Welcome to Offscript, a Southland Christian Church podcast. Each week, we sit down with our teacher to talk through what didn't make it into Sunday sermon. Thoughts, stories, or questions that got left off the manuscript, but still matter. Thanks for being with us. Let's jump in.

Well, hey, everyone, and welcome to Offscript. We're glad you here. My name is Neil, Scott. Easter edition. Easter edition. Happy Easter, man. Happy Easter. Yeah, it's a good day. We've had so far four services. One more to go. One more to go. One more. Yeah, one more. Exactly. We said that. We said that backstage. Greg Chandler and I were like, one more. It was so fun because, I mean, we had Nick beat me down here, but, I mean, he was taking pictures and video and everything of all the baptisms going on. It's always cool when we have the big flood of baptisms, pun intended, I guess. And then like 30 seconds or a minute goes by and the lights come back on in the baptistery and more people are getting baptized. You can see those kind of last minute decisions being made. And so I don't know how many of those we had, but we had a bunch so far today. I know for sure and George and I was talking to them today. They had one show up real late. Like almost the room was completely cleared out. Yeah. And they had someone come in and say, hey, I've been thinking about this. I want to get baptized. And they're like, you want to do it now? They're like, yeah, my family's here. Let's do it. Yeah, I got a great story last night from Kevin Komp, who's campus lead over at Georgetown. And they had a picture of a young lady who had just baptized her one more.

Yes.

Yeah, that was it.

That was it.

Yeah, very cool.

So cool, man.

So tell me, because I'm just, peel back the curtain for me, it is a larger weekend across

the board for a lot of churches.

When you're writing a sermon, I think we talked about this just you and I a couple weeks ago. Like, how do you decide what you want to talk on when it comes to Easter? Because there are some places that maybe don't even talk about the resurrection? They're just doing a sermon. Yeah. How do you decide kind of what you wanted to talk about today? Yeah, I mean, I'm 10 sermons into being a lead pastor. so, you know, I'm sure that my wisdom should be sent to the masses.

But... about today. Yeah, I mean, I'm 10 sermons into being a lead pastor, so, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure that my wisdom should be sent to the masses. But my thought process has always been,

because I have preached Easter and Christmas many times, my thought process has always been,

don't try to be super creative, just preach what it is. You know, so that's always been my heartbeat. Now, you can go other places in the Bible or whatever, and a lot of people do, but I like to kind of, I heard Howerton say in his Easter sermon this week, he was just going to run it up the middle. Like, yeah, that seems to be the wisest approach, in my opinion, to just run it up the middle, man, just talk about the resurrection. I mean, we have all four gospel accounts, and so there's lots of different, you know, places you can land. And I chose to really focus on that narrative of Mary Magdalene and her interaction with Peter and John at the end of the sermon. So, yeah, that's my thought was like, don't try to get too tricky. Don't try to be overly creative.

Just run it up the middle. Yeah, that's good. And Psalm 90 played a pretty big role in that. That might be the trickiest part of the whole thing. I was going to say, yeah, that one was outside of running it up the middle. like you've got all the different gospel accounts of it but then all of a sudden you've got

psalm 90 that you kind of pulled into that was outside of running it up the middle. Like you've got all the different gospel accounts of it,

but then all of a sudden you've got Psalm 90 that you kind of pulled into there. How, was that

literally just part of what the story was that you talked about with your grandmother? Yeah, you know,

that song I've just been listening to on repeat in my office and in my truck since that day that my grandmother died.

And it probably was about three or four weeks ago when I saw the way that that could be

incorporated, maybe even a little longer, into Easter. And I came to you guys about doing

that actual song. And then you guys decided to reprise it at the end of the sermon and all that.

That psalm has always been my favorite, or for a long time, I should say, has been my favorite

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