From Pastor Lee
October 21, 2024
IN THE BEGINNING...
In the beginning of my ministry as a pastor I recall struggling each week with deciding upon what to preach about. I would pray and ask God to show me what passage I should use, but most of the time I was still waiting and trying to figure it out by the end of the week. That struggle of trying to pick a scripture lesson week after week didn’t last too awfully long. I remember asking my Dad (who was a Pastor) and he suggested looking at the Lectionary readings, which in short are a three-year cycle of scripture readings that supposedly cover most of the Bible. Each week’s readings normally contain an Old Testament reading, a Gospel lesson, an Epistle scripture, and a Psalm. I found that by not looking to the suggested readings and simply preaching what I thought I should be using as far as scripture I tended to preach from the same book of the Bible while neglecting other parts of the Bible. This discipline of trying to listen to the Spirit and cover more than my favorite passages of scripture I believe helps us to see that our story goes further back in history beyond the New Testament.
Think about it, how does the story of Jesus and his resurrection make sense without the story of the Passover? Especially when Jesus is referred to as our Passover Lamb by whose blood we are saved. Probably most of us don’t consider the Passover as core to the story of Jesus and the cross. The Passover is the central celebration of the Jewish people. Jesus was brought up in a home in which it was very important, and God makes it clear in Exodus 13:3 when He says, “Commemorate this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand.” Maybe the reason we don’t think much about the Passover is because we don’t see the Israelites as us, enslaved and in need of a Savior in order to be free. As someone once said, perhaps some of the most unfortunate words found in our Bible are the words, “Old Testament” and “New Testament” which are actually not part of the scriptures. The Bible as a whole, both Old and New Testaments, are one story, the story of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and thus our story as well.
Love, Pastor Lee
