Dear Friends in the Lord,
We have lost two members of our church family this week. On Wednesday of this week, we lost Bob Cantrell after a long battle with Pancreatic Cancer. I was able to have a special Holy Spirit time with Bob on Monday night as I was seeking to help Bob transition from this life to the next. Bob’s Funeral Service will be at our sanctuary on Tuesday at 12:00 with a viewing time from 10 to 12. If you would like to provide food for the family’s meal, please let Linda Lyles know. Then, yesterday around 5:00 pm, one of our oldest members, Bob Trehern left us. Again, I was fortunate to have a special Holy Spirit time with Bob and his family yesterday afternoon. Bob was one of our oldest members of our church, he was one month shy of being 101. As plans for his service are made, I will be communicating that to you as soon as I can. We are texting each other right now, but we have to wait until we hear from Radney’s or the Veteran’s Cemetery to be able to share definite details.
We are going to meet together at the Lord’s Table for Holy Communion at both services tomorrow. I will be sharing a message about “Tapping into the Moves of the Holy Spirit of Previous Days.” I will structure the message around the five names that Christians have for the Lord’s Supper. Counting the “Lord’s Supper” as one of them, can you think of five terms that we use for this special meal that Jesus instituted? For those of you who enjoy making lists, give it a shot. With each term that we have for the Lord’s Supper, there is great truth about how God wants to relate to us and us to Him. I hope to see you are either 9:00 or 11:00 with Sunday School in between.
Then, on Wednesday, we will have a delicious R.O.W. Dinner of a baked potato bar. I want to extend a special initiation to everyone in the church. Even if you are not in the habit of coming to the R.O.W. Dinner please come and join us. We will have great meal from 5:30 to 6:00 with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Then, from 6:00 to 6:30, we will have an integrational time of preparing our minds and hearts for our Ash Wednesday Service. This 30-minute time slot will be both fun and inspirational as we seek to better understand the point of Lent and this year’s forty-day focus. Then, we will go the sanctuary at 6:30 to have a brief worship service where we will begin the journey to let go of our regrets for Lent. At the end of our service, we will give out Repentance, Redemption, and Resurrection, our forty-day devotional guide for this year’s Lent. Lent is a forty-day season in the year of the church, not counting the Sundays. We have forty devotionals written by people in our church. On the Sundays of Lent, we have devoted those pages to preparing ourselves for worship with the sermon title, scripture, and main themes of the messages. We hope to find a great joy in living through this year’s Lent Experience by leaving our regrets behind. So, when someone asks you “What are you giving up for Lent? Smile and say, “my regrets.” With our new book of devotionals, I have read all of them and I am excited about sharing this publication with our whole church family. I feel like a six-year-old on Christmas Eve. I can’t wait to put the book into your hands! I want to thank everyone who wrote a devotional. I want to thank Jennifer Barnes for all the proof-reading and recruiting work she has done. I want also, thank Tony Barnes for his great work on layout and printing.
Everyone in our church family should have received their March Newsletter by today either by email or standard mail. We have caught one quick mistake in our newsletter. We proudly host our monthly Chickasaw Senior Breakfast on the first Monday of each month. Our own people set up the fellowship hall for the event, cook the meal and your pastor shares a devotional after the meal. We put this event in the March calendar, but due to Mardi Gras days off of city employees, we will not have the breakfast on Monday. Even though I still don’t quite qualify as senior citizen, I enjoy this breakfast each first Monday of the month.
Let’s focus on Jesus in serious ways this Lent so we can all be full of the Joy of Christ’s Resurrection on Resurrection Sunday!
Rev. Dave Rhodes