Tinney Chapel Today

THIS REPLICA OF THE CROSS & EMPTY TOMB in miniature is the design and craftsmanship of Kathy Brown, daughter of Frankie Brewer, who teaches the Wise Ones Sunday School Class at Tinney Chapel UMC where this art work is always on display. It's a constant reminder of just what The Word is all about: Jesus crucified, buried, risen, appeared to many and ascended to Heaven! Today's sermon emphasizes the importance of hearing and responding to The Word.
Photo by Angela Wylie.

MORNING WORSHIP SERVICE, 9:00 A.M.:

Pastor: Rev. Duncan Graham

Greeter: Roger Schneider & Matthew Stanley.

Sound: Bob Deitering.

Ushers: Gerry Privette & Roger Schneider.

Music:

Song leader: Angela Wylie.

Piano: Jean Anderson for Pat Hollingsworth.

HYMNS:

Holy Holy Holy, Father I Adore You, Showers Of Blessing, In The Garden.

Call to Worship & Opening Prayer

Morning Prayer & Lord’s Prayer:

LITURGY

Offertory Prayer

Doxology

Gloria Patri

Apostles Creed

CHILDREN’S SERMON:

The Pastor, Rev. Duncan Graham, began by asking if anyone had ever seed a movie or read a story about people stranded on a deserted island? “Maybe their ship went down,” he explained. “And they put a message in a bottle, saying something like: Help, come rescue me from this deserted island. And they throw the bottle in the ocean, hoping that someone will find it, read the message, and come rescue them?

“I’ve seen some of those, although it’s a pretty far out idea,” added the Pastor. “But I read a true story about a guy whose name was Harold Myers, who went on a cruise, and wanted to test the idea of sending a message in a bottle. He got three bottles, put his name and address in those bottles and the message asked anyone who found it to write him. He also put a dollar in each bottle to pay for the postage of writing to him in case anyone actually found the bottles and the messages.

“He put corks in the bottles, sealed them with wax and threw the bottles in the ocean over the side of his cruise ship,” said Pastor Graham. “His friends all made fun of him, told him he was throwing good money away. But to his shock and amazement, two of the bottles were found, and he heard from those people. He had asked them in his note to tell him where they found the bottles. So, he got his message out!

“The message for us today is that Jesus said to go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing in the Name of Jesus,” explained the Pastor. “Maybe the way we can get the word out is to go down to the Bay or Gulf or the ocean, and throw some bottles in with John 3:16 inside: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have Everlasting Life.

“So, maybe that would be one way of getting the word out,” emphasized Pastor Graham. “But, I don’t think it would be all that dependable, in my way of thinking about these things, and maybe I’m a little bit warped and think different from other people. I’ve been accused of that before.

“But, to my way of thinking, we are the bottle,” added the Pastor. “And the message is supposed to be in us. And we just need to let the message out of our mouths. The True Message of Jesus Christ. See ourselves as a bottle with a message in it that has been cast over the ocean of life. Then just take that message forth: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have Life Everlasting.

“We have such a wonderful messaqe,” said Pastor Graham. “It’s amazing to me sometimes how silent we are about that wonderful message. That we don’t talk about it more, publicly. Or to the strangers that we meet. I’ve just spent a few days with some friends last week. This man came to me, and two or three other preachers standing around before church service, in the church at Beaumont where I was on the staff.

“And he said to us: I just want you all to be the first to know that I have felt the call to go into the ministry, full-time,” added the Pastor. “This man was probably in his 40s at the time, and he became a preacher. He told the story several times. He said that, out of those preachers who were standing around that morning, they said: Welcome to the world or poor, broke preachers. He said I was the only one who told him anything encouraging.

“I told him that he would have a life with a lot of disappointments, but also a lot of rewards,” said Pastor Graham. “Not material things, but they are rewards that come from God. And so, he became a preacher. He and his wife witness Jesus Christ wherever they go. They are the bottle that gets the message out. They win souls in places that you would not imagine. They win waiters and waitresses. They win tour guides. They win strangers they meet. All over the place. For just a moment in time they meet these people, witness to them and lead them to Jesus Christ.

