Easter Sunday Worship

April 4th, 2010 at 10:00 a.m.

St. Croix Falls High School

Everyone is invited!!



Don't forget about the potluck following the worship service tomorrow morning!  We hope there will be a great turnout!!

Steve & Stephanie Langer, our former worship leader and his wife, will be joining us for the worship service.  They will be joining us for the potluck.

The gospel is the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ.  It encompasses all that God did in preparing for the first coming of Jesus Christ, as well as everything he will do in the restoration of all creation in a new heaven and a new earth after his second coming.  The first section of the Bible (the Old Testament) is all about the promise of a coming King who would rescue God's people from their most serious problem:  sin and its consequences.  The second section of the Bible (the New Testament) is all about the coming of that King into our world and all he accomplished to fulfill the promise of God to save us.

A.  The Old Covenant:  Creation, fall, reconcilation... preparation.

God created all things at the beginning, and it was all "very good."  But the first man and first woman (Adam and Eve) did not trust God enough to obey him.  Despite living in the paradise-like garden in which God had placed them, they were not satisfied.  Believing they knew a better way, they rebelled against God by defiantly disobeying his command.  Their sin brought alienation in their relationship with God, each other and the created realm.  Their sin introduced the penalty of death. 

God worked to repair sin's damage through promises and relationships he established with humanity.  Early on, God chose one man (Abraham) through whom he promised to bless all the peoples of the earth (Genesis 12:1-3).

Hundreds of years later, God used Moses to miraculously deliver his people - Abraham's descendants - from Egypt, where they had been enslaved.  The Lord gave them the Law, which provided them with guidelines for how to live in right relationship with God (Genesis 26:5; Exodus 24:7-8).

Generations after Moses, God established David as his chosen king, and he guaranteed that a king from his line would always sit on the throne of God's kingdom on earth (2 Samuel 7:13).

This pointed the way to the New Covenant declared by the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31-34), as Jesus, the Messiah, is introduced to us in the New Testament as the Son of David, Son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1).  Jesus is the fulfillment of all that God was doing throughout the Old Testament period to reconciele the world to himself.

Part B: The New Covenant: Fulfillment, redemption...completion will be posted later this week.