Battles

  Special Isaiah 58:3 They say, ‘To honor you we had special days when we fasted, but you didn’t see. We humbled ourselves to honor you, but you didn’t notice.’” But the Lord says, “You do what pleases yourselves on these special days, and you are unfair to your workers. I once knew a guy that made his living from buying and selling car repair manuals. It surprised me that those old dusty books had any value and the guy told me they worth a lot of money. He explained to me that the people buying the books needed the information in those pages to fix the cars they were working on and without those books the work they were doing was a lot harder. The value was not in the book itself but the information that it held explaining how to fix a car. That conversation has stuck with me over the years because it really has application to our faith. The Bible is a lot like those old car manuals. Our Bible is not valuable in and of itself, it is valuable because in it we find the God ...

  FRIENDLY TABLE GAME CLUB! Regular 2nd Tuesday night of the month meeting Tonight, a session playing a set of house rules, CROSSROADS! Crossroads is a tabletop system Lowell Lufkin has been working on for several years. It is essentially a resource management game. Each player has a capital which generates resources. The city is connected to roads which lead to crossroads containing villages, towns, and religious centers. Each crossroad grants resource points to be used by the capturing player. Each road costs resources to send a military unit over it. The better quality road the lower cost. Poor roads, more cost. The players can spend resources to improve roads, raise troops, upgrade troops, and for other purposes to win the game. The player controlling the greatest value of crossroads at the end of the game - usually an agreed time - is the winner. We had three players; Jeffrey A Russ , Jerre Morris , and Lowell Lufkin . Jeff had a good starting position near a religious site. ...

  Shout Isaiah 58:1 The Lord says, “Shout out loud. Don’t hold back. Shout out loud like a trumpet. Tell my people what they have done against their God; tell the family of Jacob about their sins. Over the last forty years as a minister I have spent a lot of time in scripture. Most of it has been preparing sermons and Bible studies but there is also my personal devotional time which is central to the development of my faith in God. I want to say that having spent all that time getting to know the God who inspired those who wrote all of that material in the Bible I like God and I really appreciate how God thinks. This might sound weird but let me explain. When I first came to scripture, I saw God’s word as commands to be obeyed because if we disobeyed we went to hell. When I really started studying the Bible, it came as a fairly large surprise that I did not actually understand what the Bible was all about or what God was trying to do with all the stuff God was telling us. ...

People Isaiah 57:21 “There is no peace for evil people,” says my God. There are some things in my walk of faith that have troubled me over the years. One of the most crushing problems I had was dealing with God’s anger. As a young man I feared God and worried about His anger a lot. When you read through scripture you find that though God is slow to anger when He does get angry it is a terrible thing. This was a frightening thing to me and it colored much of my faith as a youth. It is interesting that certain times of life help explain who God is and what He is doing. That is what happened to me when I had children. Very quickly I understood God’s anger with such clarity that it moved my faith in a very radical way. God calls us His children and there is a reason for that. It explains how God acts and what God does and when I had children I began to understand some things about God that I had no grounding to do so until then. Parents often get angry with their children when th...

Humble People Isaiah 57:15 And this is the reason: God lives forever and is holy. He is high and lifted up. He says, “I live in a high and holy place, but I also live with people who are sad and humble. I give new life to those who are humble and to those whose hearts are broken. In two thousand and twenty-four the state of Louisiana passed a law requiring all schools to post the Ten Commandments in each school class room. For some reason this caused a fire storm of criticism and condemnation. It confuses me why anyone would object to a poster of something that is objectively true. If schools are there to teach children, the fundamental truths about the world like math, reading and science it makes since that teaching the basic moral underpinnings of the universe should be there too. No one is forcing anyone to accept the truth that is found in those words but just like rejecting the truth that math gives us all that can happen are negative results. Learning to be moral people...

  A Quiet God Isaiah 57:11 “Whom were you so afraid of that you lied to me? You have not remembered me or even thought about me. I have been quiet for a long time. Is that why you are not afraid of me? Our faith is in the God who redeems us but what does that really mean and how do we get to that place of faith. We need to think about this on a regular basis because understanding our faith will shape how we live as people of faith. First we need to make the point that our faith is not in what God does but the very nature of who God is. In short we trust in the God who does the things not in what God does. Grasping this idea is central to what we are all about because it will directly impact how we see God and then how to react to what God says. The starting place of our faith is that God saves us from the death and destruction of our own sin but we do not trust in the redemption we trust in the God who delivers us from the death that sin brings. Our next step into real an...