We are about to enter a new year shortly, the year of our Lord 2007. While this new year is not as distinct as when the new Millennium came around in 2000 (or even when a new decade begins, as will happen in 2010), the beginning of a new year is a good opportunity to take stock of where you are in your Christian walk. It is a perfect time to take an assessment of your daily habits, and the opportunities you have to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18). If you are anything like me, you are struck by how much more you should read the Bible, pray, encourage others, and the like. In fact, when we engage in serious introspection, it can be overwhelming to see how often we fall short of the high calling of God in Christ (2 Tim. 1:8-9). There is a very real sense in which this kind of challenge is good for us – to be spurred on to prayer, obedience, and faith. But at the same time, there are two twin pitfalls we must avoid:

1. Focusing on past failings to the point of despair. Whenever we review the past, especially at a time like the turning of a new year, a strong temptation is to focus upon what we have left undone in the past. We look at a Bible reading plan like those Pastor Carroll has mentioned, and we only see a wasted year. “Oh, how much Bible we could have read! How many opportunities left behind!” The irony is, that while such language sounds very pious, it can often be the whisperings of the evil one, who seeks to discourage us. Sure, many of us (including yours truly) have not done what we intended to do on January 1, 2006. It is also a Biblical truth that all of us have failed to do all that is required of us. None of us is free from sins of omission.* But at the same time, the Lord does not desire our focus to be on past failings that we cannot change. Paul expresses this well in Philippians 3:13-14. (pull)”forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”(/pull)
2. Focusing on how far there is for us to go, so we give up. When we look forward to a new year, it can be much like the start of a long journey. We have “miles to go before we sleep” and sometimes the road looks so long that we don’t think we can make it. We would much rather just sit back on the couch and avoid the whole thing. We make up all sorts of excuses – “I just don’t have the gift of prayer,” or “I don’t have that kind of perservance,” or even “that’s for really advanced Christians.” This is another way that Satan whispers lies to us: “Just rest here a minute. Does it really matter if you do…? Don’t be legalistic about prayer or Bible reading!” We need to remember that the longest journey begins with a single step, and that the Lord has promised to aid us in the long journey. In fact, if we look at the coming year as just one small part of the Christian life (a marathon, not a sprint!) that can encourage us. It is like breaking up a large task into sizable chunks. We can rejoice in each partial victory as we work toward the final goal.

Having said that, I would like to give some advice to you on things you can be thinking about doing this coming year. Maybe this will be the first time you ever attempted them. Maybe you have done them before, and you will try and do them better this year. In weeks to come, I will take each of these areas one by one, and try and give some resources and helpful hints. In any event, here are some ways to grow in the Lord in 2007:

