In chapel on Monday, we sang a great hymn often sung around Thanksgiving time:

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving as you remember the many blessings you have in Christ!

Next week we have a few changes in the chapel schedule. Dr. Jim Knox who plans to go to Uganda early next year to serve as medical director of a clinic there, will share with us his own path to serving in mission and give us a window into the community he’ll be serving with in Uganda.

On Wednesday, Chaplain Messner will continue in Mark, and on Friday, Rev. Eric Youngblood, pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship where a number of our students attend, will preach.

Dr. Michael Oh has been our keynote speaker for Global Gospel Advancement Week here at Covenant, and it has been a wonderful challenge to us to see the world and our God with new eyes.

Last night he gave us an overview of the world, in terms of reached and unreached peoples, where Christian populations are highest and where the unreached are highest, and challenged us with the lack of overlap.

It would be hard to summarize Michael’s messages in a blog post, and I really encourage you to download them as soon as they are up on iTunes.

Near the end of his talk today, Michael gave an interesting challenge:

What if 1000 Covenant College students each started investing $10 a month for missions?  That would be $10,000 per month! How about $20 a month?  How about $100 per month?  That would be $100,000!!!  That would be larger than the mission budget of many churches.  Don’t underestimate the impact that you all can make together even now.

I wonder what that would look like, if a bunch of Covenant students gave up a few coffees a month at Starbucks, or didn’t buy an article of clothing for themselves, or ate one less meal out for the sake of the unreached, sending some of their own to the field with their gifts, participating as students in the blessed work of giving. Count me in on that project!

Michael gave a few helpful resources that I want to link here:

His team website: www.cbijapan.org/jointheteam

MTW for short-termand long-term opportunities and other resources

Neal Pirolo’s book Serving as Senders

Operation World, a great resource book for prayer for the nations. You can also check out their website: http://operationworld.org/

And, for a wealth of information on Unreached People Groups, check out The Joshua Project.

We’re delighted to have with us in Chapel today Roger and Abi Lowther, who are part of a church planting team in Chiba, Japan. Roger trained at Juliard and Abi at Belhaven and University of Memphis. They are opening our Global Gospel Advancement week here on campus, and will give us an understanding of how God is working in Japan and in other places through the arts.

They maintain a wonderful website for those interested in the use of Art as outreach.

This evening, they will be joined by Tim Mills, an MTW missionary who is involved in using visual arts in Thailand.

For more information on the week’s events, check the Covenant news site.

Today in Chapel, Pastor Eddie Jacks from Resurrected Baptist Church preached from Psalm 1 about the blessed man. He defined being blessed as having the redemptive favor of God, having a deep-seated joy and contentment in Christ.

He looked at the blessed man from a negative perspective–what the man does not do, and from a positive perspective–what he does do.

The blessed man is opposed to godless thinking, opposed to the idolatry of sin, and opposed to careless speaking. He talked about the progression of sin taking hold in our lives from walking to standing to sitting.

In a positive way, the blessed man delights in God’s law, or appreciates the word of God. The Word shapes his thoughts and attitudes. The blessed man doesn’t only read and study the word of God, but he appropriates the Word–living out the theology in real life, exalting God in his heart. Here, Pastor Jacks referenced J.I. Packer’s definition of meditation, which I copy below:

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.

Its purpose is to clear one’s mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let his truth make its full and proper impact on one’s mind and heart. It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself; it is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God’s power and grace.

Its effect is ever to humble us, as we contemplate God’s greatness and glory and our own littleness and sinfulness, and to encourage and reassure us—’comfort’ us, in the old, strong, Bible sense of the word—as we contemplate the unsearchable riches of divine mercy displayed in the Lord Jesus Christ.

As a result of the negative and the positive, we see what the blessed man becomes. He is grounded and settled by the grace of God, planted in his place by the care of our great Gardener, not moved from the hope of the gospel, drawing life from salvation. What a beautiful picture of the Christian! Grounded, secure, full of life, productive by the grace of our God!

Today in chapel, we continued on our way through Mark, focusing on the story of the paralytic forgiven and healed in Mark 2. Chaplain Messner focused on two questions:

1. What is my biggest problem? or, what is the greatest threat to my welfare?
2. Who is able to deal with that problem?

As we looked at the paralytic and his friends, the scribes, and Jesus, we saw that jesus saw past the paralytic’s physical need to his greatest need, to be cleansed from his sin. We tend to see our greatest problem or threat as something that comes from outside us: spiritual, material, or relational evil. But jesus makes it clear that the greatest problem we have is our own sinful hearts, and our greatest need is to be forgiven. Regardless of all other problems in our lives, this one remains the greatest, and only God can deal with it. Jesus was able to forgive the paralytic’s sin because He was God and would later pay the full price of that forgiveness on the cross.

But, day to day, do we really see forgiveness as a small thing? Is it something that we take for granted?

The other, and very real, problems and evils we face in our lives are “light and momentary” when we really understand our sin and God’s holiness. Personally, this truth has hit me from all sides. My pastor, Rev. Eddie Jacks, who is preaching this Friday in Chapel, drove a similar point home during our Sunday service yesterday as he was preaching from Christ’s letter to the church at Sardis in Revelation. Then, yesterday afternoon, I picked up “at random” Ed Welch’s book When People are Big and God is Small, a chapter of which provided a similar helpful way of seeing our fears in light of the truth of the gospel. So, the questions I am asking myself this afternoon:

Do I see my sin as my worst problem? Or am I convinced that there are bigger, more important problems I need God to deal with? Do I truly want to run from my sin and to the forgiveness of Christ found at the cross?

Gary Purdy spoke to us in chapel on Wednesday from Luke 7:36-50, the passage where the sinful woman comes to annount Jesus’ feet at Simon’s home. He challenged us in two ways. One, we can be like the sinful woman, so overwhelmed by our own sin and dirtiness that we hesitate to believe that Christ will welcome us. Yet, as we saw in this story, Christ allowed this woman to come to him, to touch his feet, to worship him, and he forgave her sins. There is nothing in our past, present, or future that can keep us from the love of Christ.

On the other side of this event, we can be like Simon, so sure of our own righteousness, always comparing our own actions to others, looking down on those whose sins are more outwardly manifested. If we are like Simon, Jesus has words that are simple, yet devastating “He who has been forgiven little, loves little.” In our self-righteousness, we limit our love and never really get the extent of Christ’s forgiveness and his sacrifice, and our great need for it.

Today, in chapel, we’re hearing from Jennifer Marshall, who’s speaking on “Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Singleness in the Twenty-First Century.”