This past Easter Sunday was a glorious day at Johns Creek Presbyterian Church! I hope you were able to attend our In-person worship service under a tent on our ballfield, attend our Drive-In service, or watch it Online. I know some of you did more than one -- and maybe someone attended all three! I hope you will let me know if you did.
Gathering for worship in-person on our ballfield reminded me how much I miss worshiping with others. Like all of us, I look forward to the near future when we can gather again together indoors and safely worship God. As we have shared, our plans are to add an 11:00 AM indoors worship service with masks and social distancing beginning May 2nd in our Great Hall, provided the present downward trends in Covid cases continues. Our “Signup Genius” will work the same way it did for Easter Sunday to reserve seats for those indoor services. We will also continue both our Drive-In and Online services for now.
This Sunday we begin a new sermon series based on the book of 1 John. Last Sunday we read the Easter story from the gospel of John. But this Sunday we began this brief epistle written by John. Because one of the main themes of this epistle is love, I'm calling the series “1 John - a love letter.” If the gospel of John tells the whole story of the life of Christ from beginning to end, 1 John distills the teachings of the gospel message to its basic fundamentals. One Bible scholar even suggested that beginning reading 1 John would give a new believer an excellent foundation in the faith, from which he or she could progress to reading other parts of the Bible.
Martin Luther said this about 1 John: “This is an outstanding epistle. It can buoy up afflicted hearts.” In stormy times such as these, my guess is that all of us could use having our “afflicted hearts” buoyed up! I hope you will plan to join us this Sunday!
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