1. Read the Bible systematically throughout the year. This is the time to begin a Bible reading plan. There are literally dozens of them out there. You can read from Genesis to Revelation, OT/NT readings each day, chronologically, and just about every other way you can think of. You can have the reading emailed to you by an automated internet list, you can encourage your children to read and keep track of their progress, or you can use the famous Reading plan of 19^th century Scottish Presbyterian minister Robert Murray McCheyne. There are even reading plans available on the ESV website, chronological or daily reading. You can visualize what these plans look like by going to this page on the ESV website. If reading the whole Bible in one year seems like too much (or if the daily readings seem too daunting), there is a simple solution – take two years! Half a Bible in a year is better than none. Simply divide up the readings for two years.
2. Commit a certain portion of the day – even 5 minutes – to prayer. The best way to maintain any habit – whether exercise, homeschool teaching, or writing – is to find a specific time of the day and commit that time to it. You will need to find out what works best for you, because some are “morning people,” others are night-owls, and still others would find lunchtime the best. My suggestion is that you take one specific time that you believe will work, and start out small. Commit yourself to five minutes. Once you have had success in keeping that time (say, a couple of weeks), expand it to 10 minutes, then 15, and so on. Don’t start by saying, “I’ll spend one hour in prayer every day” if that has not been your practice. After a couple of weeks, you will likely have failed 90% of the time (been there, done that!) and then you will give up. Set yourself up to succeed initially, and then keep pushing yourself on.
3. Have family worship. The practice of our forefathers that is perhaps the most neglected in our day is that of family worship. In days past, “every house was a church” and the head of the household was a minister in the home. As a practical matter, God is merciful, gracious and good to us every day, not just one in seven; it makes sense for us to acknowledge that and to praise Him for His goodness every day. What does that look like? It does not need to be complex – prayer, reading the Word, singing. Again, it could be 10 minutes, or 30 minutes. Much depends on the age of the children in the house. A house with many young children would be better served by a shorter period. Some families will find it better to gather in the morning, some at the dinner table, some just before bedtime.
4. Try to find one way this year that you can be involved in outreach. This could be in your neighborhood, at work, in school, anywhere! It does not have to require an organization, or a commitment of time that will turn your life upside down. In fact, you may simply need to think more intentionally about the time you already spend with others.
5. Try to find one way this year that you can serve the Church. If you are not actively involved in the ministry of the Church, now is the time to start to think about that. How can you serve others? By babysitting? By writing? By repairing someone’s home? By writing encouraging cards and letters (or even email !)? By serving on a committee? If you are already serving in many different areas (as many are), that does not mean you need to add one more. Start by thinking about how you can help others minister in the same area you are. Many hands makes the labor light. You can also think about how training someone to do what you are already doing will allow you to undertake a new area of ministry.
6. Begin thinking pointedly about your manner of life. The
   start of
   a new year is the perfect time to challenge ourselves with respect to practices that we know in our hearts are not honoring to the Lord, and with respect to habits that we know we should take up. The famous pastor-theologian Jonathan Edwards did something that you may want to do (even if you do it on a smaller scale): he wrote down a series of “Resolutions” that he desired to keep. When you read them, you can see a man who desired to honor God in all he did.

Let us all work together to encourage each other and run the race together. Let me know how I can help you.

*Sins of omission are those things that the Law of God requires us to do. Sins of commission are doing things God forbids.

Coming Lord’s Day

One of the best ways for us to encourage each other is by coming together to worship the Lord. This week we come together to hear God’s word and to come to His table. We will be looking at the pastoral warning that Paul gave to the Galatian church in Galatians 4:8-20, “A Pastor’s Plea: Don’t Look Back.” As we look back on the year, it will also be helpful to think about the faithfulness of the Lord to each one of us. To that end, we will be singing “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”:

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.

The bulletin for this week can be found here. In the evening, we will come together and look forward to a new year of God’s grace, centered on Paul’s admonition to the church at Rome in Romans 13:11-14, “The Day is At Hand,” and then after the service we will have a time of food and fellowship.

As a follow up to my previous post here, if you are looking for a plan to read through the Bible in 2007 you can find a good one developed by Dr. Benjamin Shaw of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary at on the Greenville Seminary Resource web page. The plan is a PDF file that you can downloaded, print out, and put in your Bible.

This plan has you read in both the Old and New Testaments each day beginning in Genesis and Matthew. The difference is that as your reading progresses you follow a chronological order rather than the order in which the books appear in the Bible. When you get to the life of David, for example, readings from the Psalms are inserted. When you get to the Acts of the Apostles readings from the epistles are inserted where they should fall in the historical record.

I have been aware of this kind of plan but have never tried it. I am planning to do so this coming year for variety.

Have you decided to read through the Bible in 2007? Would you like to join an accountability group to help you keep going through the year and share some of the blessings gleaned from this daily discipline? I know, you don’t have time for one more meeting… but how about just keeping in touch by email and updating each week about how we are progressing?

If you are interested in being part of such a group, please let me know by emailing me (john.carroll@cckpca.org) or simply commenting on this blog.

What is faith? Do you have faith? Do you have the faith spoken of in the Bible? How can you know? Can you understand what Biblical faith is and be enabled to examine your own life to see if you have it? I believe the answers to these last two questions are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’!But I also wonder if many Bible readers and people in the world’s churches often think of faith in a way that is less Biblical and more of a generic, vague, hope that things will turn out all right in the end. And this especially seems true when we Christians are confused or fearful in the various circumstances of our lives. We can’t exactly say why, but we seem to cling to a hope that everything will turn out OK! Exactly what “everything” is and what ‘OK’ means is often a vague feeling, but we are hoping everything will be OK anyway. This is not the faith of the Apostles.

