The Center for the Study of God & Culture

At 10:00 am this morning we will gather around our radios or computers or tablets for worship. I have prepared this family worship guide to enhance our worship today. Use it either before or after we participate together in worship at 10:00 am.

Call to Worship

The Psalm Reading: Psalm 31:9-16

⁹ Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble:
mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly.
¹⁰ For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing:
my strength faileth because of mine iniquity,
and my bones are consumed.
¹¹ I was a reproach among all mine enemies,
but especially among my neighbours, and a fear to mine acquaintance:
they that did see me without fled from me.
¹² I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind:
I am like a broken vessel.
¹³ For I have heard the slander of many: fear was on every side:
while they took counsel together against me,
they devised to take away my life.

¹⁴ But I trusted in thee, O Lord:
I said, Thou art my God.
¹⁵ My times are in thy hand:
deliver me from the hand of mine enemies,
and from them that persecute me.
¹⁶ Make thy face to shine upon thy servant:
save me for thy mercies’ sake.

Pray: Express your fears, anxieties, and concerns to the Lord. Pour out your heart to him. Seek his face and ask for him to hide you in his shelter during this time of trouble.

Sing

Pray: Pray for the needs of the world around you: family members, neighbors, medical workers, governing officials, those who are suffering financially, and those who are sick. Ask the Lord to sustain, provide, heal, and guide. Ask him to give his people endurance, wisdom, and hope.

Listen to today’s sermon:

I am praying for you by name. Please let me know what specific needs you or your family may have so that I can pray more efficiently.

May you know the peace and presence of our risen Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, on this Palm Sunday.

In this time of isolation and separation, may I encourage you by a reading that has been of special encouragement to me?

Rev. Samuel Shaw (1635-1696) lost two of his children, his sister, a servant, and several friends during the Great Plague of London in 1665. In that same year, he wrote a memoir of his experience titled, “Welcome to the Plague and Farewell to Life,” a theologically deep, yet profoundly devotional, response to his own grief.

Let me share just one brief passage with you below, which I hope will strengthen your resolve to live upon God during these hard days. Meditate on this. Read it more than once. I’ve highlighted some important points in bold:

“God will take more care of his own people than of the rest of the world, and will rather correct them than not restore them. It is their main happiness that he takes care for, and he will in kindness take out of the way whatever hinders it, and give whatever may promote it. God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts; he judges otherwise of health, riches, liberty, friends, &c. than we do. We are apt to measure God by ourselves, and our own affections, which is the ground of our mistake in this business: we mind the things that please our flesh, our senses, our appetite, our fancy; but God minds the things that concern our souls, and their true happiness. The saints are much dearer to God, and much more beloved of him, than they are to themselves; and therefore he will not give them what is sweet, but what is meet; he will give them what makes for their real and eternal happiness, whether they would have it or not. He loves them with a strong and powerful love, and will not deny them anything that is truly good for them, though they cry out under it; nor allow them anything that is really hurtful, though they cry after it. So will a wise father upon earth do by his children, to the best of his skill and power; much more will God then, whose bowels are infinitely more tender than those of a father.

“Now then, labour to converse with the faithfulness of God in the time of afflictions, which is by studying the covenant, and the promises of it, and your present condition, and comparing them together, and observing how consonant and agreeable they are, each interpreting the other; as also, by persuading your hearts of the consistency of afflictions with divine love and favour, and by studying to reconcile the hand and heart of God together. But especially converse with it practically, by a holy establishment and settlement of heart under all afflictions: for, whereas afflictions in themselves are apt to beget a fearfulness, despondency, or at least fluctuation in the soul, the lively sense of God’s faithfulness in inflicting them will settle and sustain it; it is a firm and consistent thing, upon which the shaking soul may settle safely, and centre itself boldly.”

Effective Wednesday, March 25, 2020, The Paul Edwards Program will no longer air on WMUZ-AM 1200 in Detroit.

For nearly a year, Paul has produced and hosted this program without compensation with the understanding that the program would eventually be supported by advertisers secured by account executives at WMUZ.

Over the course of an entire year, WMUZ has failed to secure ANY advertisers necessary to make The Paul Edwards Program financially viable and to compensate the host, while at the same time enhancing their FM programming with a new talk show and new host in their 4pm-7pm drive-time slot.

Therefore, the program has ended, with regret.

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Keith and Kristyn Getty occupy a unique space in the world of music today as preeminent modern hymn writers. In re-inventing the traditional hymn form, they have created a catalogue of songs teaching Christian doctrine and crossing the genres of traditional, classical, folk and contemporary composition which are sung the world over.

According to CCLI, it is estimated that 40 to 50 million people sing “In Christ Alone” in church services each year.

Keith Getty has collaborated with Jordan Kauflin, Matt Merker, Matt Papa and Matt Boswell on a new hymn just in time for Easter (and the anxiety around COVID-19), Christ Our Hope in Life and Death.

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Keith and Kristyn Getty’s Facebook Page

The Getty Children singing around the piano with their mom and dad will make you forget there is a national pandemic . . .

St Patrick’s Day hymn sing! Here is the link for the lyric sheet https://www.gettymusic.com/christ-our-hope

Posted by Keith and Kristyn Getty on Tuesday, March 17, 2020

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The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond

For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action.

The creator of comedies such as All in the Family and Maude, Lear was spurred to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in response to the rise of the religious right. Rolsky offers engaged readings of Lear’s iconic sitcoms and published writings, considering them as an expression of what he calls the spiritual politics of the religious left. He shows how prime-time television became a focus of political dispute and demonstrates how Lear’s emergence as an interfaith activist catalyzed ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were determined to push back against conservatism’s ascent. Rolsky concludes that Lear’s political involvement exemplified religious liberals’ commitment to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what they saw as the public interest. An interdisciplinary analysis of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.

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Charles Spurgeon on the Cholera Epidemic of 1866

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