporate worship that is much more modern than what you’d normally see in a church service here in the UK.  I’m so grateful for technology.

As far as the teaching goes, Sam has been working really hard over the last couple of months on putting together lessons that are a good combination of his “How To Study the Bible” and “Footprints” series.  If you’ve ever been a participant in either of those studies you’ll know that he has an incredible gift for taking the Bible and setting it inside of the bigger picture of history and world events, and ties that all together with God’s plan of salvation for us found all through the pages of Scripture – from Genesis to Revelation.  This current teaching series will last this entire year, and very likely extend into the next couple of years, so he’s got his work cut out for him, that’s for sure.  But everyone loved his lesson and are looking forward to coming back next week.

Sam capped off the night with an amazing Gospel presentation from Genesis 5.  Yep, that’s right, the first geneology found in the Bible is a presentation of the Gospel message of Jesus.  I was floored when I saw this, especially as someone who’s been in church my whole life, I’ve never before heard this but I want to share it with you because it is just one more confirmation that we’re God’s plan A!  Pull out your Bible and turn to Genesis 5…

Name                                              Meaning

Adam                                              Man

Seth                                                 Appointed

Enosh                                             Mortal

Kenan                                             Sorrow

Mahalalel                                      The Blessed God

Jared                                               Shall Come Down

Enoch                                            Teaching

Methuselah                                  His Death Shall Bring

Lamech                                         Despairing

Noah                                             Comfort

If we are to read these name meanings as a sentence it says:

Man was appointed mortal sorrow; the blessed God shall come down teaching that his death shall bring the despairing comfort. 

Praise the Lord!