In a glorious way, the Bible – the very Word of God – gives us a more tangible and defined description of what faith is and how its presence in our lives leads us to actions which we can see and know are the result of Biblical faith. By understanding God’s Words on the subject of ‘faith’, our faith and our resolve to live by faith can be strengthened. The author of Hebrews tells us that “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). The term for ‘assurance’ is a word which in this usage means substructure or foundation or that which provides a stable platform for or is the ground of what is hoped for. The term for ‘conviction’ means proof of or that by which invisible things are proved and we are convinced of their reality – i.e. convicted of. So the gist of this statement is that faith is that which gives us assurance and conviction or a ‘convinced-ness’ of certain things which are hoped for and as yet are unseen or unrealized.

Now what are these things that the writer speaks of? They are things spoken of in the Bible – works done by God, promised by God, foretold by God. They are not just any “thing’’ one might hope for such as good school grades, or cars which run trouble free, or to be promoted at your job. They are the spiritual things hoped for by those who have heard the Word of God, have listened to His promises, and have considered what to expect. These are all the things taught of in the Blessed Holy Scriptures. These are the “things” of which faith is the assurance and conviction.

Now, how would a person live if he or she had such a ‘faith’ that brought about assurance and convictions of things hoped for and unseen? Indeed, they would live their lives making choices based upon their assurances and convictions! That is if they really and actually had assurances and convictions of the things spoken of in the Scriptures. Their lives would be marked by choices and decisions based upon these assurances and convictions. This is indeed what faith is! It is the assurance of the Truth of the Words of God and the convictions to act on what is not yet seen. It is conduct of one’s life as if the Word of God is true! Sounds simple doesn’t it?

But isn’t this exactly the picture we see of faith in the Bible? The examples given by the writer of Hebrews illustrate this faith. If you read further in Hebrews chapter 11, you will see that “By faith Noah … prepared an ark” (v. 7), and that “By faith Abraham … obeyed by going out” (v. 8 ), and that “By faith Abraham … offered up Issac” (vs. 17), and that “By faith [Moses] kept the passover and the sprinkling of the blood” (v. 28). You can see that the assurance and convictions of Noah, Abraham, and Moses led them to make choices and take decisions about what they would and would not do. This is what faith is! This is what faith does in a person!

Now where do you learn what is promised by God, what are His works, what He says we can expect? One learns this in the Bible – in the Word of God. Learning what God says in his Word is how we will know what to be assured of and what unseen things we can be convicted of. Isn’t this what Paul indicates in Romans 10:17 when he writes that “faith comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ”? And Paul also indicates this in Galatians 3:5 when he says that God provided them with the Holy Spirit and worked miracles amongst them “by hearing with faith”! Thus to have faith, we must be hearers and readers and studiers of the Scriptures for without familiarity with God’s Word we cannot have the assurances or convictions of His message. So then faith is a belief in God’s Word which leads to actions and decisions and life choices and this faith comes from Bible hearing, reading, and studying. It sounds so simple doesn’t it? But it is true. How can you know if you have Biblical faith? Look at the decisions and choices you make in life. What convictions have you expressed by making choices? What assurances you have demonstrated by the decisions which you have taken in life for yourself or your family? If you are choosing to live life in a certain manner because of what you read in the Bible – because of what you read in God’s living Word, then you have faith! If you have chosen to live life by following Christ, by not stealing or not lying to get ahead, or by honoring God in your handling of money, by not cheating on tests in school, or by self sacrificial love for those people around you, then you have faith and you have the faith spoken of in the Bible. All these acts and more become our “steps of faith” in imitating Abraham (Rms 4:12). We can see this very picture of faith, of belief working itself out in actions, in other examples in the Scriptures.

