Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley. To those here in the sanctuary and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
This morning, we will sing songs of worship, pray together, hear from scripture and one another, as we move toward the pinnacle of our service: the table of our Lord, where we will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so I invite you to participate in as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
We welcome all sounds and smells from the youngest to the oldest among us. The Kids Corner is in the back for anyone who needs to move around and play to worship God this morning. There is also a nursery available. We know that the energy and spirit of children can be different than adults and we consider that reality a gift.
There are information cards in the pew in front of you—if you are a guest, or if you have moved and have not updated your info with the church, please fill it out and drop it in the offering plate when it goes by later in worship.
For those watching online or for those who would like to follow along, our liturgy for every service is posted on our website before the service begins.
It’s Choir Sunday! Hooray!
Next week is Children’s Choir. All kids will meet Nicole and Ms. Becky in the sanctuary at 10 AM.
We invite you to Sunday School at 10 AM every week. There’s classes that meet in the Seekers room and the Parlor. There is also a combined children and youth class that meets in the MUB. Godly Play meets behind the sanctuary for our younger elementary students.
To keep up with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter on our website.
We continue our worship series today: Dear Church: A Study of Philippians.
Let’s pray to turn our hearts toward God for this hour.
Spirit of truth, open to us the scriptures, speaking your holy word through song, through the bread and cup, and through offering ourselves, and meet us here today in the living Christ. Amen.
Litany of Faith
One: God arises in the council of heaven and gives judgment in the midst of the gods:
All: “How long will you judge unjustly, and show favor to the wicked?
One: Save the weak and the orphan; defend the humble and needy;
All: Rescue the weak and the poor; deliver them from the power of the wicked.
One: They do not know, neither do they understand; they go about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.”
All: Arise, O God, and rule the earth, for you shall take all nations for your own.
(From Psalm 82).
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
This morning, I will begin our prayer with the New Zealand Anglican Lord’s Prayer. As always, we will conclude with the Lord’s Prayer as we traditionally say it at ACC.
Join me in prayer.
Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe;
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world;
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings;
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
Sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trial too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever.
And so we pray together the prayer that Jesus, our brother and redeemer, taught us to pray…
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 debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
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Sermon: I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection
Philippians 3:4-21
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us, then, who are mature think this way, and if you think differently about anything, this, too, God will reveal to you. 16 Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.
17 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. 18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. 19 Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Imagine with me for a moment that you are on the beach. It’s a beach you’ve been to many times. It’s sunrise and there are just a few people out with you this early in the morning. You slip your sandals off and tread reverently into the water, the waves sloshing against your knees. You stay right there for awhile, closing your eyes, listening to the sound of the waves. You feel the sand brush over the top of your feet over and over again like an underwater baptism.
Time is standing still. Your breath is moving with the tide, your heart rate has slowed. Whatever you were anxious about when you woke up this morning has faded into the background. Your mind drifts to yesterday on the beach, when the sun was at the top of the sky and your family kept pulling you into the water. You were content to build your sand castle, but the enthusiasm of those who love you pulled you in. You sigh in contentment.
As you stand there with your eyes closed in the water, you start to wonder how the beach you are standing on came to be. How did all of the sand get here? How is it possible for the ground to be literally moving underneath your feet but you remain standing?
You wiggle your toes and feel the loose particles of sand and shell fragments. At this strange place that is not quite sea, not quite land, you realize you are standing on what used to be solid ground. The sediment underneath you used to stare at the sea from a distance but has now given itself to the water. This is the reality of a beach, you suppose. It is not a static pile of sand, but rather, it changes constantly. A lot like me, you think to yourself. With every wave, sand is both deposited and withdrawn in complex ways. And this is on a normal day.
As you breathe in and breathe out, you remember that today is not a normal day. There was recently a hurricane. Or rather, a string of hurricanes. You remember seeing a headline about “coastal development.” You have a stray memory of the way the shore looked when you were a kid, how much farther away it was from the road, and now the road is nearly swallowed up by the tide.
The extent that the ground underneath your feet has shifted is not lost on you. What your feet have burrowed into under the waves is a mixture of a history much older than you and the completely changed landscape hidden beneath the water.
