Today, I was on the CCEF blog and found a powerful post on this subject by one of their counselors, Alasdair Groves.  If you’re not familiar with the ministry of CCEF, I encourage you to peruse their website (ccef.org), purchase a few of their books or video series, or even make plans to attend one of their conferences or training courses.  I’ve been personally encouraged by their focus on “restoring Christ” in the context of counseling and they always seem to rightly end up preaching the Gospel to the heart issues.  I’ve read a few of their excellent books, and have several more sadly watching me from my bookshelf.

If you have time for little else right now, please read the post.  Here’s an excerpt:

Ultimately the proof of God’s goodness does not reside in the plenitude of physical and social blessings he gives. Rather, God’s goodness to us is that he has given us Christ, uniting us with him, filling us with his Holy Spirit, redeeming us from our sins, and sanctifying us into the image of his Son.

Does that sound like a theological platitude? Does the gift of Christ’s blood at the cross fail to excite you as much as the resolution of conflict in your marriage, kids to be proud of, a promotion, or taking that attractive girl to dinner and a movie? Then you, like me, are a Christian who finds it hard to believe that God is really good; and you, like me, are privately convinced that your own definition of good is really much better than God’s.

You can read the rest here.

Blessings!

God’s first statement to newly created man is presented as a blessing for man to work and do God’s will.   [28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28 ESV) Only because of the Fall do we view our G0d-given task as “work” and not blessing.  This is seen by what Lamech, Noah’s father states, “[28] When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son  [29] and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” (Genesis 5:28-29 ESV) Since the Fall man has been searching through success, inheritance, stocks, and investments to find a way out of work.

We are given a glimpse of rest from work in God’s rest after His work of Creation, and then the command to rest in Exodus 20:10.  Hebrews 4 also speaks to us to pursue rest in God as a means of keeping us from disobedience.  Jesus also came and did the work of His Father, God’s will, and completely and perfectly accomplished it by the power of the Spirit in Him (John 4:34;10:25; 17:4).  So while looking forward to the rest that is to come weekly and eternally, let us work in light of it being God’s will for us now.  God works, created us in His image to work, and promises rest in Him.  What joy to work and labor not just for money to feed our family or pay the bills, but to be image-bearers of God and fulfill God’s will for us.  Believer take heart that there is no difference with God in your occupation, but He through His plan for you has designed you to do that which you are doing.  So brothers and sisters work; work with joy in God knowing he is using your work to conform you to His image and bring Him glory in you doing His will.  Pray to the Spirit to work these ideas of work in you for the glory of God and your sanctification.

(For more on this subject of vocation, Tim Tsuei preached this message from Colossians a few months back.)

Our lease with the Hillsboro School District at Lincoln Street Elementary is coming to a close and we are thankful God has provided a new meeting place that will meet our needs so well. We look forward to the many new and enhanced ministry opportunities God will provide as we enter this new phase. The new service time is an unconventional one for our body, but we pray that it will be a smooth adjustment and that everyone is able to adjust their schedules without undue inconvenience.

The building will open for us at 2PM and we will be able to have a brief worship team sound check, start the coffee maker, and do any final prep for our organized time of worship as we worship our Savior and God together.  There is a cafe area with small tables and chairs immediately behind the worship area that will be equipped with coffee and open for informal fellowship before we start our time of worship. In light of that, we would like to invite everyone to aim for an earlier arrival time, perhaps 2:30, to leave room for conversation over coffee, prayer together, or location of the nursery & toddlers classes. The fellowship area will also be open post service until 6:00 at which time the building closes.

The church building is located just off Hwy 26 in Hillsboro, near the Cornelius Pass Road overpass and right next door to the DEQ testing facility.  A map is located below and we’ll also have signs at the road near the entrance and attendants helping you find a parking space.  We pray you’re able to join us as we gather to be shaped by God’s revelation in the Word.

View Larger Map

This morning, I came across a blog dedicated to “Practical Shepherding” for pastors.  It’s very helpful and a recent post gives some good tips for how we all can help minister to the widows and others in need in our church body.

HT: Challies

Tim

It is The Gospel Coalition, and I could not recommend this website enough. This is a group of evangelicals who are committed to aiding and strengthening churches with gospel-centered materials.  I would encourage you to stop over there, maybe subscribe to one of their blogs for a while, listen to some sermons (on James perhaps), and whatever else peaks your interest.  I have been following Justin Taylor’s blog Between Two Worlds for a few years now, and I frequently download sermons and read Themelios.

So who are they, and why does this website with all these resources exist?  The beginning of the preamble to their foundational documents states, “We are a fellowship of evangelical churches deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures…We have committed ourselves to invigorating churches with new hope and compelling joy based on the promises received by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.”

Oh, and the greatest part, is that all these resources are free (except some sermons link to churches that make you pay, but with 44,000 I think you can find plenty of free ones)!  So go on and enjoy, drink deeply from God’s word preached, taught, and written about by men and women who love Christ and His Gospel.

“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact?  All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.  Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove!  I’m being humble’, and almost immediately pride-pride at his own humility-will appear.”

“Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be.  No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point.  The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.  By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.  And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.”

“The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”

He [the Enemy] would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.”

I mentioned Sunday that this section is showing us that we need wisdom, that God is wise, and that God is generous.  Verse 6 changes topics from that of the “willing Father to the waiting child”.  The terms “faith” and “doubting” are set in direct opposition to each other.  The same combination of words is found in Matthew 21:21, and in both places the words have similar meaning.  Faith means more than just an intellectual belief that God will give you what you ask for; it includes confident, unwavering trust in God.  Doubting has the idea of a basic conflict of loyalties, and this is seen in the terms “double-minded” and “unstable” a few verses later.

The doubting one is pictured vividly by a continual tossing of the surface of the sea, caused by the friction of wind over open water.  The doubter here has no set beliefs or loyalties; they are easily swayed or persuaded by a good sales pitch.  Their loyalty to God is constantly threatened, and they do not posses that confident, unwavering trust in God.  The doubter is called a double-minded man, or literally a double-souled man.  That means that his heart’s loyalties are divided, and he has not decided whether to put his faith in God or not.  This double-minded person is in direct contrast to the believer who is enduring through trials toward maturity/perfection (1:4).

Christians must guard against two errors from this passage; first this text does not support the “name it and claim it” philosophy.  That erring philosophy says believers should ask God for whatever they need, and then act as though it is theirs.  The problem is, that in doing this, you belittle God’s grace in giving and put all of your eggs in the basket of your faith.  It is God who graces us with faith to ask for wisdom in the midst of trials, and it is God’s grace to grant wisdom to us when we ask for it.

Second we must guard against the idea that we have to suppress all mental doubts and really, really, really believe, and then God will give us wisdom.  This will lead one to great despair and self-introspection as one seeks the genuineness of their faith instead of the generous character of God.  God gives freely without reproach.

The double-minded person is diametrically opposed to the persevering believer in verse 12 who is steadfast under trial, and also to God with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.  The doubter is insincere and inconsistent in his relationship to God, and he should not expect God to answer his request for wisdom.

The church isn’t defined by what we want it to be or what others think it should be. Instead, the church is what God has defined it to be.  In Part 1 we saw how God brings strangers together in one body to be His people, creating a new primary ethnicity rather than one that originates with our skin color or heritage. The passage then goes on to talk about an even deeper relationship that exists between us now:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.  (Ephesians 2:19-22)

When Paul, the inspired author of this letter, refers to “the household of God” he’s talking about a family relationship.  That is, through the work of Christ crucified and risen, God has brought us into His family. We are now His children through adoption and brothers and sisters with each other (that beats being Facebook friends pretty much every day of the week, by the way). We may already be using those terms to refer to each other, but do we regularly appreciate the significance of this close bond, not formed by our blood relationship but by Christ’s blood? We are family.

Such a profound truth should affect every aspect of our interactions with and care for each other. When you face a difficulty with a member of your physical family, you probably approach it with a degree of forbearance and understanding that you may not offer a stranger or casual acquaintance (at least you should!). In the same way we should treat other family members in the body with generosity and faith, believing that God is working to continue His work of reconciliation between us and other broken people. If we truly see ourselves this way, we’ll also be quicker to jump into ministries run by our family and help make things better than to criticize how things are being done. We’ll recognize that to treat church as consumers (where what we get is of first importance) is antithetical to our new position as family.

Would you pray with us that this identity of the church as family would be supernaturally applied and lived out in our community at Grace & Truth?

Most of us have had the experience of being an outsider. Whether as a new family in a close-knit neighborhood or as a visitor to a foreign country, we dislike the uncomfortable and isolated position of the stranger. Being unknown by those around us threatens us on a deeper level than mere words can express.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.  (Ephesians 2:19-22)

Those who were being reconciled to God in the early church came from various religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds. New Gentile (non-Jewish) believers in particular were on “foreign soil” and often felt like strangers in the Christian community.  Paul assures them — and us by the Spirit — that they are not under-privileged outcasts but full-fledged citizens of God’s kingdom. Regardless of the differences between backgrounds or preferences or financial portfolios, there was a new relationship forged by the shed blood of Christ that supersedes all of that, and that relationship was a truer reality.  Full privileges of citizenship beats being an outcast every day of the week.

Perhaps you also, need to be reminded of the nature of the Christian community God is creating, the Church. It is not just a community club filled with people having shared interests, nor is it a random hodgepodge of people with no affiliation. In Christ, we have together become something we were not. We are now citizens of a new kingdom.

Part 2

Each of these believers completed the application paperwork and follow-up discussion/s with one or both elders, then testified of God’s grace in their lives before the body at large and were individually affirmed by the congregation. Hearing people publicly share how God has reached into their lives bringing change by the power of the gospel is an awesome, God glorifying time to those of us who have known that same grace. These past two gatherings have been a gift of God’s goodness to our body. Jesus, thank you!

Beth and Jennifer spoke as part of our outdoor worship gathering on July 4th. Then on July 11th we heard from Elizabeth, Brian, JoeAnn, Barbara, Annie, & Nick. Welcome each of you!