• See the example of Paul in II Cor 4:13 as he mentions speaking because of his belief.
• Paul points to the Thessalonians “work of faith” in I Thess 1:3 and II Thess 1:11.
• Paul urges Timothy to “fight the good fight of faith” in I Tim 6:12.
• Paul says the he has “kept the faith” by fighting and finishing the course in II Tim 4:7.
• The writer of Hebrews recognizes that the faith of the Hebrew’s leaders resulted in the way they conducted their lives and urged the Hebrews to imitate them (Heb 13:7).
• James wrote that “faith without works is dead” because real Biblical faith involves works based upon our Biblical assurances and convictions (James 2:18-20, 26).

And even more, we can see faith pictured in the actions of those who believed Jesus – the four friends of the paralytic who climbed a house and made a hole in the roof for the expected benefit of a friend (Mark 2:1-5); The centurion who was concerned for his servant (Matt 8:5-10) and ‘knew’ that it was not necessary for Christ to come to his house; The woman with a 12 year hemorrhage who believed she could be healed by touching Christ and acted upon her belief (Matt 9:19-22); and the Canaanite woman pleading for her daughter who was so sure of the opportunity to help her daughter that she vigorously pursued her cause before the Lord (Matt 15:21-28). Jesus remarked at the great faith of all these and the faith that they had led them to have certain assurances and convictions and thereupon to choose certain decisions and take certain actions.

So I hope you won’t let faith be a vague, misty, cloudy concept for you any longer. Faith is not an undefined hope that “things” will all work out in the end. Faith is an assurance of specific hopes and convictions of specific unseen things that God has said or promised will come to pass and that based on these assurances and convictions I will choose to live out the details of my life in certain ways and I will choose not live my life in certain other ways. These assurances and convictions arise from knowing the Scripture – from knowing God’s Word. Thus, let us ask ourselves “Do we have faith?” and let us answer with a resounding ‘yes’ in the way we choose to live now, driven by our Biblical assurances and convictions.

Have you read through the entire Bible? About the time I finished High School, I got the idea that I should read through the Bible as part of becoming an educated man. I sat down and calculated the number of chapters in the entire Bible and discovered that if I read a chapter a day I could finish in about 3 years. So with an unmistakably proud desire to improve myself, I began to read every day, beginning with Genesis in my King James Version.

Before I was halfway through, God had brought some believers into my life who shared the gospel with me both in word and deed. On a November afternoon in my second year of college I became painfully aware of how spiritually lost and headed for hell I was, daily Bible reading notwithstanding. I called on the Lord and He reached down to me and drew me out of the pit.

Naturally I didn’t stop reading the Bible but rather read it with new eyes and heart. Instead of reading to check off a duty on my do-list, I read with hunger to know God better. I read early in the morning before class as I prepared for the day. My experience was similar to that of Jeremiah: “Your words were found and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts” (Jeremiah 15:16 ESV).

Someone challenged me to read through the Bible, not in three years, but in one year. I picked up the pace and for most of the years since then I have read through the Bible on an annual basis. There are a number of “plans” by which to do this. Here are some:

1. The simplest annual Bible reading plan is to begin in Genesis on January 1 (or whenever you begin) and read 3 chapters a day and 5 on Sunday. That should get you to Revelation 21 by about December 31 (or 12 months after you begin). This can be tough going for those who are reading the Bible through for the first time when you reach books like Leviticus. However, you can subscribe to this plan on line at http://bibleplan.org/ and apparently receive a daily email to help you keep going.
2. There is a morning and evening plan for reading through the Bible. It has you start on January 1 in Genesis in the morning and in Matthew in the evening. This has the advantage of giving you some time in the Old and New Testaments each day. Even if the Old Testament reading seems tedious then the New will not be. I have used this plan several times and it is a good one. This plan is available on line at The Heartlight website.
3. Discipleship Journal publishes several Bible reading plans. One that I have used has you read in four places each day. You begin in Genesis, Psalms, Matthew and Acts. This plan gives you a daily reading diet containing Old and New Testament, historical books, poetic or prophetic books, the gospels and the epistles. It also has the flexibility of assigning only 25 readings a month, so you have 5 or 6 days each month to catch up if you get behind (and who doesn’t?). You can find this plan and others by going to the NavPress website.
4. Bible software programs. This past year I discovered that my Bible software (Logos) has a feature which allows me to design my own Bible reading plan. I got a late start on my annual reading but was able to design a program which allowed me to begin on January 7, read in the Old and New Testaments each day and have only five assignments a week so that I had a built in “catch up” feature. I am scheduled to complete my readings on Friday, December 29.

