"Reception.................."

Our pastor is away once again, filling a pulpit elsewhere and returning to us this Wednesday, a different preacher being assigned to us for each of the three services here yesterday. The early morning sermon was taken from Philippians and dealt with the idea that God orchestrates our life, events often beyond our ability to understand, but never without His wisdom working on our behalf regardless of outcome. While my short explanation of its subject matter might well leave room for discussion, its delivery, in this old man’s opinion, could not have been better. I loved the one point made emphasizing the fact that, regardless of how our minds decipher what we hear shared with us from a pulpit, all the theology we unravel and shape in a classroom, it is our experience as we go, given unto Him, that shapes us in our identity… The apostle Paul, in Romans, defines the Gospel in terms of how a man receives it, specifically applying that which he claims to the message of Christ’s death on the Cross. What comes to us in our sanctuaries, however, often seems to detour, its content dealing with the living of our faith, the doctrinal “legalisms” we all demand to some degree, the theoretical perspectives we all hold on what the Word, itself, requires of us and promises unto us. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, the Bible being stuffed with both categories. Nonetheless, unless we all yet believe it a shame for both a man to have long hair and a woman to speak in church, it seems obvious that there is room for us to quibble over culture, change, and common sense… Last night’s passionate gift served up for our congregation to digest was focused on those men seated in the pews, a call for the male gender to shake themselves and assume the role assigned them in Scripture. There is, indeed, an example that we are to attempt in this, a husband and a father figure we are to adopt as we go, the achievement thereof yet an on-going process shaped by a relationship held with the Holy Ghost now in us; but there is also a need to teach such truth beyond the mistaken idea that we, somehow, are superior to our female counterparts. Equality is also a mandate……