"Bible - The Musical: The Long and the Short of It"

Last Sunday, it snowed.  This Sunday, I was walking around in my shirtsleeves.  As I write this, I’m a little warm in my polo shirt.  It’s not so much that I think Winter hung on too long.  It’s more like I just kinda missed having a Spring between Winter and Summer...

This week is shaping up to be a busy one.  First off, my son begins his final musical at Morton High School this Thursday (we’ve had kids in pretty much all of the productions at Morton schools for the past nine years, so this is kind of a big thing for our family).  I’m sure that he’d love to have you poke your head in to see one of the performances.

Then on Friday, I’ll be heading up to Chicago for our next Central Conference Annual Meeting (aka “Celebration!”) at Glen Ellyn Covenant Church.  It’s always nice to be able to interact with my colleagues all around the Central Conference, as well as to get a sense of where our Conference is at, now that new Superintendent Danny Martinez has been sitting in the big chair for a few months.

This Saturday, we will be having an all-church Spring Cleaning Day for our church facilities.  We’ve been blessed with a great place to come together for worship and fellowship and discipleship ministries, but we need to be good stewards of what God has so graciously given us.  So if you have even an hour or two that you can spare on Saturday, April 28, please let Wendy know in the office--or, worst case scenario, just show up on Saturday morning and ask to be put to use somewhere.  Many hands make light work... and an earlier finish time.

In our message this week, we continued to look at “The Bible--The Musical!” as part of our current sermon series, this time looking at the longest single song in the Bible (if you count “Song of Solomon” as a mini-musical made up of multiple songs) and the shortest song in the bible.  Psalm 119 is a 176-verse love song to the Word of God, while the song in 2 Chronicles 5:13 is only five words long in the original Hebrew.  So which is the better worship song?

Shorter doesn’t always mean better, but neither does longer.  If Psalm 119 tried to make its point about spending quality time with God in only five words, it would be a joke.  And if the emotional snapshot in 2 Chronicles 5 tried to belabor its point in verse after verse, it would blunt the profoundly simple purpose that it was written for (and if you read on to verse 14, God seemed to appreciate its brevity pretty well).

The potency of its simple message that you can trust God because His love endures forever was borne out years later, when all of Judah sang the song on the way to a battle that never happened in 2 Chronicles 20--they trusted God’s unfailing love, and He protected them, just as He’d promised.

I dunno what stressors you might be facing in your life today, but how might actually, completely believing that God’s love for you will never fail change the way that you look at things?  How would it change your perspectives if you saw the upcoming battles in life not as battles which might be won or lost, but as worship services within which you can honor God? 

Try singing that tiny little song to yourself and see what happens...