Whatever plan you use, it is important for everyone who would grow in faith to be taking in God’s Word on an on-going basis. Lane Joffrion’s post on this website entitled “What is faith? Do you have it?” provides great motivation for beginning or continuing this practice. I hope you will make it your goal to read through the Bible in 2007.

Last week we took a first look at why God gave His Law. I mentioned briefly that normally theologians talk about three “uses” of the Law. By “uses” we mean that there are three broad categories of ways in which the Law of God helps people. They can be summarized as:

The first use of the Law is something that we all take for granted, but should be something for which we are daily thankful to the Lord. None of us would want to live in a world where others would lie to us, steal from us, or hurt our families with no protection from our government. We know that the world is not perfect, and we also know that sinful men and women are not above harming others. We also must recognize that for unbelievers, it is often the threat of punishment that keeps them from committing crimes, rather than altruism. Because their actions are not foremost for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31), they are continually doing a cost/benefit analysis – weighing the costs of being caught against the perceived gain. Calvin describes the first use of the Law in restraining sin this way:

“Such persons are curbed not because their mind is inwardly moved and affected, but because, as if a bridle were laid upon them, they refrain their hands from external acts, and internally check the depravity which would otherwise petulantly burst forth. It is true, they are not on this account either better or more righteous in the sight of God.” (Calvin, Institutes II.7.10)

So we see that this use of the Law does not make mean righteous before God, or cause them to earn His favor. But it certainly does make the world a much more pleasant place to live in than would otherwise be the case. This is what we call the “common grace” of God (see also Berkhof’s comments). We are instinctively struck by the horror and evil of a place where the Law of God is ignored. In fact, we often compare such a place to the place where God’s Law is despised: hell. Think about Rwanda in the late 1980s. There was no order, no reason, no protection for the innocent, no punishment of evil doers. Just chaos and death. (As an aside, if you ever want to see just how evil man is outside Christ, see either the movie Hotel Rwanda or the documentary Ghosts of Rwanda, and see what happens to “ordinary” people swept up in the chaos). It should not surprise us that one of the greatest blessings that the Lord has given to us here in the United States is that we live in a land where the “rule of law” is upheld, and that our country was founded on the principle that God exists and that He has created man in His own image with dignity and worth. Let us think about that the next time we are rerady to complain bitterly about the country we live in.

The Coming Lord’s Day

At the same time that we are thankful for the Lord’s provision in His Law to us while we “conduct [ourselves] with fear throughout the time of [our] exile” (1 Peter 1:17), we cannot help but long for the return of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We are especially reminded of that at this time of year, when we have the opportunity to sing such great hymns as “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus”:

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
Born to set thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
Let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth thou art;
Dear Desire of ev’ry nation,
Joy of every longing heart.

Born thy people to deliver,
Born a child, and yet a King,
Born to reign in us for ever,
Now thy gracious kingdom bring.
By thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By thine all-sufficient merit
Raise us to thy glorious throne.

The bulletin for this week can be found here. This week we will continue to look at the Law of God, as we think about the question: Why Did God Give the Law? (Part 2). The passage that we will look at will be Galatians 3:22-25, one that is relatively well known to many of us. May the Lord bless us with a greater knowledge of His Law, His love and His Christ this coming Lord’s Day!!

Over the years, I have found that one of the most abused verses of Scripture is the King James Version’s translation of Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” In contradiction to almost all principles of interpreting Scripture (context, original language vocabulary studies, comparison with other passages, etc.), this passage is often used as a proof text for writing a “vision statement” for the church, or for launching out on some new elaborate plan of ministry. “After all,” the saying goes, “we need to have a specific and unique vision for our ministry, or else we will fail (i.e. perish).” And so we begin the latest in a series of trips up the mountain to find out what God will have us do this year, or this month or this week. How can we completely revamp our ministry this time, we ask ourselves, so that we can be relevant, successful and affect our community? Should we emphasize youth? or families? or something else? We need to know what our vision will be!!