As the rising sun starts to warm your face, you take a deep breath. You wiggle your toes and let your fingers graze the top of the water. You are not who you were all those years ago when you first started coming to this beach, and yet each year between then and now feels close enough to summon. And you are not yet who you will be, but you feel pulled in that direction, as subtly and as powerfully as the waves want to pull you into the sea.
The spell is broken. You turn and shuffle slowly out of the water. You head back to meet your family for breakfast.
We have gotten to a point in Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi that requires context we don’t have. There are many things that would make the Bible clearer and more accessible that have been lost to time, and this is one of them.
In the beginning of the text we read today, it seems like Paul is contending with people who have reason to boast. Whether it’s their Jewishness or their Roman-ness, they seem to be antagonizing the church in Philippi in some way. It’s not crucial for us to pin down this group in order to get some of what Paul is saying.
He goes off to list how he is a super Jewish person. He was circumcised as a baby rather than an adult—which means he’s been Jewish his whole life. He is from the people of Israel and not a convert. His family probably spoke Hebrew. He was a Pharisee, which is important for us to remember that being a Pharisee is not inherently bad. The Pharisees were a devout religious group. And while they are often demonized in the gospels and subsequent Christian interpretation of the gospels, the Pharisees as a group cared sincerely for their faith. In fact, Jesus was closest to the Pharisees in religious observance than any other Jewish group. But that’s a conversation for another day.
So Paul tries to say, “Look, I cared so much about the faith that I even persecuted Christians to preserve it. I enacted violence in the name of God.”
And as Paul lists off all the things that he has reason to boast about but won’t, except he kind of does, it’s helpful to understand that he is not attacking his Jewishness. He is not looking back and saying Judaism is worthless, that it is rubbish.
No, what the is doing is counting the cost. He is speaking in transactional terms. This is where my husband, the financial advisor with a Bible degree, would be able to speak more intelligently than me.
What Paul is saying is that if you lay out everything about himself and assign value, his life before had tremendous value. It still does to him. He has not forsaken it, except perhaps the persecution part.
But knowing Christ out-values it all. Any claim he has to privilege and entitlement and right and liberty, no matter how dear and precious it is, cannot compare to the value of following Jesus.
Ultimately, what was is a net loss.
And then Paul turns his attention from behind him to in front of him. And says, “I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. I forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead.” The day of Christ is what Paul talks about a lot. We also know of it as the reign of God, as Jesus talks about it.
It’s our eschatological end. Eschatological is a word that theologians and biblical scholars use to talk about the world God wants. The end game. The wholeness of creation and the Creator. The already but not yet. The kingdom of God, for which we pray each week.
He’s looking ahead. He’s wrestling and striving not because that’s what it takes to become a super Christian, but because faith naturally involves movement. And he invites the Philippians to join him. To live this way, too. To imagine all the ways they have privilege and rights and advantages and things that they could boast in, laurels they could rest on, and for them to ultimately say, look, following Christ means more to me. It is worth more.
And so in this little passage of Paul’s letter that we can’t fully understand, we see Paul paint himself in this in-between-ness. Caught between what is behind and what is ahead.
It’s as if he is on a shoreline himself. In a place that is not quite land, not quite sea. Standing on ground that is constantly moving and shifting. His toes buried in sediment that is very old and very new, and is constantly moving in and drawing out in complex, unmeasurable ways.
I don’t think it’s a stretch for us to see the world as it is today as a shoreline, especially one that is moving. We are land creatures. And yet, we are being pulled out to sea. Or rather the sea is moving toward us.
Maybe we will build a boat. Perhaps we will become fishermen. Or perhaps we’ll learn how to breathe underwater. I don’t know.
But may we shuffle our feet into the water with curiosity and wonder. What is behind us is of great value. It is not forgotten. May those memories buoy us rather than sink us.
May we leave behind building sandcastles that won’t last, and may we instead be pulled in to the water by those who love us.
May this shifting sand underneath our feet inspire new ways of thinking and seeing the world. May we press on to lay hold of the One who has laid hold of us.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church. You can give online on our website, on Venmo, or in the offering plate as the deacons come by during our final song.
Invitation
If you’d like to become a member of this faith community, or if you’d like to become a disciple of Jesus, please talk with me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction:
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
Our benediction for this series comes from the first chapter of Philippians. Receive this benediction:
This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. Amen.