I sorta held off on posting my thoughts on Marcos' Wednesday sermon for a variety of reasons. One was an excuse of convenience - I was sick and spent much of the day Thursday sleeping off a head cold. The second was that I might talk myself out of using my cynical observation immediately after the service.

Seems I was approached by my friend Dale who rather enthusiastically proclaimed to have gotten a lot from this particular sermon. The topic was on staying away from the darkness. After kicking off with an anecdote from Marcos on a recent news story about a murder-suicide, the message qualified easily as one of Marcos' heavier topics. My response to Dale? "Great, so you're not going to kill someone now?"

I know ... I really need to work on that whole sense of humor thing.

Romans 1:18-32 served as the basis of the message. And you might be happy to know that I also got a word or two out of it. Marcos homed in on two themes in particular: (1) glorify God, and (2) give thanks.

On that note, there's one aspect to which I have to confess some amount of envy. Once upon a time, I recall Marcos preaching another sermon and he commented that reading the Bible for a particular word to meditate on was somewhat easy for him as a musician. He could simply write a song about it and replay it in his head. I suspect he's not the only musician with that advantage.

Pertaining to this Wednesday sermon, however, I had the temporary advantage of realizing one of my favorite tunes instilled this message rather nicely. So with that, I uploaded the song into the nifty widget a couple of posts below. The lyrics practically sing themselves:

How do you explain/How do you describe/ A love that goes from east to west/and runs as deep as it is wide/You know all our hopes/Lord, you know all our fears/And words cannot express the love we feel/But we long for you to hear

So listen to our hearts/Hear our spirit sing/A song of praise that flows/from those you have redeemed

We will use the words we know/to tell you what an awesome God you are/But words are not enough/to tell you of our love/so listen to our hearts

If words could fall like rain/from these lips of mine/And if I had a thousand years/I would still run out of time

So if you listen to my heart/Every beat will say/Thank you for the life/Thank you for the truth/Thank you for the Way

So listen to our hearts/Hear our spirit sing/A song of praise that flows/from those you have redeemed

We will use the words we know/to tell you what an awesome God you are/But words are not enough/to tell you of our love/so listen to our hearts

For something a bit more up-tempo, there's this nice punk rock tune by Five Iron Frenzy that I posted on an ancient YouTube Tuesday.

Beautiful day, wonderful feeling, this reason to sing, psalms meaning songs singing praises all day long. Joy fills the weak, joy makes us strong. Filled 'till we burst, songs of praise to the God of the Universe.

Despite our selfish selves, despite all loss of hope, despite our lack of faith, despite our stony hearts, despite the waning moon, despite the ebbing tide of how we think this world should be.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him all creatures here below, praise Him above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Gray rainy day, down in the mud for us. Don't feel I can sing, songs to the God in control of the seasons. But what's good and bad, flow from the hands,
of the God with the perfect plan. Filling us with joy, all of this will glorify

And that, my friends, is as close as I get to our more talented musician friends who have the great luxury of turning any word into a song. Thank God I at least have a big CD collection.