Pastor’s Blog (Page 4)
As most of you know, my good friend Tim passed away a little over a year ago. His absence still leaves a substantial hole in my heart. The depth of our friendship was such that we shared our locations with each other via the telephone app Find My Friends. The other day I happened to open the Find My Friends app and saw this message with regard to Tim: NO LOCATION…
I don’t know about you, but I love driving on windy mountain roads. Hairpin turns. Engine-taxing climbs. Brake-testing descents. Stunning views. Breathtaking drop-offs. Thin air. Eagles soaring mere yards away. Things we have grown to expect on windy mountain roads—at least in this country—are guardrails. We don’t take offense at them. We know they’re for our protection.…
Reminders. We use them all the time. Because we know we’re prone to become distracted or forget. Four times in the first 7 verses of 2 Timothy, Paul reaches for a remind/remember word. The first three times are what Paul himself remembers, and they lay a foundation for what Paul will say next: Stemming from those remembrances, Paul urges Timothy: And it sounds as if this…
The Promise of Life
On page 3 of the Book, God gave the man He’d just created a promise: In the day that you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die.Gen 2:17 You know the story. He ate; and he died. And ever since then death has been ruthlessly certain. It’s just a matter of when. Mercifully, against the backdrop of death is another promise—the promise of…
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. So Paul begins his second letter to Timothy (which we will begin to study this Lord’s Day). Whether to individuals or churches, Paul opens all 13 of his letters with a similar prayer for blessing: Grace to you and peace…, and in so doing he reveals what God wants to lavish upon all…
Barb alerted me to this grave marker in a church cemetery downtown. Rebecca Wright Shand spent eighty-eight years on this earth, and at her passing they summed up her life with this epitaph: “rich in good works.” She apparently never married, as she bears the last name of her father (next to whom she is buried), who was the long-time pastor of the church. Evidently she…