Sunday Leftovers – 1/21/24

Some families have a tradition of a large or special meal on Sundays. We have often stuffed the crockpot to the brim, turned it on before we left for church, and been welcomed home to the smells of tasty food just ready to be eaten. Sometimes it is the Easter meal at my parents. Or Christmas dinner. What most of these have in common are the leftovers. I think leftovers are often an unsung food group. If you haven’t taken slices of turkey from Thanksgiving, and created some new edible creation the next day, then have you really eaten leftovers before?

This post is meant to start an occasional series where we will pick through the leftovers from the Sunday meal. But the meal I’m talking about is the feeding on God’s Word from the church gathering. Hopefully, this tastes as good to you as it did to me.

Labor and Faithfulness

My Pastor, Jacob Saylor, has completed a series through the book of 1 Corinthians. What a delight it was. Yes, it took a bit less or more than a year (I lost track of the start date, with all that was going on in my life). But it was really a great study. Pastor is a verse-by-verse preacher, but not the kind that ignores the structure or purpose of the text. He doesn’t get lost in the minutia or miss the major point of each section. I have many “life application” notes in my journal from this series. On Sunday morning he preached the last sermon in 1 Corinthians 16. The message was about patterning our lives after those who have been faithful in serving Christ. While there is much I could point to, I want to share one statement he made that really captured the section:

“Labor does not always equal faithfulness, but faithfulness always labors.“

This was such a helpful way to capture the situation. He explained that many in the book were laboring for selfish reasons. And often we can be very “productive” in ministry, working long and difficult hours. But if we are not serving Christ, then this labor is not really faithfulness.

The Finishing of a Series – Reading the Entire Book of 1 Corinthians

The other noteworthy element from the Sunday “meal” is the way Pastor ended the series in the evening service. He chose to take the entire service to read the whole book of 1 Corinthians in one sitting. It was great. It took a little more than an hour, but we stopped to sing a song in the middle. There was a beautiful sense of how far we had come together while studying God’s Word. I don’t know if this is standard practice in churches today, but it really should be. Let’s call it the “Saylor Finale” and make it a tradition 😂 . (Knowing my pastor, he would demur and not like that label).

So what about you? What was the best part of your Sunday meal? Why not shoot a friend a text and share it. Who knows, maybe they haven’t “eaten” anything yet today. 😉