Preparing for Sunday, Jan. 15th | “The Gospel to the Outcast”

Preparing for Sunday, Jan. 15th | “The Gospel to the Outcast”

“Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast . . . Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

– A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

 

Sermon for this Sunday: “The Gospel to the Outcast”

First Scripture reading: Isaiah 56:3-8

Second Scripture reading: Acts 8:26-40

Song to practice: “Come ye Sinners”

Reflect:

“If you’ve ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”

– Tim Burton, filmmaker

“My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

– Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel