Marlene and I would like to thank you all for the special gift during Pastor Appreciation Month.

We are grateful the Lord has allowed us to labor alongside such generous and faithful people who love Him and want to serve Him. Thanks for being there for 10 years and for your willingness to question unprofitable conventions. It has been a joy to serve Him with you.

May the Lord bless you and those you love,

Pastor Jess

It is the little things that get us into the biggest trouble.  We live in a broken world, and we are broken ourselves.  The little things grow into big problems because this world and all that is in it is not improving; rather, it is degenerating.  This is happening because it is all broken.  Adam and Eve broke it, and it will remain broken until God is finally done and all is brought back under His authority

Many years ago, I read this in a book, “Nearly a century ago, a French sociologist wrote that every institution’s first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself.”  When I read that, it helped me to understand what I saw going on around me in the Christian organization I was involved with.  Regardless of the lofty and altruistic goals of any organization, without constant restraint and discipline from people, the people will end up serving the organization rather than the organization serving the people.  It happens so often we no longer take note, but it is wrong and it happens because everything is broken.

The book of Judges tells the story of the Israelites living in their land, serving God in their families and tribes and trusting Him for their leadership.  This individual reliance upon God when shared by all produced a culture of reliance upon God that covered the land.  But they too were broken.  Their individual trust turned to individual sin and reliance upon things other than God.  Soon God allowed them to be oppressed by neighbors.  Then they repented, then God would raise up a deliverer and they would live in peace and security, then the whole cycle would start again.

In Samuel, the people cry to God for a king.  It seems they wanted to be like other nations.  God warns them about the weaknesses of kings and kingdoms, but they persist.  When God tells Samuel to anoint their king, he comforts the broken-hearted prophet by telling him that it was not he they have rejected, but God himself.

The small thing is our independent reliance upon God and no one else, every man, woman and child trusting in and being accountable to God.  This idea is so slippery; and because we are broken and lazy, we give our loyalty, our authority, to others who promise in their brokenness to help us with our responsibilities.  Every organization, be it government, labor union, service club or church, must be ruled by the independent, God-reliant people who created it, lest it rule them and destroy them.

We can do it; it’s just a little thing.

“There will never be a church where every meeting is thrilling, but there could be a church where Christians gather with the anticipation that the Spirit could invade their hearts at any moment, and think that maybe He is, without their realizing it.”    From Real Church by Larry Crabb

Great quote, but when will we define the church as people; all day, every day, in or out of a meeting?  Let’s all expect the Lord to be at work in our lives every minute of every hour whether we are conscious of it or not.  He is!

There is an instant, if only that brief, where we don’t care about ourselves.  We are lost in, engulfed in, the love of God revealed to us through the death of Jesus.  Since He died for us and made it be about us, we realize we can forget about ourselves.  Unfortunately, the moment passes.  We revert to pre-salvation, self-centered thinking, which gets married to and supported by incorrect Christian teaching.  We begin to believe that since He made it be about us, we should also.  Our liberty, freedom from self-awareness, is now gone.  We begin the slide to practical atheism that leaves us no different in outlook than the world.  If that is not tragic enough, we convince ourselves that the slide is actually maturity in Christ.