Getting Ready For Sunday: How To Prepare For The 11/1/2009 Sojourn Gathered

This week we enter into the world of Lamentations.  This is a book that forces us to consider weighty issues.  Written shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem, Lamentations teaches hurting people how to deal with disaster.

In the face of tragedy, “smiley face Christianity” seems futile.  Positive thinking and cliched homilies cannot lift people out of despair.  We can either blame God, or we can cry out to Him.  We can recognize the price of our own sin and plead the Lord’s sacrifice as payment, or we can act as if there is no reason we should suffer.

Lamentations could be one of the least preached books in the Bible, so come prepared to study this treasure-filled but overlooked part of God’s Word.

Our pastors will also call on all un-baptized Christians to make their faith in Christ public, by following both His example and command to be baptized.  We’ll be holding a Baptism Sunday service on November 15, so this is the perfect opportunity.

Along with this call, they’ll preach the need for salvation — a need that the original audience for Lamentations knew all too well.  Two thousand years after Pentecost, people who recognize the weight of their sin still ask, “What should I do?”

The response of Christ’s church must still be, “Repent and be baptized …” (Acts 2:37-38).

If you have our Over The Grave CD (which is now on iTunes), you can sing along to “Warrior” and “May Your Power Rest On Me,” in preparation for singing them together Sunday.  And if you have These Things I Remember, you can practice singing “From The Depths.” Other songs we’ll sing together include “When The Savior Reached Down For Me” and “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand.”

Until then, meditate on this scripture reading, which we will say together after communion at Sojourn Gathered:

Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;

it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD

Lamentations 3:21-26