In a word – hogwash! As all the modern conservative translations point out, Proverbs 29:18 has absoluetly nothing to do with “vision planning” or “vision” in the sense of “the manner in which one sees or conceives of something” (American Heritage Dictionary). That does not mean that the King James translators got it wrong. They perfectly well understood what was meant, but they simply translated the Hebrew into the idiom of their day. They lived well before Tony Robbins or Zig Zigler. Just because someone abuses a translation does not make it bad. What the verse really says is that without God’s revelation (especially the Bible) to man, the people will perish. See:

ESV Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.
NIV Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint; but blessed is he who keeps the law.
NKJV Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint; But happy is he who keeps the law.
NAU Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is he who keeps the law.

This should make sense, and greatly encourage us. We need God’s Word. Without it, we case off all restraint and cannot survive. We certainly cannot be blessed and happy. Why? Because it is God who has made us, and He knows what is best for us. Do you really think anyone wants to live in a world where murder is acceptable? Or theft? Or lying? Someone might want to live in a world where everyone else has to obey the law, but they don’t. But no one wants to live in a world where others can kill them, lie to them, and steal from them with impunity. That is why the proverb ends: “blessed/happy is he who keeps the law.” The law restrains our sin. As a matter of fact, it restrains all sorts of sin throughout the world. In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis calls this phenomena the Tao. Not in the sense of Eastern mysticism, but in the sense of “Natural Law.” God has given all of us a revelation about what is right and what is wrong, and He has done this for all to see in His creation (Ps. 19:1-3; Rom. 1:19-20). He has also given this to us in our very nature. Our Westminster Confession of Faith refers to it as “the law of God written in their hearts” (WCF 4.2). This is why the most amoral of people are outraged when injustice is shown to them. Even if they think “anything goes,” the first time someone abuses them, they cry out for justice!

So our encouragement comes from the fact that God has not left us on our own – He has not even left us with only His creation. No – he has given to us His Word, His revelation, His prophetic vision. We can look to the Word of God, and see “what duty He requires of us” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q.3).

So why think about this today? Why write about this in the context of the coming Lord’s Day at Christ Church? For two reasons:

1. I will be beginning a 12 week Sunday School series on A Vision for Ministry. We will be discussing what it means for Christ Church in Katy, Texas to minister to each other and the community.
2. Our sermon text this week is (Providentially) is Galatians 3:19-22, in which Paul talks about the purpose of the Law of God.

One could easily think that these two events are completely unrelated (especially since there was no grand plan to have them coincide). But in truth, there really is an important thread that runs through them both. (pull)If we are to minister to the community around us, we must have a vision.(/pull) Not a newfangled, fancy, 10-point organized vision, per se, but the vision that comes from God’s Word, the Bible. Ministry is Bible driven, not “vision”-driven. And the Law of God is an important part of that vision, and of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Law is not contrary to the gospel, Paul says, and we must believe him!

So as we prepare to think about how we will minister to others, and what the gospel of Jesus Christ is, let us renew our commitment to study, memorize and live God’s Word. Without it, there is chaos. Without it, there is death. Without it, it is impossible to be happy or blessed.

The Coming Lord’s Day

This week, we should focus on not only the Word of God, but the God of the Word. It is the Lord Jesus Christ who makes the place where we are beautiful and fulfilling, as Isaac Watts wrote in his hymn “How Sweet and Awesome is the Place“:

How sweet and awesome is this place
With Christ within the doors,
While everlasting love displays
The choicest of her stores!

All of God’s Word points to the matchless greatness of Jesus Christ, including the law. This week we will look at “Why Did God Give the Law (Part 1)” from Galatians 3:19-22. As always, I look forward to seeing you all and praising the Lord with you. To download a PDF copy of this week’s Bulletin, please download here. You can listen to the music for the hymns (or use it to practice!) by clicking the tune links in the PDF file.