Easter Encouragement

One of the difficulties about ministry is that your spiritual life is so wrapped up in your professional life - for better or worse. Like all of you, I have times of spiritual vitality and times of dryness. In the weeks coming up to Easter, I found myself doubting, even regretting the decision to have two services for Easter. It asks a lot of our volunteers; there is more planning; preaching is exhausting for me. And frankly, I find it’s more enjoyable to preach and worship in a full sanctuary. As Easter approached, I tried to prepare myself for smaller services and possible disappointment.

But God in his mercy had something different in mind. Between both services we had at least 240 people. We typically have 199 seats in our sanctuary. While some volunteers were counted in both services, this is by far the most we’ve ever had for Sunday worship. When I looked through our records this was our highest Sunday worship attendance by 62 people! I hope you are encouraged by this as many of you made sacrifices in order to host both services.

I always try to meet every visitor, something that was impossible last Sunday; however, from the many that I did meet, I got the sense that they were exploring their faith, using Easter as a good opportunity to visit a Christian church. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first time many of our visitors had heard the gospel. Another encouragement for me was how many of these visitors were invited by you. Let’s pray that we’ll see some of these people make professions of faith.

While I was exhausted when we got home, I found myself surprisingly encouraged. God certainly didn’t need to bring so many people, but in his grace he did. It was a grace to my heart; it reminded me of the people here who don’t know the grace of Christ. I was encouraged by how many of you invited people. I was encouraged as I preached and saw people soaking up the word. There will certainly come other times of discouragement, or spiritual dryness in my life, but this past week, I’m thankful for how God used our Easter services to encourage my own soul–I hope it was an encouragement to you as well. 

In Christ,
Pastor Jon