Discipleship

Over the last months, and years, our youth leaders and pastors have been prayerfully considering changes to our youth ministries to make them more effective. This includes our Sunday children's ministry and our youth group(s). We believe we have found the will of the Lord for our church for the foreseeable future.

On August 25 Marty Machowski will be doing a seminar on a new curriculum we are using in our Children's Ministry. He will also be preaching that Sunday morning (26th). To introduce you to him a little bit here is an interview he did recently on Bob Kauflin's website.

Continuing our discussion of biblical convictions regarding work, unemployment, and even under-employment, here are convictions 6-8 with a ninth point added about temptations for the unemployed.

After a recent sermon I knew of a major change it needed even before I left the stage. Usually it takes at least a few hours, sometimes a couple days, but when I preached on God's view of work from Ephesians 4:28, I knew I needed to address in a more helpful way those who were unemployed or under-employed.

Serving at A Hand of Hope PRC you see the compassionate side of the pro-life fight, showing the love of Jesus in real and tangible ways to women in need.

This Sunday we will celebrate the Lord's Supper. It is an act that some of us have done hundreds of times. Such seemingly routine acts can lose their richness and power if we forget what exactly they mean—just like a wedding anniversary can be just another task on my calendar if I forget that it means this amazing person actually said, "Yes!" to spending the rest of her life with me.

Yesterday Phil preached on reasons we give our finances to the church. To put it as snappy as Sam Houston did: "When I got baptized, my wallet got baptized, too." One of the sections of the sermon gave a rationale for why Christians should (at least) tithe. 

Ten Big realities about God and about us that we all need to hear every morning.

Jeremy Walker at the Reformation 21 blog recently wrote a post with recommended books and resources for Christians in the workplace. There is a variety of old and new, long and short, so pick one that fits what you're looking for.

Michelle Alston has created a list of Scriptures (and some paraphrased Scriptures) that unpack in wonderful completeness who we are in Christ. For some of these, the pronouns are changed to personalize them, and for others a paraphrase is used to get at the essence of the text. Yet, these several dozen texts remind us vividly that God not only loves us, but he wants us to grow in our understanding of that love.