Pastoral Notes for Sunday, April 11, 2021
Dear Cornerstone Family,
I’m still basking in the afterglow of a fabulous Holy Week culminating in one of the most memorable Easters on record. Having sorely missed gathering together the Easter before, you could sense the excitement of being together. My only regret was not getting to speak personally with each and every one of you!
As I write these notes, I’m on a flight headed to Jackson, MS. What am I doing in Jackson, you ask? Well, I’m meeting up with a couple hundred of my closest pastor friends for a couple of days of spiritual encouragement and fellowship.
For years now, I’ve tried to take a few days off after Easter for some rest and refreshment. As spiritually encouraging as Holy Week and Easter are (and they are very encouraging!), I’m always in need of catching my breath when they are over. These few days away—listening to fellow pastors preach the gospel, sharing and praying with dear friends, enjoying late night theological discussions with more than a few laughs—help me catch my second wind.
Speaking of second wind, I’m reminded now of Josef Pieper’s groundbreaking work Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It’s been a decade at least since I first read it, but I still remember him noting that the Latin word for leisure, scola, is the root for the English word school. At the time, I found that puzzling, for we do not think of school as leisure. In fact, we think of it as the opposite of leisure—it’s work! For the ancients, however, work of a certain kind is leisure. To be schooled, for instance, requires one to stop, think, and contemplate reality and its meaning. When we slow down to reflect on life and meaning in a thoughtful way, we’re drawn down the path toward true rest and restoration.
In biblical terms, this is not unlike the purpose of the Christian Sabbath; what we sometimes call The Lord’s Day. On Sundays, Christians gather together to worship—to read the Bible, pray, sing, eat, and fellowship together. From one angle, these activities are work. That is, they require effort. But it is the kind of work that brings about or produces the true and deep rest our souls need. As we worship today, let’s give ourselves to the work of rest!
Your servant,
Bulletin for Sunday, April 4, 2021
Pastoral Notes for Sunday, April 4, 2021
Dear Cornerstone Family,
He is risen! He is risen indeed!
We are delighted to have you with us on this glorious Easter morn! Our prayer is that through today’s worship service, you will encounter by faith the risen Savior and come to know in a real and fresh way the power of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10). To that end, take a few minutes now to thumb through the worship bulletin, orienting yourself to the service. Then, come back here to meditate on the quotes below, reflecting on the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, in human nature, descended into His own universe and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away, there is nothing specifically Christian left.”—C.S. Lewis
“The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the foundation stones of Christianity. It was the seal of the great work that he came on earth to do. It was the crowning proof that the ransom he paid for sinners was accepted, the atonement for sin accomplished, the head of him who had the power of death bruised, and the victory won.”—J.C. Ryle
“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.”—G.K. Chesterton
“The resurrection means not merely that Christians have a hope for the future but that they have hope that comes from the future. The Bible’s startling message is that when Jesus rose, he brought the future kingdom of God into the present. It is not yet here fully, but it is here substantially, and Christians live an impoverished life if they do not realize what is available to them.”—Timothy Keller
“Jesus can still meet people today in all situations. Although he no longer meets us face-to-face, the reality of his presence remains through the Spirit and the Bible (see John 14-16). Jesus can meet us in every situation we face, just like he met his disciples. Throughout the rest of church history he has continued to meet with his people, sometimes by surprise, but always to keep his promises: ‘For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them’ and ‘Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’”—Adrian Warnock
Now, having prepared our hearts, let’s approach the throne of grace and worship God together!
Your servant,
Bulletin for Sunday, March 28, 2021
Pastoral Notes for Sunday, March 28, 2021
Dear Cornerstone Family,
Today marks the beginning of the high holy days of the church calendar. For this year’s Holy Week, we will gather twice leading up to Easter morn. First, we will gather on Thursday evening for a Maundy Thursday Communion Service and again the next evening for a Good Friday Service. It’s long been our custom to gather on Good Friday, but for the first time in our history, we will gather on Maundy Thursday, too. Since this is something new for us, it’s worth asking, “What is the significance of Maundy Thursday?”
