Our Blog

Worship July 2018

Church Family,

I hope the summer is treating you well and you are all having lots of summer fun with your family and friends! It’s been a busy season of ministry here at Oakhill, as we have seen God move in big ways this summer! We are just coming off an incredible week of VBS, and we hope you and your family were here to enjoy it. As I reflect on our time in VBS, I can’t help but thing of the great times we had at the worship rally as our kids danced, sang, and worshipped through music! It’s always a joy to hear a child speak and sing about Jesus.

If you’re like me, you wish you could hear children worship like this all year long. The good news is that you don’t have to wait until VBS every year to worship with your children! Worship with your children can happen any day, and any week. Yes, it may look and sound different. You may not have the fun VBS songs, the crazy lights, or dance   motions, but you have the opportunity to teach your children more about what worship truly is. You have the opportunity to teach your children that worship doesn't come through your singing or dancing, but true worship comes through your heart. Here are 3 ways to worship with your children every day and week.

1) Bring your children to Church on Sunday mornings. This may seem like an obvious answer, but this is a guaranteed time to worship together once every week. Here at Oakhill, we have our Children’s worship, and we also have our corporate worship times. Come and be a part every Sunday.

2) Worship in the car. This may seem different, but we all have CD players, IPods, etc., and these are all great resources to worship with. Find out some of your kid’s favorite worship songs, or show them some new worship songs. Play these in your car, and encourage your family to sing along. Take the time you have in the car to talk about what the songs mean. Lead your children in worship while you are in the car together.

3) Find time for family worship in your home. In the evenings, in the mornings, whenever works best, find a time to gather around with your children and worship. You don’t have to play an instrument, but you can sing some songs that they can easily learn. Amazing Grace is a great hymn to teach your children. And have your Bible with you. Take 20 minutes to read scripture together, pray, and sing. It will be well worth your time. We don’t have to wait for times like VBS to worship with our children. Opportunities are all around us, we just have to take advantage of them!

Spiritual Development July 2018

                                                      Wisdom for Relationships

One of sin’s greatest rebellions is our repeated refusal to listen and submit to the wisdom of God revealed on every page of his Word. Dr. Paul Tripp offers the following insight regarding how we can flourish in relationships by submitting to the wisdom of God’s Word.

As I listened to them argue, blame, and graphically recount one another’s wrongs, all colored with hurt and anger, a sad thought gripped me. The vast majority of what they needed to hear in order for their relationship to be what God intended for it to be was clearly written in the Bible that they both said they believed. Their marriage was the sad casualty of their street-level unwillingness to listen to God’s wisdom and seek the grace he offered to live with one another in light of it.

Consider one passage loaded with essential relational wisdom: “[Live together] with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:2–3). Think about these wise guidelines for relationships:

1. “with all humility . . . ” Pride always destroys a relationship. It causes you to feel more entitled and to be more demanding than serving and giving. It drives you to insist on control. It makes you have to be right. It forces others to submit to your lordship. Pride is an anti-relational way of having a relationship. Humility is the godly way.

2. “and gentleness . . . ” Treating a person with gentleness makes him or her want to move near you. Responding with gentleness teaches another person that he or she is safe in your care. It is an essential relational bond.

3. “with patience . . . ” You cannot have a healthy communion with another flawed human being without being willing to wait. If you demand to have things your way and in your time, you are so busy loving yourself that you have little time left to love the other person.

4. “bearing with one another in love . . . ” Love requires that you be willing to be forbearing, that is, willing to suffer. Why? Because you are in a relationship with a less-than-perfect person, living together in a fallen world. Both you and that person often fail.

5. “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit . . . ” Love means unity is more important to you than being right, having your way, and getting what you want. Love rejoices in the fact that God’s Spirit in both of you gives you a wonderful platform for unity.

6. “in the bond of peace.” Love means committing to make peace, not war.

There simply are no more-important relational commitments that you could cite. The husband and wife I mentioned above held this wisdom in their hands, but did not listen. Do you?