“Well, that’s what we are supposed to be all about, concluded the Pastor. “That’s the opportunity we have. So, this morning I pray that you will be that bottle that fills up with the message and keep throwing it out wherever you go. Cause you know what: The bottle will never run dry. You can keep giving out the message. Let’s pray.

“Oh, gracious Lord, we pray today that you will use us to be that message bearer, that bottle, that vessel that just gives the message out everywhere we go, Lord. That we become more bold in our efforts to win the world. For that, Lord, we give You thanks and praise as You work through us in Jesus Christ. Amen.”

ADULT SERMON:

“I’m going to preach to you today out of First Peter,” explained the Pastor, Rev. Duncan Graham, who read from Chapter 1, verses 22 through 25. To view the New Living Translation of today’s Scripture Lesson, click HERE “Today I want to preach to you on the Word, about the Word

“There are two agents, if you will, of our Salvation, and they are: First of all, of course, the Holy Spirit, because no one will ever come to Jesus Christ unless the Holy Spirit draws them,” added the Pastor. “And, the second one is The Word. Now, certainly we could throw the element of prayer in there, because, indeed, if you are Born Again, somebody prayed for you. And, as I’ve said before, you may or may not know who they were. But, somebody, I guarantee you, prayed you into that relationship with the Holy Spirit.

“How shall they know, how shall they hear, without The Word?” said Pastor Graham, rhetorically. “How shall they hear unless The Word is preached? And, how shall they preach unless they are sent? So, your Salvation comes, at some point in your life, by hearing The Word, and by responding to that Word. That response, again, is part of the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. That means, of course, when that happens, we become Born Again.

“Sometimes, our vernacular will say that we are saved,” explained the Pastor. “To be saved simply means to be Born Again of The Spirit. So, what we find here is that the words Peter writes to us, assuring us once again that, folks, unless Jesus happens to come first, you are going to die. Sooner or later, you are going to die. I’m going to die. Unless Jesus happens to come first.

“And, incidentally, let me say that, after being away for a week: You all really look good,” said Pastor Graham. “Not that you didn’t look good before. But, you look really good, after being away. The moral of that story is that you ought to send me off for another week. No, but I’m serious about this: You really do look good. I think that, sometimes when you get a distance away, you recognize better the people you love than you do when you are around them all the time. And, so, you look good.

“The Word brings us to that rebirth, or that birth of The Spirit that causes us to become new creatures, or at least we should become new creatures,” explained Pastor Graham. “Through that Spirit and that Word that begins to dwell within us. I’ll never forget, and I’ve shared this with you before: The first day we walked into the class of the study of the Gospel of John in the original language. You’ve just been through a season of having studied Greek, grammatically, and you’ve learned a lot about the meaning of some Greek words, and you feel pretty good about yourself. That you’ve reached a certain plateau.

“And you walk in there, and you are thinking, boy, I’m going to eat this up,” added the Pastor. “This is going to be a really wonderful course: The Gospel of John in the original language. Then, almost the first words out of the mouth of the professor: You need to know that you will never understand Scripture without the illumination of the Holy Spirit. It’s a little bit deflating after you feel like you have learned something about the language and you are really going to lap this up.

“But he is saying that you can study it all you want,” emphasized Pastor Graham. “And you can study it in the original language, but you are still never going to get it until the Holy Spirit brings something to your eyes, mind and understanding, that you will never be able to get on your own. And, how right he was! I don’t care what language you read the Bible in. But, first of all, you are never going to get anything unless you read it.

