Tuesday, February 28, 2017

2-28-2017



Good Morning All,
         Matthew5:42; “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.”
      When our youth group went to New Orleans for the youth gathering, we listened to a lady who spoke about the Mardi Gras.  She told us of the tradition of those who ride on the large floats will give out beads, doubloons and whatever trinkets they have.  She said that the tradition is that the people on the ground have to ask those on the floats for the trinkets.  They have to shout something like, “Master, can you spare some?”  The people on the float are not supposed to give out the trinkets unless someone asks.  She was asked about this as most of the kids were only familiar with the throwing of the beads.  She mentioned a couple of thoughts about the origin of the parade and the saying.
       She said there are a couple of thoughts.  One was that the parades may have begun with the wealthier people dispensing with the food they were going to give up for Lent.  This would have included dairy products, eggs, sugar and meat.  This occurred because the food would not last until the end of Lent so the food was given away.  As part of the giving process, those giving the food away covered their face to be anonymous.  In order to try and not waste the food, they would only give it those who asked and once they had enough they were to quit asking.  The main idea was to not waste the food; take only what you could eat that day prior to the start of Lent.
      What does this have to do with our verse?  Not much, except that as we approach the Lenten season we remember that all we receive, much like these poor people in the parade is a gift, a gift from God.  All we receive is from the gracious love of God and we are but beggars before Him.  We receive with cupped hands the pouring out of his love and mercy.  He loves us and he cares for us.
     We see this most clearly when we look at Jesus.  As we look at and consider the work of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection; we see the greatness of God’s love.  We see the incredible will of God to show his love for his creatures (us) by willingly becoming one of them in order to die for them.  Not because of their great worth but because of his great love.  This is the love that moves him to have mercy upon you and to give you hope.  This is the love that moves him to do the ultimate good for you and that is to cleanse you of your sins and declare you holy.  He gives you the righteousness you need to keep you in his kingdom.  We only need to open our hands and receive his love.
Father of all mercy, in you we find all of our needs.  We are but mere beggars before you.  We can only ask and wait for your gracious hand to open and sustain us in all that we need.  Remind us that by looking only to you we always have the comforting mercy that you bestow to us.  Keep us mindful this Lenten season of your love, your mercy and the redemption that we receive through Jesus.  In His precious name we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret

Monday, February 27, 2017

2-27-2017



 Good Morning All,
                Romans 8:27; “And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
     I was watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie the other day titled “Anatomy of a Murder.”   It is based on a true event where a soldier walks into a tavern and kills the owner and then leaves.  The version of events that he and his wife state is that the tavern owner raped the wife one night.  The wife goes home and tells the husband; he loads his pistol, drives down to the tavern and shoots the tavern owner.  The soldier is acquitted because of something called “irresistible impulse”.  This is similar to an insanity plea in that the person is unable to resist the impulse to do what he does.  Usually, the person experiences some form of intense emotional upheaval.  The soldier is found not guilty.  It is a good tense movie with some big names and has an ironic twist at the end.
    Throughout the trial, the back and forth was “what was on his mind?”  “What was he thinking?”  “Did he know that what he was doing was wrong?”  The defense and the prosecution went back and forth until a not guilty verdict comes back.  The question came down to how we know what another person is thinking.  How do we know?  We can’t look into their mind or heart and see what their desire is; we can only guess.  So how do we know?
    The deep down basic truth is that we cannot ever know with 100% certainty what another person is thinking or what their motives are.  There is always some level of uncertainty.  For us as humans we can never be sure, did the man in the movie really know what he was doing or did he have a hidden reason?    We may never know what someone thinks or feels but God does.
     This can be one of the great comforts in our life.  There may be times in your life when you only know the pain or the sorrow.  You only know the hurt; you do not see any remedy or relief in sight.  You only seek to have the pain relieved.  You seek after God’s grace to heal you.  You may not know how to find it; you only know that you need his love and grace desperately.  We may not know what to say or how to say it but the Holy Spirit searches our heart and our soul.  He knows our mind and our needs.  He knows how to pray and what to say in these times of pain and sorrow.  With the Spirit’s intercession, God has mercy on us.  With the Spirit’s intercession and cries for mercy for us, God responds with his grace and sends us comfort; he sends us hope.  We are his dear children; he will never fail us.
Father of all grace and mercy, through your great love and mercy we have the comfort of your loving arms surrounding us and lifting us up in times of distress.  You heal us in your great compassion.  Send your knowing and searching Spirit to seek out the hurting, the suffering and the lost.  Heal their pain and bind their wounds.  In the precious name of Jesus our Risen Savior we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret  

