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Suinday Sermon

  Evil Isaiah 59:1-2 1 Surely the Lord’s power is enough to save you. He can hear you when you ask him for help. 2 It is your evil that has separated you from your God. Your sins cause him to turn away from you, so he does not hear you. The greatest event in all of history is the entry of Jesus Christ into the world. There is nothing that compares to this single moment in time. Jesus is both God and human at that same time and so we have God who lives a fully human life knowing the joy of human life and the suffering. I have talked about how the birth of Jesus has a sad side effect for me that we do not think about very often but nags at me on a regular basis because I know that Jesus has come to deal with my sin. It breaks me that God has to die because of my sin but that also makes me aware of my sin and my need for God to save me. Jesus dying on the cross is the most tragic event in history but is also the greatest statement about who God is and how God works. As power...
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Sunday Sermon

  The Sabbath Isaiah 58:13 You must obey God’s law about the Sabbath and not do what pleases yourselves on that holy day. You should call the Sabbath a joyful day and honor it as the Lord’s holy day. You should honor it by not doing whatever you please nor saying whatever you please on that day. A few months ago I was awoken by my family to find that our water heater had broken. Water was pouring out of the bottom of it at a rate that told me we had real trouble. It was clear that the only solution was to replace the water heater. Of course this did not make me happy because it was now going to cost us hundreds of dollars to replace it but I had no other choice. No matter how much I did not want to admit that the water heater was broken or that it needed replacing reality made me deal with the issue. I could not avoid the problem because we had no hot water and that made me have to fix the broken water heater. When I think about that day, it makes me think about the human ...
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Sunday Sermon

  Lead by the Lord Isaiah 58:11 The Lord will always lead you. He will satisfy your needs in dry lands and give strength to your bones. You will be like a garden that has much water, like a spring that never runs dry. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge story has always fascinated me. To reduce the initial construction price from an estimated $11 million down to a cheaper budget, engineers replaced the original deep, rigid open-truss stiffening design with shallow, solid steel plate girders. On November 7, 1940, moderate 42-mph winds caught the rigid, unyielding deck design, creating a violent twisting aerodynamic resonance and the structural forces then quickly snapped the cables and tore the entire bridge apart. That bridge did not break apart because it was built wrong but it broke apart because a choice was made that ignored what was true and instead chose to follow what was easier. I think about that often when I think about God. We have a God who tells us what is true and what ...
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Sunday Sermon

  What Does God Want Isaiah 58:5 This kind of special day is not what I want. This is not the way I want people to be sorry for what they have done. I don’t want people just to bow their heads like a plant and wear rough cloth and lie in ashes to show their sadness. This is what you do on your special days when you fast, but do you think this is what the Lord wants? In the book of Genesis during the creation we find the making of mankind and the thing that always stands out to me is how God handles what He does with humans. All the other things that God makes God just speaks and they exist but God takes special time and attention when creating humans. We humans are created by the hands of God and that is something that we need to think about because it has profound effects on who we are in this world. But that is not even the best part of what God does. Not only are we created by God’s hands but then God breath’s his breath into us. There are thousands of books written on...
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Sunday Sermon

  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 ...
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Friendly Table Game Club meeting 07/14/26

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  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. ...
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Sunday Sermon

  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. ...
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