Gathering
Welcome and Announcements
Call to Worship
Lamentations 3:25-33
Prayer of Invocation
Adoration
“Great Is Thy Faithfulness”
“How Firm a Foundation”
Confession
“Christ Our Hope in Life and Death”
Thanksgiving
Psalm 32
Prayer
Commitment
“By Faith”
Word
Text: John 11:45-57
Message: “The Decision to Kill Jesus“
Benediction
1 Thessalonians 3:11-13
Doctrines of the Week
Atonement
Atonement refers to God’s act of dealing with the primary human problem: sin. Both the OT and NT affirm that sin has broken the relationship between God and humankind. According to Christian theology, God accomplished the way of restoration through Christ’s death.
Penal Substitution
One of several theories of the atonement, penal substitution speaks of sin as the breaking of God’s law, for which the penalty is death. Therefore, on the cross, Christ suffered the death penalty in the sinner’s place and so appeased the wrath of God. This theory was first proposed in the Reformation and later became the most widely held view among Protestants, especially evangelicals, in Britain and the United States.
(According to Webster, “penal” is defined as “of, relating to, or involving punishment, penalties, or punitive institutions.”)
Propitiation
Propitiation is an offering that turns away the wrath of God directed against sin. According to the NT, God has provided the offering that removes his divine wrath, for in love the Father sent the Son to be the propitiation (or atoning sacrifice) for human sin (1 John 4:10).
(Definitions adapted from the Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms)
A Glimpse into Church History
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
A brilliant scholar and theologian, Edwards studied Latin at the age of six, was fluent in Hebrew and Greek by thirteen, and graduated from Yale University with highest honors at the age of seventeen. He was a Congregational minister from the age of twenty-four, and served as the pastor at Northampton for twenty-two years.
He later served as a missionary to Native Americans, and for a few short months served as the president of Princeton, where he died at the age of fifty-four as the result of a smallpox vaccination gone wrong.
In 1734 he preached a series of messages on justification by faith alone that gripped the small town of Northampton, Massachusetts, so much that within a year most of its entire adult population had professed repentance and conversion.
He is widely regarded as the most influential theologian North America has ever produced.
Jonathan and his wife Sarah had eleven children, and he considered his marriage to Sarah as an “uncommon union.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said of Edwards, “I am tempted, perhaps foolishly, to compare the Puritans to the Alps, Luther and Calvin to the Himalayas, and Jonathan Edwards to Mount Everest! He has always seemed to me the man most like the Apostle Paul.”