VERDUGO COMMUNITY CHURCH EASTER SUNDAY SERVICE APRIL 9, 2023

We open our Easter Service with song. Pastor Gail Linstrom welcomes all to worship and to participate in the life of our church family. We are called to worship with a reading from Psalm 33 by Dale Reynolds. Luisa Fernandez gives the opening prayer. Nick Baltazar, Jessica Jimenez, Michael Minasyan, Ed Manacop, and Isaiah Tejada lead us in our praise singing. Albert Ramseyer takes up the praises and concerns of the church and our world in the Prayers of the People.

 

In her sermon, “Rolling Stones and Resurrected Hearts,” Pastor Gail leads us through the story as told in John 20. Everyone is given a stone to hold until later. In this account it was Mary Magdalene is the first to come to Jesus’s tomb, not even sure of how she would roll away the boulder covering the entrance. To her surprise she finds the stone rolled away, but to her sorrow the tomb is empty. She asks Peter and another disciple to return with her but they then leave her to mourn alone. It is she who then first encounters the risen Jesus, and she becomes the first to share the news of the resurrection. Each of us have things that block our heart from accepting God’s love. Pastor Gail invites us to come forward with our stones, symbolizing those things and to lay them at the foot of the cross, and then take a flower in recognition of our new life of hope in Jesus and our resurrected hearts open to his love.

 

Verdugo makes its Sunday sermons available to you on Facebook and posts audio copies of the service and sermon at https://verdugochurch.podbean.com.

 

Prayers of the People has been edited to respect the privacy and confidentiality of individual prayer requests. All CCLI songs are performed under Verdugo Community Church’s license with CCLI.

 

Verdugo Community Church is a Free Methodist congregation serving the Glassell Park, Eagle Rock, and Glendale areas in Los Angeles. It is located at 4300 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, CA 90065. Our email address is verdugofmc@gmail.com. Contact Pastor Gail at (323) 500-3343.

 

Verdugo is online at www.facebook.com/verdugochurch and www.verdugochurch.org.

Worship Service copyright 2023 by Verdugo Community Church and Sermon copyright 2023 by Gail Whitcome Linstrom and Verdugo Community Church.