Two Good Things from Church
My pastor (First United Methodist Church, Pensacola) today caught my attention in a special way two different times. The first was when he announced the reading for his sermon. We had already read the gospel lesson, and the Psalm was included in the call to worship.
He then said that we needed to take the opportunity more often to read extended pieces of scripture, after which he read all of Genesis 37. I really enjoyed hearing that entire chapter read. He built a good sermon on it as well, dealing with living our lives according to some narrative. As Christians, he said, we should be living our lives according to the narrative of scripture. That is, of course, much too great of an oversimplification (redundancy-r-us!), but it gets the basic idea.
Early in the message he also paused for a moment to tell the congregation that he had profound pity on those who do not read the Bible regularly. I also pity those Christians who have no regular program of Bible reading and study.
