Submit to the Government Serving God to Save Lives (Online Worship per Coronavirus)

Session has postponed public face-to-face assemblies of worship at the church building and will try and serve the Lord and our saints through online webcasts here beginning this Lord's Day due to the mandated (or strongly urged) restrictions by our State and Federal governments that we all stay home and not gather more than 10 people for other than essential needs to avoid spreading the coronavirus. We greatly appreciate that several in our church appealed to us to keep worship in the building open (including an elder). We took this and many things into prayerful discussion and have decided to heed the guidance (and mandates) of our civil leaders for this civic concern and no longer hold in-person gatherings for worship adhering to the timelines (for now) that the government has noted. This message is to share what informed our thinking that this would not be disobeying God, but rather obeying Him at this point in the pandemic. We share this as more of a lecture than a declarative, "Thus Saith the Lord". But we hope it will be helpful as we proceed in coming weeks with online worship. Romans 13:1-10: As citizens of this world we must not rebel against our earthly authorities in the civic sphere of life for they too are ministers ordained by God to serve us just as are ministers of the Word over the religious sphere of life; as Kingdom of Heaven citizens we are to lovingly work for the good of our earthly societies under their lawful jurisdictions and to do so is to obey the Law of God. "Submit to the Government Serving God to Save Lives." Also, visit https://www.reformation21.org/blog/submit-to-the-government-serving-god-to-save-lives