“And, secondly, you are never going to get anything out of your reading until you get it through the Holy Spirit,” said the Pastor. “He’s going to have to be your constant companion that opens your inner eyes, your inner mind, to see and understand the things of God. I don’t care how many years you have studied the Bible or read the Bible. I don’t care how great your intelligence is. I don’t care if you go off the charts on intelligence quotient levels. It doesn’t matter. But as long as you read the Bible for years and years, there’s still going to be mysteries that are unlocked, revealed to you after you read it and re-read it, and begin to meditate and reflect upon it and pray about it, and seek the Lord and have the Holy Spirit begin to reveal to you mystery upon mystery upon mystery.

“This is, in one sense of speaking, a mysterious book,” added Pastor Graham. “And that is to say the Mind of God, who inspired all this, every word is inspired by God. And His Mind is so great, and so far beyond our own, that we will never know all the depth of it this side of Heaven. I truly believe that one day, when we get to Heaven, and we are around the throne praising God, we will have such an illumination that will begin to reveal to us all that God really wanted to say to us through this Word.

“I know of no one, in all the history of this world who has it all, save Jesus Christ, and could reveal to us all that He has for us, individually, and as a group of believers,” declared Pastor Graham. “It becomes important, then, that we spend some time constantly reading and learning about the Word of God. That Word is the most important thing that we have in today’s world. And that Word is the one thing that will really guide us in The Way that we need to go as individuals and groups of believers in these times and in the world we live in.

“And that Word is something that we need to take advantage of in every way we possibly can,” added the Pastor. “Now, let me give you a little bit of a commercial here. In this church, we regularly provide opportunities to hear the Word read and taught. We do it on Wednesday nights. We do it on Sunday mornings in Sunday School. We sometimes have special courses on other nights of the week. Always there is something going on in this church about The Word. I want you to know that we are unique in many ways among many churches of today. A lot of churches do not afford its members these kinds of opportunities.

“And yet we only have a pretty small portion of our people who take advantage of these opportunities to learn The Word,” said Pastor Graham. ‘And, I’m not trying to get on your case when I say that. I’m just trying to encourage you: While you have the opportunity, make the most of it. I realize that in today’s world, there are reasons why people don’t take opportunities to learn all they can about The Word. You may not think the teacher is qualified, or may not like the way it is presented? Well, then you ought to be a teacher yourself! Just get up and teach The Word if you know more than anybody else!

“But, it’s a big mistake for any of us to think that we can’t learn something from anybody who is presenting something good,” declared Pastor Graham. ‘In fact, I believe I can learn something from any person in the world. Now it may be something wrong, that I want to stay away from. But, most people in this world can teach me something good, something that I need to pick up on, something I need to appropriate into my own life, into my own being. It’s there for us!

“A lot of people use the cafeteria plan in reading the Bible,” added the Pastor. “You know what the cafeteria plan is: You go through the line, and you pick and choose what you want. Now, what do you pick when you go through the cafeteria line? Is it not the things that you like? For instance, you will never see me pick, knowingly at least, cooked spinach. My wife will eat enough for both of us. She loves it. I don’t like it, and when I go through the cafeteria line, I will not eat it. And, if my wife cooks it at home, she knows not to put any of it on my plate.

“We do that with the Bible a lot: We go through the Bible kind of leap-frogging, until we get what we like,” he explained. “And we leave what we don’t like alone. In other words, we read with a certain bias. Some may say: Well, I don’t like all that talk about prophecy? End times? That scares me? Well, sometimes I have to take a medicine that I don’t like, but it’s good for me. And, if I’m going to get any better, or be as healthy as possible, I’m going to have to take some things from time to time that I don’t like.

“Same way with the Word,” emphasized Pastor Graham. “The Word is such a thing that I have to take, wherever it is and whatever it says. Because, I’m sure that God knows more than I do. Amen, Brother Duncan, that’s right? God knows more about what I need than I will ever know. And God has put it there all together for my good. And my blessing. And my being a blessing. So that if God says: This is My Way, or this is My Will or this is My Word, then I’d best step back and say: OK, Lord, if that’s Your Word, help me to conform to Your Word, and not try to conform Your Word to me.

