| | Happy Easter, everyone!It's been a week since Easter, but now with all the preparations for Good Friday and Easter services over, it's a good time to just be able to sit back and reflect a bit. I was very happy to see how things went with the Easter celebration that took place after our worship service...instead of the usual assortment of testimonies and music offerings, we instead turned the after-worship celebration into a baptismal service so the baptisms wouldn't have to be rushed at the end of the service, which had been our usual practice. What better way to reflect on the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ than to celebrate the baptisms of brothers and sisters with the entire congregation?
The program was simply designed -- opening prayer and responsive reading, the children sang a few Easter songs (which everyone enjoyed tremendously) and congregational singing, much more than our usual one or two songs during service. What we also did, to solve the problem of a bilingual congregation listening to testimonies spoken in a single language, was to record all the testimonies beforehand on video and edit it all together with subtitles so everyone can get a translation in real time as they watched. Sure, a translator could be used, but it makes everything twice as lengthy and most people aren't used to speaking with a translator (the start and stopping makes it easy to lose one's place and it's hard to maintain a flow) that it gets very cumbersome. The videos were met with a lot of positive feedback, which I'm glad for since it took a lot of time to put together ;) so it was all worth it. Thanks to technology and some elbow grease, we were able to restore people's enjoyment of the testimonies and have a great church family time enjoying the Lord together.
I can't stop thinking about the implications of having a new life in Christ -- I guess that's why I'm a pastor. It's truly such an amazing thing which transforms our entire outlook on life. The concept that we're united again with our Heavenly Father through the incomparable death and resurrection of His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
It has an impact on every area of our lives.
Take families for example. It's a subject important to me in my ministry, especially at a Chinese church. One undeniable fact about families is that they are inherently inconvenient. It's complicated having all these people living and interacting with one another and trying not to get under one another's skin...which nonetheless still happens whether we try to avoid it or not. Sinful people bound together by a common bond and called to make the best of it. Now this can either be done in our own strength -- which ultimately offers little solution to the problem besides tiring us out and feel as if we're always dealing with an unchangeable situation, especially if we're the "younger" individual in the relationship: adults dealing with senior citizens, young adults dealing with older adults, youth and parents, etc. The younger always in the back of their minds feel that the older will never change.
It's profound that our Father God calls us all "his children," so we're all in the same boat. With each day being "new every morning," each day is an opportunity to enjoy God anew and we're all coming to God humbly and broken, to be restored by his Spirit as a new creation -- the old has gone, new creation! (2 Cor. 5:17)
New life helps us deal with the inconvenience of relationships, while restoring the importance of being in a family community. As such, our new life in Christ means that the intellectual and emotional conclusion to thinking about our family does not automatically equate to being a "hassle" or an "inconvenience" which is an all too common reply that I hear as I counsel young adults and teens as they think back on their own family experiences. Dealing with our families, even church families, is now a task managed with the presence and promise of Jesus Christ. This newness of families is now attainable through Christ's restoration. A brand new hope helps us persevere to get to the "not yet" in the midst of the "already." It's not yet where we want it to be, but by God (literally), we'll get there.
Have a blessed time with your immediate family and your church family, brothers and sister!
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| | Posted 4/1/2008 5:41 PM - 89 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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