College and Singles Weekly Update: July 28th-August 4th
COMBINED COLLEGE AND SINGLES EVENT!!
Louisville Bats Baseball Game!
Date: August 10th
Time: Meet at 6:00 PM
Where: We will MEET AT THE FIELD, at the back gate closest to the river.
Total Cost: $10
Additional Details:
You MUST REGISTER AND PAY BEFOREHAND by clicking the link here.
The game starts at 6:30 PM, PLEASE MEET 30 minutes early (6:00 PM at the back gate closest to the river) in order to all enter together.
Reach out to Alexa Knight with any questions!
SINGLES GROUP
- BFG (Bible Fellowship Group) Sunday Morning 10:30 AM, RM 202
- Sunday Worship: 9:00 AM
Information for Singles Ladies on KBC Women’s Conference:
- Alexa created a push pay link to use!
- You should have received the info already but here it is again…
Where: We will be attending the KBC Women’s Conference at Little Flock Baptist Church.
When: October 15th-16th.
Lodging: We will be lodging together in an old-school slumber party set up on Friday night.
Transportation: We will be taking the church bus to and from our accommodations as a group.
The deadline to register for this event and pay the $30 fee is August 15th!!! So, make sure to register and pay to reserve your spot!
The link to both register and pay can be found here.
COLLEGE GROUP
- BFG (Bible Fellowship Groups) Sunday Morning 9:00 AM, RM 202
- Sunday Worship: 10:30 AM
- Mid-Week Girls and Guys Bible Study:
Dates: August 4th
Time: Wednesday Night at 7:00 PM
BIG NEWS/CHANGES FOR THE COLLEGE GROUP!!
Big News NAOBC College Group!! This fall we will be introducing College Night, Sundays from 6-8 pm. This will be taking the place of our weekly college small groups, so, instead of joining a small group this fall, we will just have one night all together for college night.
There will be supper (What??) every week, as well as games, fellowship, and a short lesson with smaller prayer groups to follow. This event is very fellowship-oriented and will offer a great opportunity for our college group to become closer and more connected as a whole. This night will also serve as a great opportunity to invite friends who are both believers and unbelievers!
The heart behind college night comes from wanting to promote unity within our college group and our college group within the church as a whole. This fall semester our church will be going through “Disciplines of a Godly Woman” and “Disciplines of a Godly Man” on Wednesday nights, and by eliminating college small groups during the week, this frees our college-aged students to one church event during the week, hopefully limiting busy nights in the midst of homework and work.
Our main desire this fall is to see an uprise in college students serving and investing in our church body as a whole, and our college group as a whole. It is our prayer that our college students will get to better know the rest of the church by coming to Wednesday night studies with different aged members or serving in a ministry. So, two nights this fall. Sunday nights are for our college night, and Wednesday night for the church as a whole! We can’t wait to see you all in the fall and are so excited for College Night!
Check out our website or GroupMe App for more info regarding specific events!!
Love the Ville is coming up on August 28th!
This is a church-wide event where all NAOBC members get to give back to the community and share the love of Christ through various service projects. We strongly encourage all College and Singles to mark this date off on your calendar and join in our day of “loving the Ville!”
Our Week in the Word segment this week comes from Isaac Reff, one of our Singles Group interns.
Matthew 6:1
Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
Our text for this week comes from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus’ first lengthy discourse in Matthew contains innumerable teachings of great value, but I want us to focus on the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer should not be ripped out of its original context; it is part of His teaching on the Christian’s life in secret, and it finds its place in between how a Christian is meant to give, and how he is meant to fast.
Each of the three sections (vs. 4, 6, and 18) are punctuated by this phrase, “And your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.” Jesus frequently condenses His teaching on a certain subject by giving us a summary of His main point in a closing statement. The repeated use of this phrase is meant to reveal something to us about our righteous activities: whether giving to the poor, fasting for days on end, or praying to our Father, above everything else, they must be performed before an audience of God alone, and not with an eye to garner praise from men. Matthew 6:1 has already set the stage for this and serves as His thesis statement for this passage.
What is the application then, to prayer? Why do we pray in secret, and what is it that we are meant to pray for?
The primary reason we pray in secret, noticed by God alone, is because these are the prayers He loves to answer. Our guilty and disbelieving consciences often have a hard time trusting that God will answer our prayers or that He will give us what we long for, but Jesus is telling us that if we pray according to God’s will and in the manner of His choosing, we will be abundantly rewarded. Matthew 7:7-12 explicitly clarifies, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the reward for prayer is a positive, good answer in accordance with what we asked for. When we pray for bread, our Father will not give us a stone – He will give us bread.
That much is straightforward; we pray in secret because the One who sees what is done in secret will truly give us what we ask of Him. If only we really believed this! Anxieties would melt away, fears would dissolve like snow in the noonday sun, and stress would dissipate like morning dew in the midst of a Southern summer. My friends, our problem is not only that we do not pray, as many preachers will tell us. Our problem is that we do not believe He will hear us.
To close, a brief word on what it is we should be praying for. Many of us are familiar with the various praying templates: ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), PRAY, and so forth. They all have a tendency to place supplication, or making requests, at the bottom of our priorities in prayer. Instead, we are supposed to focus on who God is, how much He has done for us, and like topics, and then maybe if we have time, we’re allowed to smuggle in one or two prayers that we would really like to be answered.
Except that’s not exactly how Jesus is praying in the Lord’s Prayer, the model for all other prayers. He begins by focusing on the Father (as we should too) and who He is (the One in heaven), but the phrase, “Hallowed be Your name,” isn’t a bare statement: it’s a request. In the Greek, the verb for “Hallowed” is not in the indicative mood, the mood used to make an observation or statement of fact, but rather in the imperative. In this context, the verb takes on the force of a request. The very first thing Jesus does after opening His prayer is to make a request of the Father, specifically, that He would glorify Himself. Most of the other verbs are in the imperative as well; the whole prayer is one massive request for God to glorify Himself, provide, protect, advance His kingdom, and forgive.
The glory of God known is the single highest pleasure available to mankind. Nothing is more thrilling, more lovely, more delightful, more awe invoking, more sweet, and truly good than God’s excellencies.
So let us go to Him, and let us beseech Him to make Himself known to us. He loves to answer those kinds of prayers.
