This blog gives you a glimpse into the upcoming Sunday Gathering. It's an opportunity to read through the passage we'll be studying together, pray through some of the liturgy we'll be using, and listen to a selection of the songs we’ll be singing
LOVE, JOY & PEACE
SERMON
This Sunday Gary Aston will be preaching to us from Galatians 5:22-23, looking at the first three characteristics the Spirit brings: love, joy and peace.
LITURGY
CONFESSION/ASSURANCE
We've experienced the love of God, yet so often we find it difficult to love him and others in the way we should. Instead of loving others, for their good, we love them for what we'll get out of it. We seek our good instead of theirs. Every week, at this point in our gathering, we take a moment to confess our sin before God. It's a time to admit our failing to him and celebrate the forgiveness we can know in Christ. Let's take a moment, in the quiet of our hearts to do that together now. Let's read these words of assurance and encouragement about our God who has shown us what perfect love looks like:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.
This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loves us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God we ask that as a response to this love, you would help us to love one another with this kind of love, knowing that if we love one another, you abide in us and your love is perfected in us.
(Based on 1 John 4:7-12)
MUSIC
- In Tenderness He Sought Me (Citizens and Saints): A song celebrating the love shown to us in Jesus' death and resurrection, the blood that was shed on our behalf and the grace that brings us into God's family.
It is Well: A song declaring the deep joy and peace we can know in Christ, even in the midst of despair.