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The Lord’s Table is the center of the church’s hospitality. We become a hospitable people by receiving the hospitality of God. He brought us in when we were strangers and, worse, rebels. We welcome others because He first welcomed us. The entire Bible tells a story of hospitality. God finishes creating the world with an invitation…
A church’s music sets the tone, the ethos, the atmosphere for the church. When we ask, “What should we sing?” we’re asking what kind of church we want to become, what kind of people we want to be. Our souls are tuned by the music we sing. When we sing Psalms, our souls are tuned…
The Psalter has been the church’s primary songbook from the beginning. In Acts, Christians pray Psalms. The liturgies of East and West are packed with Psalms. Monks chanted through the entire Psalter every week, and the Reformation spread on a wave of metrical Psalms. There are no hymns like the Psalter. Where else are you…
You’re a chosen nation, a royal priesthood, Peter writes. He’s writing to us. You are a community of priests. Every one of you is a priest. Many of you are junior priests, priests-in-training. But you’re all priests, because you’re baptized into Jesus, the Great High Priest. What do priests do? Israel’s priests were servants of…
Music’s power is uncanny. Sound slips past our ears and takes root in the depths of our souls. How does it do that? Where does this power come from? I’m sure there are physiological reasons, having to do with frequencies and vibrations and the attunement between our biological rhythms and the movements of music. But…
When Jesus meets the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24), He teaches the two disciples “everything concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” The Bible has one main hero – the anointed King – and one main plot – the suffering and glory of the King. Yet, the Bible is also a “book…
Paul says the Bible is profitable for reproof. Reprove means correct, scold, expose something evil. When you reprove, you show someone what’s he done wrong. Yes, Timothy is a pastor, but reproof isn’t just for pastors. Jesus tells us to reprove a brother who sins against us. Reproof is what parents do when their children…
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. Because the church is united to Immanuel, the church is Immanuel. As Jesus is the Father’s presence with us, so we’re Jesus’ presence to the world. Think about it this way: Paul talks about the church as a body. What he means is this: A body is one body…
Immanuel is a Hebrew word made up of three Hebrew words and means “God with us.” It appears only three times in the Bible: Once in Isaiah 7, again in Isaiah 8, and then in Matthew 1, which doesn’t quite count because it’s a quotation from Isaiah 7. Rare as it is, “Immanuel” sums up…
Immanuel Reformed Church 