Anyway, tonight was great. So great in fact, I deemed it worthy of blogging about. Tonight Pastor Scott defined to us what Rock Bible Church is currently and what we will strive toward. Acts 2:42 says, "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." Luke (the writer of Acts) goes on to say, "they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God..." (v46/47ish).
We are a church that gathers together to hear the word of God, be together in fellowship, eat meals together and pray together/for one another. I love our gatherings. There's a simple joy that is in our group; I think we gather with "glad and generous hearts."
Our Sunday evenings, though relaxed, have Acts 2:42 all over them. We begin with praise and prayer to our Lord (more on that below). Pastor Scott has been teaching from Acts (appropriate, no?). There is a unique vibe right now between him and us in the congregation; our proximity allows for questions and comments and interaction. After teaching, we break bread together. Food is fun! (No shame, I know). I've been fighting allergies and I'm a wuss when it comes to being sick so I was being a little anti-social tonight, but I got to kinda sit back and observe. It was a joy to watch the fellowship at our church tonight. I'm excited to keep this vibe going for our transition to having our evening service at Centerpointe here in Pleasanton. The pastor and his church have been so kind to us. We will still break bread together and have community afterwards.
More will come about RBC in the coming weeks/months. We are looking toward a formal "launch" at Centerpointe in the fall and thanking God for His provisions - past, present and to come.
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As for worship, an unamplified setting is tricky. I'm looking forward to having some better volume control and lyrics on a projector. There are some great songs I'm looking forward to introduce to RBC. Appropriateness and timing, of course, apply to this however. I won't show up on June 27th at Centerpointe with 5 new songs :p ...no worries. (For those interested, go to youtube and check out "Glorious" and "Our God Saves" by Paul Baloche, "Our God (is Greater)" by Chris Tomlin and "How He Loves" by David Crowder.)
Tonight, we sang Everlasting God and Oh Praise Him (by Brenton Brown and David Crowder, respectively)- an appropriate follow up to last weeks' Holy Is The Lord and Forever (both by Chris Tomlin). Everlasting God is straight from Isaiah 40:28-31. Praising the Lord by singing His word up to Him, in my opinion, can't be topped. It's the bible. It's the truth. It's His praise. Oh Praise Him is a song I could sing every Sunday (don't worry, I won't). I've probably said this before, dear blog, but oh well - There are two themes in worship that I just love. One is praising the height, depth, and width of the Lord's love for us (see Jesus, Lord of Heaven below in the previous post). The other theme is joining the angels. After reading Revelation over a few weeks a few years ago in college, I was struck by the role of the angels in praising our Lord. They were unrelenting. They were loud. And, they wasted no words. Oh Praise Him, to me, captures this.
"For who is God, but the Lord? And who is a rock, except our God?" - 2 Samuel 22:32