Sunday, February 26, 2017

2-26-2017



Good Morning All,
                     Romans 15:13; “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
     It is the best of inventions and it is the worst of inventions.  I am talking about a cell phone.  At times I cannot live without it.  It is always with me so the members of the church can get hold of me.  I don’t have to arrive home from a visit to the hospital to find out someone is heading back.  When winter makes a gruff appearance, I know I can be in contact if I need some assistance along the way.  It is a very useful tool.  The problem is it always seems to have a low battery and about to lose power.  I need to take care or it might not work for me when I need it.
    In a number of ways our spiritual life is the same.  Notice how the Apostle Paul writes in our verse.  The God of hope fill you with joy and peace so that you may abound in hope.  The God of hope wants you to abound in hope.  We are fully charged and when we are fully charged we abound in hope.  We can abound in hope because we are filled with joy and peace.  We are fully charged with God’s joy and peace.  We have his Spirit that allows us to abound in hope.  No matter what is going on in our life, no matter what the world throws at us; our hope can never be destroyed.
    Yet that hope, that certainty of God’s eternal grace and favor being actively given to us is something that we can and should hold onto.  This can aid us when a loved one is battling for existence and is somewhere between life and death while we can only watch and wonder; we can have hope.  We can have hope because we know that God is forever on our side and his grace will see us, and our loved one through.  This hope can aid us when relationships end and the pain seems beyond endurance; this hope can guide us to the one relationship that will never be ended by God and that is his redemptive love for us.  We have that hope and when life makes everything difficult and painful; hope will see us through.
   However, that hope needs to have a full charge and that charge is given to us by God when we listen to his words of comfort, promise and hope.  We hear those words when we read his Scriptures and cling to those words of hope.  God also charges that hope by listening to our cries using them to bring us to the complete awareness that our only hope is in him and his mercy.  Nothing else will work.
   So hope abides but it needs to be fully charged; charged by the hearing of God’s mercy and coming before his throne of grace with our cries of pain, of sorrow or of joy.  Keep the charge full; read God’s Word and study it often; pray often and the fully charged hope will see you through.
Gracious Father, you give us hope and fill us with peace and joy.  You give us the courage to face this world and all the demons that fill it knowing that in you we have total victory.  Keep us fully charged that we might forever know the certainty of your love and promise of life eternal that we may live forever as people of hope.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret      

Friday, February 24, 2017

2-24-2017

      Good Morning All,
           Philippians 3:13; “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,”
   Do you remember when Al Bundy would always brag to anyone who would or would not listen how he “scored four touchdowns in one game for Polk High.”  The fact that he was a middle aged shoe salesman made the claim a little pathetic.  His greatest feat, his highest accomplishment was in his past.  Yet many people live this way.  In 1968, Mary Hopkin sang a remake of a Russian folk song that took much of the northern hemisphere by storm.  The chorus was:
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.

It went to number two on the hit list only kept out by the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”.  Yet the view offered is that the best of life is over.  The days of freedom and carefree joy are gone and all that is left is doldrums, sorrow and then death.  Kind of a miserable life, isn’t it?
    It is sad that so many people think that the best of life is over and that all that is left is a dismal existence.  What do you look forward to?  What makes you want to go forward with anything?  Yet sin can cause us to feel this way.  Not much to look forward to so look back.  The problem with looking back is that usually the good ole days weren’t always that good.
    This is the difference between believers and unbelievers.  Believers look forward.  Our hope is the future.  We have the greatest days ahead of us.  We look forward to, we long for, we pray for the return of Jesus which will bring about the completion of our sanctification.  We look forward to the perfection of our body and soul and the eternal life that God promises to us through Jesus.  We look forward to greater things to come.
    Yet as this life can and is a struggle; we look forward with expectant yearning for God’s good gifts.  There is no need to look back and long for days past because the best is yet to come.  Our glory days are not behind us; our glory waits for us.  We wait for our glory with Jesus in the days to come; maybe soon or maybe later but they are coming and we will celebrate with all the faithful with Jesus in the feast to come.  The best is yet to come.
Father in heaven, the best is yet to come.  Lead us by your Spirit in all peace and truth.  Keep us ever watchful and always focused on your love and mercy.  Do not let us look back but always straining forward to you.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret  

2-24-2017



Good Morning All,
             Romans 5: 3-5; “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
     One of the most difficult discussions to have with some Christians is why they suffer.  It is easy to feel that pain.  Sometimes it is truly physical suffering like a bad back or a bad knee.  Sometimes it is a relational problem, like not getting along with your in-laws or a sibling or a child.  Sometimes it is financial, like when it seems that the neighbors get the right rains but we don’t.  Sometimes it seems that the “breaks” just go the wrong way.  It feels like when one thing goes wrong, two and three follow shortly thereafter.  Some wonder why being a Christian doesn’t equate to everything going right.
    The truth is that we still live in the world.  We still live in a broken creation in which chaos is the norm.  Random events occur throughout creation, the lightning strike that hits a tree that falls on a house or the tire that blows out on a crowded freeway will always occur.  It happens to the believer it happens to the unbeliever; the difference is how we view it.  The unbeliever looks only at today and maybe tomorrow but the believer looks at the long term, we look to eternity.  We look to an eternity in which we live with Jesus in a perfect renewed creation.  Randomness goes away and God’s perfect order is restored.  To the unbeliever, struggles in this world are forever; to the believer they are a temporary battle.
    Through it all we have hope, the complete and unwavering, joyful expectation of eternal life is what we cling to.  This is God’s love gives us, it gives us hope.  No matter how difficult life can be; no struggle will be greater than the joy we will know in all eternity.  We grow knowing that our loving Father will never leave us or abandon us.  The struggles of this life will never separate us from his love.  His grace will always carry us and through our struggles we can see the hope of salvation.
     It is not that we desire to suffer but rather that the circumstances that cause us to suffer do not define who we are.  We are not people with no love, or no health or no wealth but rather we are people of God.  We are the redeemed of Christ living with the ever certain promise form God that we have eternal life with him.  We have the certainty of his love forever.  We have the blessing of his grace to calm us and his Word to encourage us.  We do not face our battles alone; we face them in his loving arms.  We have hope for we are his children.  We have hope because he is our God.
Father, defend us from all evil and if evil strikes, keep us strong in our faith.  Protect all your children and be with those who are especially struggling at this time.  Send your Spirit to enliven their spirit and to renew the hope that lives in them.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret