Bible

As we approach a new year, many of you may be considering a fresh start with your Bible reading. I encourage you to take an honest look at your own spiritual disciplines, and to look for fresh ways to know God better through his Word. Remember that in order to worship God in spirit and truth, we need to know God accurately through his Word.

Hi! This winter, I will be taking a course called Perspectives that is about the role each believer plays in God's plan to reach the nations. It is put together by the US Center for World Mission, the publishers of Mission Frontiers magazine.

This morning in our sermon we're looking at the names of God from Psalm 86. Specifically we're looking at God's name, Adonai. It means, "my Master." To help us appreciate how David the Psalmist would have used the names of God, I switched out the English translations of God's names for the Hebrew originals. Sometimes it helps us to do this in our minds as we read the Old Testament to cause us to slow down and reflect on how much God's names reveal about him. Here is Psalm 86:

Psalm 86
A Prayer of David.
Incline…

This afternoon I spent time with Benjamin Tangeman at the Cary office of Trans World Radio. Ben has been working for them for years and has been connected to them through his parents and grandparents for decades (he spent his first ten years on the island of Bonaire, while his parents worked for TWR). It was an inspiring look into a ministry I knew virtually nothing about.

The idea of our current sermon series on the names of God, What is God Like?,  is to use the names of God as a way to think about God.

On September 7th we are providing an opportunity for water baptisms, so this is a good time to revisit what we believe about baptism. The basic idea is that believers should be baptized by immersion in water as a believer. The two halves of this idea are equally important to get straight in our minds: (1) believers and (2) baptized by immersion in water. Thus, the simple test of whether you (or your child) should be baptized is whether or not you (or your child) believe in Jesus and haven't already been baptized as a believer.

In our last post we introduced Daniel's seventy weeks, this mysterious reference from Daniel 9:24-27. It is often used as a defense of a 7-year time of hardship called "the great tribulation." Yet, we are taking a different approach to the passage. We began with verse 24 yesterday, and today we will look at the rest of the passage going verse-by-verse.

If you've read much of anything connected to the end times, you've likely heard about "the great tribulation." Or maybe you've even heard about Daniel's 70 weeks. These issues are connected to our view of the end times or eschatology, "the study of the last things." All of this can be endlessly fascinating but also wildly speculative. Arriving at solid conclusions from the biblical text can be difficult at times, impossible at others. Here we want to examine one piece of this complex puzzle, Daniel 9:24-27.

This Sunday morning we have the opportunity to do something unique, life-changing, vitally important to every facet of our life, and also mysterious: We can draw near to God. James 4:8 says, "draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." The author of Hebrews calls us to "draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith" (10:22).