“And, He said, in the Word that I read to you today, that I am supposed to love you intensely,” added the Pastor. “Not because you are such a wonderful person, but because I have supposedly been Born Again. How many of you know that I am not always easy to love? How many of you have looked in the mirror lately? And, know that you are not always easy to love? And, there is absolutely no exception to the rule? The only One that was: They didn’t love Him and they crucified Him.

“So, what does that say?” asked Pastor Graham. “Well, it says that if I have been Born Again, and I can’t worry about where you are, I simply am called to love you, right where you are, because The Word is dwelling richly in me. The Word is working mightily in me. There’s a song about that. I’ll sing it to you:

“Oh, The Word is working mightily in me.

The Word is working mightily in me.

No matter what I think about.

What I feel or see.

The Word is working mightily in me.

“See, if The Word begins to work mightily in me, that means that I am being transformed,” he explained. “All I need to do is not twitch it, not decide that out of my biases I am not going to accept that, or this, but that I am going to allow The Word to get beyond my natural in-born prejudices or my acquired prejudices that I have imposed upon myself through my own selfishness, through my own lack of vision, through my own narrow-mindedness, to deter me from becoming all that God has for me to be.

“Even including Isaiah in these words when He said, like the prophet says, people are like grass that dies away,” continued Pastor Graham. “I was amazed to come back home after being away only a week to find how brown and dry everything has looked just in that week. I knew it was dry before I left, but I wasn’t prepared for it to have changed that much. I’ve told you before: I’m a 25-year-old man. I’m just trapped in this body. And, it happens so quickly. So very, very quickly. Because I remember when I was 25, and I thought it will be a long, long, long time before I get to be as old as my folks are. When I was 25, they were 30 years older. So 25 and 30 is what: 55? I’m older than that now.

“And, I wonder: How did it happen so quickly,” added the Pastor. “The prophet was right. Very quickly our youth fades away. Very quickly we have become that older generation in that senior citizen group. Some of you know what I am talking about. And the rest of you soon will. Before you know it! What does all that say? Well, it says that I need to make the most of every moment of my life to accomplish something good. Something positive. Something that blesses. Something that lifts up. Something that builds the lives of others. Something that causes them to be all they can be in God’s eyes.

“I don’t mean by that to run other people’s lives,” cautioned Pastor Graham. “But I mean to encourage them where they can be filled, in every way, with the grace of God flowing in, flowing out. I think God has a plan for every individual who will submit to Him. I think that plan is something very positive, though it may not mean that life is always filled with joyous things. We are all going to suffer some trials and tribulations. That’s part of living life on this earth. But in the midst of all of it, He assures us that He will constantly be there with us.

“And, when we fill ourselves, time and time again, over and over aqain, with His Word and The Spirit, we begin to have experiences that cause us to rise above and beyond the tribulations that we face and encounter,” added the Pastor. “The things that cause us to be overcomers over the things that would try to hold us down and cause us to dwell in miserable conditions and miserable attitudes in a shriveling heart. The answer to all of that again is The Word of God.

“I’m constantly impressed by the Psalmist because the Psalmist has told is in Chapter 119 of the Psalms, and they don’t know for sure who wrote that Psalm, but they think maybe Ezra, the priest, the one who wrote The Book of Ezra as well, was the author of Psalm 119,” he explained. “And you know that it’s a very long Psalm, but he says at one point: Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Thy Word is what illumines The Way for him. Thy Word is what shows me how I need to go. Where I need to step. What I need to do. The Word of the Lord, is the illumination I need in my life.

“For those reasons, I take His Word and I believe it,” emphasized the Pastor. “I believe it from Genesis through Revelation. I believe it all the way through. That it is God’s inspired Word. And I believe that this Word is what tells me: Come to Eternal Life. Because, one of these days, I’m going to be like they entitled the movie. I’m going to be Forever Young. One of these days. I’m going to be living in a glorified body. I don’t know what that body is going to look like.