Over the centuries, the church has set aside time on the Thursday before Easter to reflect on events that take place at the last supper Jesus shares with His disciples. Aside from certain common themes and the celebration of communion, it is traditional during a Maundy Thursday service for the Communion Table to be stripped—that is, the removal of communion vessels and fine linens from the sanctuary to indicate the end of feasting and the coming suffering of Jesus Christ. Said differently, as Jesus’s life is being stripped away—betrayal, arrest, trial, beating and crucifixion—the Lord’s Table is stripped of the comfort and life symbolized in the communion elements. During our Maundy Thursday service this year, we will practice the stripping of the table, reminding ourselves of the sorrow and loss that marked Jesus’s final hours of life.
The word “maundy” is an abbreviated form of the Latin word mandatum from where we get the English word mandate. It refers to Jesus’s words in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” You’ll probably recall that previous to issuing this command, Jesus laid aside his outer garments, wrapped himself in a towel, filled a basin with water and washed his disciples’ feet. It was a job reserved for the lowest ranking bondservant, but Jesus, the Son of God, willingly became a servant to the disciples, giving them a powerful demonstration of his love and an enduring example to follow.
Moreover, in that humble act of service, Jesus prefigured what he was going to do on the very next night. For on Good Friday, Jesus would take the lowest place of all. He would absorb the wrath of His Father toward sin—our sin—on the cross. His love for us was so great that he would stand condemned on our behalf in order that we might be made righteous. He would be our servant on the cross, so we could be made the children of God. He would take our dirty, stench-of-death souls and make them clean, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
Just writing those words, my heart soars! Truly, I can’t wait to gather with you on Thursday and Friday this week in anticipation of Easter Sunday! If you haven’t already, please register for these special services. Let’s whole heartedly enter into Holy Week as we collectively offer a sacrifice of praise to God for the gift of the Savior.
Your servant,
Bulletin for Sunday, March 21, 2021
Pastoral Notes for Sunday, March 21, 2021
This week I asked Ben Griffith to tell us a bit about the book that the Tuesday Men’s Book Study has been reading:
This semester in our Tuesday Morning men’s book study we’ve worked our way through Dr. Irwin Ince’s The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at it’s Best. It’s a book about race and the church, written by an African American pastor in the PCA, and I would highly recommend it. It was a privilege to process and digest it around the table with a group of brothers who were committed to learning from each other, growing together, and being stretched and challenged in new ways around these weighty matters. I learned from Ince and I also learned from how other men learned from Ince, which is why we do this kind of thing. Shameless plug—men, we’ll be starting a new book soon, and we’d love for you to join us on Tuesday mornings! Stay tuned.
I want to briefly share with you one reason why I’d recommend you read this book and one of the major takeaways for me from reading and discussing it. To begin, I’d recommend The Beautiful Community because it will help you get to know the God of the Bible better. Yes, it’s a book about race and the church, a subject that has a long and ugly history and a painful and complex present. And yes, it’s about ways that Christians can be a part of the problem and are called to be a part of the solution. But it’s first and foremost a book about God—which is where this dialogue has to start and has to stay in order for true healing and hope to be possible. The “beautiful community” is actually God himself, who exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the perfect and ultimate expression of unity in diversity and diversity in unity. And we are made in his image and called to reflect this divine Beautiful Community! This is Ince’s driving theme throughout the book. The gospel imperative to pursue unity in diversity across lines of difference is rooted in the beauty of who God is, and the beauty of who he’s saved us to become. I was drawn closer to the “multicultural heart of the Father” by reading and wresting through the practical implications that Ince teases out of this doctrinal goldmine and was gently but clearly shown ways that I either forget or downplay this beautiful truth. Even as he leads his readers through some of the complex, sad, and sometimes overwhelming realities involved here, Ince keeps our eyes on our beautiful God and his beautiful gospel as the best and only resource available to us in our calling to pursue beautiful community.
