Category: From the Pastor’s Desk

I can remember in 1989, when I started working at a local grocery store, we were closed on Sundays.  In fact, apart from the mall, gas stations, and restaurants, most other businesses were closed on Sunday.  My manager at that time told me that when he was a kid, you couldn’t even find gas stations open on Sunday.  Even today, most professions outside of retail stores, have the weekend off.  Why?  While few talk about it, it is the result of Christianity.  When Christ entered the world at the beginning of what we call the Common Era, Sunday was just …

This third installment of our series on the local church focuses on one of the most important questions we should be asking:  “What is the Mission of the Church?” We have talked about the origin of the church, the formation and activity of the early church, now we need to find out, what is the church all about?  What did God have in mind when He designed it?  What should we be doing? I hope you will take the time to listen in on this message.  It is one of the most critical, because if we get this right, it …

In our first message in this series on the local church, we looked at the fact that the church was God’s idea, it is not manmade.  While man has produced many forms of church that may be very different than what God intended, make no mistake, God is the one who created and established the church.  Because of that, we want to make sure we have a good grasp of what the church should look like and what the church should be doing. To that end, we are going to dig into Acts 2 this morning.  We want to look …

How important is the church? I have been a pastor for over 25 years and I have been a follower of Jesus for 45.  If I have not learned anything else in all my experience, I have learned that the most important elements of the Christian life are time with God in prayer, time with God in His Word, and time with God’s people, specifically through local church involvement.  I have also learned that those are the things Satan most wants to keep us from. Now I think we all know those first two items are important.  I’ve never heard …

In our Boys Only Club we have been looking at the reliability of God’s Word and the fact that every word in the Bible was put there on purpose by God. Sometimes, however, we treat parts of the Bible as less important than others, such as genealogies. Who wants to read a long list of hard to pronounce names? What meaning do they have for us? Well today, as we look at Jesus as the ultimate fulfillment, we will see that genealogies can be very important, and God knew what He was doing when He started the book of Matthew …

Today we have one of the young men who grew up in our church sharing about a ministry trip he was on.  He has had the desire for a long time to go on such a trip and God worked out the perfect timing so that desire could be fulfilled last month. Curtis has come back excited about what he has seen God doing in Asia and he is eager to share it with us this morning.  I am eager to hear all about it and invite you to join in as well!

Pride and thankfulness don’t mix.  Thankfulness acknowledges that you have been given something, something that someone chose to give you.  Thankfulness acknowledges some form of exchange that you came out ahead on.  On the other hand, pride tends toward the attitude that someone owes you something.  Pride is demanding, it says people owe me. The other side of this coin is the fact that humility fosters thankfulness and thankfulness fosters humility.  They tend to build on each other.  The more we focus on what we have been given from God, the more humbled we become by His generosity.  This is …

Today is a special day on our church calendar and one of our favorites.  For the past several weeks we have been collection shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child.  Today we will be praying over them and dedicating them to the Lord’s use.  These shoeboxes have been known to literally change the life of a child and we pray God gets just the right box to just the right child to do just that! Our service will be very different today, with the children remaining in the auditorium with us for the whole service.  We will be celebrating children, giving, and …