I sure hope everyone had a great week and was blessed. We are one day closer to Christmas and you know what a wonderful time that is around here with the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service and all of that! Good times are ahead for us folks!
And the loan for the new building will close this week sometime we’re hoping! Praise the Lord! How wonderful will that be! Dennis and Juli have their house on the market and they will be out here the first week of January Lord willing. Then we’ll get started on the new building and rocking and rolling there, so maybe we can be in there by our 10th year anniversary in April. Wow, a dream is fixin’ to come true, for me anyway!
As we near the season that we celebrate our Saviors birth I sure hope we can all look back and see how far the Lord has taken us as a church in the last year. We’re growing in numbers and growing spiritually. We’re going to be in a bigger place Lord willing this year so we can go back to one service and all be a family again! It’s just so great to see how God has answered prayers and how He is shaping things around here so He can grow the church and us as His children!
One of the ways He grows us as His children is to allow us to go through hard times. It seems we are more open to His leading and we have a tendency to call on Him when the hard times hit, so He goes ahead and allows them in our lives. I want to be closer to Him but that doesn’t mean I enjoy the hard times. But I know I need them. It’s a catch 22 because I know I need them but I don’t like them but I need them and…so praise the Lord, He’s in control! All we need to do is make Him the center of our world and He can handle the rest!
Please let me know if you need anything. Naomi and I love you all.
Forgive as the Lord forgave you!
Colossians 3:12-17
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
Wow! This is a great passage of scripture that tells us just what church should be! Now I think, and maybe I’m wrong, but I think that church should be a place where we as Christians (believers in the salvation that Jesus Christ gave us through His death on the cross), can come and be encouraged in the Lord! Where we as believers want to come and change our way of life and desire to make a difference in the world around us! If we are going to do what Paul is telling the church at Colosse to do and our desire is to “clothe ourselves” with these things then we need to put off our flesh and put Him on! I hope our church can be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints.
We love you, let us know how we can serve you. Pastor Steve & Naomi
This World is Not My Home
Have you ever wondered what your thought pattern is going to be when you come down to the end of your life? Will you be like Paul and say “For I am ready to be poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” (II Timothy 4:6-7) Do you long to hear the words, “Well done good and faithful servant?” I always talk tuff and say that I’m ready to go, but when it comes down to it we’ll see where my faith lies!
But remember the old song, “This World is Not My Home?” it’s true that we are just foreigners here and there is a promised land waiting for us in Heaven! That’s real folks! Life, at least to me, is great down here on this earth, but can you imagine what Heaven is going to be like? And we have a promise that we will be there if we know Jesus as our personal Savior! Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:19, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”
So then, we have Faith to trust Jesus as our Savior, we have Hope that we are going to make Heaven our home, and then we have that agape Love that allows us to treat our neighbor as we would treat ourselves. And the best part of all of that is the fact that it all comes through the grace of God! We get God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense! We don’t have to work for it folks! We just get it because our Heavenly Father loves us so much!
Please let me know if you need anything. Naomi and I love you all.
-Pastor Steve
Shadows in the light
Does anybody remember this song?
When I look into Your holiness, When I gaze into Your loveliness
When all things that surround become shadows In the light of You;
When I’ve found the joy of reaching Your heart, When my will becomes enthralled in Your love When all things that surround become shadows In the light of You,
I worship You, I worship You, The reason I live is to worship You
I worship You, I worship You, The reason I live is to worship You
I’m not sure who wrote it or what year it was that Naomi and I first heard it but I do remember it really touching my heart. Especially the words, “When all things that surround become shadows in the light of You, I worship You…”So what that is saying is that everything that we do, everything we say, everything that we face every day is a shadow compared to Him! He burns brighter, He shines brighter in my life and He makes all the bad things good! And He does this not by changing our circumstances, but by changing us! He is in the life changing business and I for one am thankful for that!
Alan Redpath once wrote, “The conversion of a soul is the miracle of a moment; the manufacture of saint is the task of a lifetime.” Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.” Amen.
God Bless Your Day! Keep me in your daily prayers, please! Love All Y’All!!
~Pastor Steve~
Pure heart
Psalms 51 was the Psalm that David wrote after Nathan the prophet had come to him and confronted him about his adultery with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed in battle. What a great Psalm and what a merciful God we have! I want to challenge you to not just read but study the whole chapter and then apply it to your life.
The verse that really sticks out to me as I study this chapter is verse 10; “Create in me a pure heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Did you see that? He doesn’t say anything about how the Devil made me do it. He doesn’t blame his circumstances. It’s not the environment he was raised in. He didn’t ask God to change anyone else, he asked God to change him!
You ever tried to make someone change? It doesn’t work t0o well does it? I’ve been trying to get Naomi to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom and turn off lights for over 33 years now and it hasn’t happened yet! I’ve even shown her the benefits of lower electricity bills and read to her on the toothpaste tube where it says “For best results, start at the bottom and work up,” but she doesn’t care! So I have to give in and realize the only one I can change is me! Not my co-worker, not the other drivers on the road and for sure not my wife! Just me. Only me. And only through the help of my Lord Jesus Christ can “I can do all things.”
We don’t have to let others rob us of our joy. We don’t have to get frustrated with others when they irritate us. We are the only ones that can ruin our day. Our day won’t be ruined unless we allow it to be no matter what others do to us.
But we can’t do it in our own strength! We need to be empowered by the Holy Spirit of God and be plugged into Him. That’s the only way to overcome our flesh. That’s the only way to have a new heart created in us.
Read Psalms 51. It’s a great read!
God Bless Your Day, and please pray for me and I’ll pray for you!
~ Pastor Steve~