“As I was reflecting on Jesus Himself, I was reflecting on so many of the pictures we see of Jesus, you know: Nobody knows what Jesus looked like when He walked on this earth. They certainly didn’t have any cameras. They didn’t have any artists that were drawing likenesses, good portraits, of anybody at that time, so we really don’t know what Jesus looked like. We see various artist renditions of what they think Jesus looked like: Where they got that, I don’t know. I have no idea. But it’s all supposition.

“When we see Jesus in Heaven, He’s going to be in that glorified Body, and He probably won’t look anything like He did while He was here on earth,” added the Pastor. “For one thing, the Face is going to be so shiny that you couldn’t look at it in the natural eye right now anyway. And I think His hair is going to be white and not brown. I’m getting a head start. I think it’s going to be so glorious that anything in the natural now is going to be extremely pale in comparison.

“But, He is the Word of God that brought us Life Everlasting,” said Pastor Graham. “And Salvation. And He is the perfection of what He wants us to be. So, like the little WWJD bracelets: If Jesus did it, it’s all right for you to do it. If Jesus didn’t do it, then don’t do it. But, The Word that He left us, The Word that is in the covers of this book, will give you Life, will give you Victory, will give you Power, will give you everything you need, and more, if you believe. If you take it, not on the cafeteria plan, but in the fullness of His Word.

“I’m like the man who said, in reading His Word: God said it, I believe it and that settles it,” concluded the Pastor. “Take The Word and you will be forever blest, living spiritually and a blessing to others. Let’s pray: Oh, gracious, heavenly Father, may Your Word live in us. May we become living epistles that reflect Your Word every day of our lives. Oh, gracious Lord, by Your Holy Spirit, teach us Your Way. In the Name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord. Amen.”

CLASSES TODAY:

SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS TOPICS:

WISE ONES, Frankie Brewer: Free To Serve.

LADIES BYKOTA CLASS, Peggy Boyd: The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.

TINNEY CHAPEL MEN, Bill Knoop: Faith for Earth's Final Hour, by Hal Lindsey.

OVERCOMERS, Jenna Nelson: The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.

YOUTH, Ronny Ellison: Life Lessons from 1 & 2 Peter, by Max Lucado.

CHILDREN, Linda Hallman: Pentecost.

REMNANT, Joe Dan Boyd: We take teachers, not courses: Proverbs 9.

The Remnant Righteousness handout is below:

REMNANT RIGHTEOUSNESS:

Life lessons # 268 from studying Proverbs 9 and related Scripture:

1. In this Chapter, Lady Wisdom is personified as building a house that is supported by seven pillars or hewn timbers. The number seven may here represent completeness, suggests commentator Vernon McGee. He further analogizes that to a complete education, including graduate studies.

2. Those who suggest that the 12 Apostles were not educated men minimize the educational value of spending 3 years with Jesus, the greatest teacher the world has ever known, adds McGee.

3. This Chapter also compares the ingestion of wisdom to a fine banquet meal at a well-appointed table.

4. Nevertheless, Lady Wisdom is personified as going to town, standing in a prominent place and inviting all to enroll in her school. By extension, McGee suggests that we, too, are to invite people to come in and be reconciled to God.

5. Verse six is variously interpreted: Either we are not to waste time on those who resist The Word or we are to leave behind our own confusion by association with Lady Wisdom.

6. If we are truly wise, we will welcome further instruction from the wise.

TODAY’S DATE: 05-22-05

THE REMNANT

SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS

TINNEY CHAPEL UMC

WINNSBORO, TEXAS

ASSIGNMENT FOR NEXT SUNDAY: 05-29-05

READ PROVERBS 10

Afterwards, reflect upon these things:

1. The joy of a wise son.

2. The grief of a foolish son.

3. Lazy versus diligent hands.

4. A chattering fool.

5. The man of integrity.

6. Love covers all wrongs.

7. Concealed hatred.

8. He who holds his tongue.