One of the things that I’m taking away from The Beautiful Community is a renewed impression of two things: the enormity of the task ahead of us as Christians when it comes to race relations in the church, and the inevitability of the victory ahead of us. The task is enormous because people are sinful and the world is broken. It actually seems to grow more enormous the more I learn about myself, our history, and other people’s experiences. But the victory is inevitable because the beautiful community isn’t our idea—it’s God’s. We know that this beautiful and broken world is barreling through time towards Revelation 7 where we see “people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” worshipping together in beautiful community before the throne. And Ince reminds me that I’m invited and called to practice for that inevitable eternity now, with my eyes on the One who made that eternity inevitable. As he says in the introduction, “What will enable us to actively resist the pernicious polarization that has been present in the church in America from the beginning? It will not be the fact that diversity is a hot topic in culture today. It will not be the pressure to appear viable or acceptable to the world. The pursuit is too hard. It is too perplexing and often too painful, if our commitment is not drenched in the beautiful truth that we are participating in the beautiful plan and purpose of our beautiful God.”
Bulletin for Sunday, March 14, 2021
Pastoral Notes for Sunday, March 14, 2021
Dear Cornerstone Family,
As hard as it is to believe, today marks a year of COVID-19 disruption to our congregational life at Cornerstone. It was on Sunday, March 15, 2020, when we cancelled in-person Sunday morning services due to COVID-19. On that first Sunday, we sent out via email a modified worship liturgy for home use and a video sermon I preached several years earlier at another church. At the time, we thought the virus may affect us for a few weeks, maybe a month. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
As news reports about the deadliness of the virus spread, including projections of death tolls in the tens of millions, we began to realize that a “new normal” was taking shape. While virus numbers in Williamson County climbed quickly, a number of Cornerstone staff and members jumped into action exploring livestream worship. Within a few days, we built a make-shift livestream platform from scratch in order to worship online together.
On Sunday, March 22, our first livestream worship service happened. Though it went smoothly on the church end, we had trouble with the internet bandwidth that morning. Many of you suffered through the frustrations of a stop-and-start buffered worship service. It was so bad for others of you that you had to wait for the recording to be available later that day. But praise be to God, through fits and spurts, the first livestream-only worship service of Cornerstone was in the books.
Though livestream worship is not, in the truest biblical sense, corporate worship, under the circumstances we believed that utilizing a technological platform to “gather together” where the Word could be read and preached, prayers prayed, songs sung, etc. was critical to the spiritual health of the congregation. Though none of us were sure how long this stop gap measure was going to be needed, we felt a deep sense of gratefulness that we could share together even technologically in the forms of worship and continue to encourage one another in the faith during a time of great trial and turmoil.
I went back to the video archives and viewed part of that first livestream worship service. Boy, it made me grateful for Anneke Seely, the Steffens family, Maxwill Shell, Ethan Vroom, and others who stepped up and served early and often during the lockdown. I’m also very grateful for Greg Wilbur, Ken Carpenter, Charlie Lico, and Jeremy Steffens in helping us think through and troubleshoot matters related to livestream and filming. It was a steep learning curve, but with the help of these friends (and a lot of grace), we pulled it off.
The first livestream sermon text was Luke 7:11-17, the story of the widow of Nain. Returning to my notes this week, I was struck by this paragraph:
“If you just want COVID-19 to go away so you can get back to feeling like you’re in control of your life, then know this: God is not interested in that for you. If you’re a child of God today, then know that this crisis is nothing but the loving hand of your heavenly Father tearing you away from the things of this world; the things you tend to look to for life, stability, strength, joy, a sense of self-worth, etc. in order that all your trust will be in Him. In order that in Jesus Christ alone you would find life.”
I need to hear that again this week. Who am I kidding? I need to hear that every week! As virus numbers fall and as vaccines spread (and praise God for that!), may we not lose sight of the spiritual lessons God has been teaching us through the pandemic. Chief among those lessons—that our life is found in Jesus Christ. Let’s approach worship today with this in mind.
Your servant,