Family

We are excited to tell you about an opportunity to get involved in our community through a ministry called Safe Families for Children. Safe Families is a volunteer ministry that exists to provide biblical hospitality, love, and support to families in crisis, largely through providing parents with safe places for their children to stay while they work to resolve whatever crises that they are experiencing, such as unemployment, homelessness, or financial difficulty. This ministry equips churches like ours to create support networks for desperate people in our community who have no one to turn to in times of crisis. They do this through creating teams of people to come alongside of these families in various roles. This is one of the really neat things about Safe Families - that there are many ways to be involved.

Last Sunday I preached on 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8, one of the most challenging passages on sexual immorality in the New Testament. The overall theme of the passage is on our holiness, but purity is the central focus of that holiness--at least, within this particular passage.

In the sermon we also looked at the category of lust from Matthew 5:28, I briefly mentioned pornography as one of the most significant issues of our day. It has made life treacherous for all of us regardless of our personal level of temptation. The ubiquity of the internet--through the obvious sources like mainstream…

by Cassie Sasser

A Resource for Advent

Marty Machowski and Sovereign Grace Music have given us two new resources to help us see the Christ Child and the risen Savior in the Prepare Him Room advent book and the Christmas CD of the same name.  I say “to help us”, because isn’t it the case with all thoughtful Christian material for children that we all (both the child and the adult who has the privilege of reading it to him) grow deeper in our understanding of the Savior?

As our own family life began, over 45 years ago, one of…

Just under three years ago our church lost Scott Monroe, but our collective loss was nothing compared to what the Monroe family experienced themselves. It taught all of us a great deal about the earthly side of death—a side very different from the heavenly side of it that Scott joyfully experienced in a brilliant moment. As a church we are still learning how to come alongside those who have faced trials and tragedies very different from our own, but this is what Christian love and compassion call us to do. In this note from Carla, she shares something of the way the church has entered into her suffering these last several years. We hope it is both encouraging and challenging for you.

Completing the Ugandan side of Josie’s adoption took just over five weeks. Eli and Esther returned to the U.S. after two weeks, and God taught me so much in the remaining three weeks about what it means for His strength to be made perfect in my weakness; His grace was completely sufficient for me - and for the rest of my family (2 Cor 12:9).

The rest of this story moves so much faster than the beginning, but now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I am clearly able to see God’s hand in the waiting. 

It was absolutely thrilling to have a baby in the house at last, but we knew that God was only just beginning the story of our family, and we were eager to see what else He had in store for us.

When Eli and I were married in 2003, we already knew that adoption would very likely be part of our story. We started out the same way so many other couples do, desiring a sweet, tiny baby (or several!) to call our own. However, my infertility had been diagnosed many years before, so we knew that God would be writing our story differently.

Josh Blount is a pastor at Living Faith Church in Franklin, WV, one of our sister churches. He wrote an article for the Sovereign Grace blog about Why Martin Luther Would Love Children's Ministry.