Worship Notes for Sunday, September 4, 2011

This week in I Peter 5, Peter exhorts the elders to “shepherd the flock of God” with willingness and humility in the example of the Chief Shepherd. The Call to Worship from Psalm 100 reminds us that “we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.” We continue by coming into His presence with the singing of Come, Christians Join to Sing.Our new Psalm of the Month is from Psalm 110—one of the Messianic Psalms emphasizing Christ as King and Priest. The New Testament Reading from Titus 2 sets before us an example of older men and women teaching, training, and shepherding younger men and women to “renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope.” This passage also admonishes those in authority to “show integrity, dignity, and sound speech” as well as being “self-controlled and sound in faith, love, and steadfastness.”

This litany of imperatives brings us to the cross by means of the Confession of Sin based on Colossians 3. Our heart’s cry is to put to death impurity and evil desires and to put on the new self with compassion, kindness and humility. We continue singing of the assurance of pardon with There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy. “There is plentiful redemption in the blood that has been shed…Souls of men why will ye scatter like a crowd of frightened sheep?...Was there ever kinder Shepherd half so gentle, half so sweet?”

The Communion Hymns include Isaac Watts’s version of Psalm 23—My Shepherd Will Supply My Need and the Horatius Bonar text, Holy Father, Hear My Cry. The final hymn, O Thou in Whose Presence (which concludes in the Sung Response to the Benediction), calls Jesus our Shepherd, hope and salvation finishing with the prayer to hear and follow His call.

Click Cornerstone Bulletin 09.04.11 for Sunday's bulletin.