On this episode, we finish our walk through the book If God Already Knows, Why Pray? by Doug Kelly! 

What are you waiting for in your life? Really sit back and think about it for a second. Maybe you are in the midst of a family situation or physical pain that you would say you are waiting for it to stop. Maybe you are waiting for kids to get a bit older, or have a bit more money in the old account, or hit a certain level of your career. Why are you looking forward to these things? If I could venture a guess, based on my own mind, we’re really looking for peace. It’s not really looking for nothing happening in our lives, just the ability to move through life only thinking about what is in front of you.

The characters in our passage this story have many things occupying their minds. We’ve got a famine, a grave concern we’ve not had to feel; we have lingering guilt from a two decade’s old betrayal; we have a family conflict stemming from favoritism strengthened from loss; most severely, we have the crushing parental dread of a child potentially in harms way. Where on earth does this family find peace? They are so far in the hole. We can say that they need to trust God, and we find evidence here that they do, but it is pretty buried in a lot of other motivations? Can they find peace, and if they can, can we?

Today, our main point is this: God can use even fear-filled obedience to bring peace to His people.

We begin a new series in our Sunday Night Lectures looking at the Spiritual Disciplines in the Christian Life. We start by looking through the book by Doug Kelly If God Already Knows, Why Pray? 

How can we use our fear to grow spiritually? What do your fears tell you about yourself? Have you ever gotten an out of the blue or late night call from someone who doesn’t normally call you like that? There is often a sense of fear at least wondering what might be wrong or what might suddenly be expected of you. The cryptic “We need to talk…” text is even worse! The three dots means you did something! The worst case scenario is when you know, or at least are pretty sure you know, what those three dots mean. You know what you did, and now you have been discovered.

Now, it is one thing to receive that communication from a friend or parent, but what if on the caller ID it read, “God”? What comes to your mind? “Did He see what happened the other night? What is He going to ask me to do? What topic do I need to make sure we stay FAAARR away from?” When we feel the twinge in our conscience, that is something like getting that phone call. Or when we feel our chest tighten up when thinking about a worry of ours, it is an invitation to consider what God might have to say about those emotions.

Today we are going to consider our main point: God prods our fears to shape our faith.

We are going to see these next few chapters develop our characters in some pretty profound ways. There will be many echos of what we have seen before in Genesis that will resolve in some interesting ways. I invite you over these next few weeks as new semesters start, as we approach the back half of the year, to consider along with these characters how God may be calling you to grow. This week, we will see how God lays His hand on them and in the coming weeks, we will see how God shapes them.

On this episode, we finish our series on the Apostles' Creed looking at what the eternal state is going to be after we die! 

What is God doing? It’s a question we ask from time to time, and what we are really asking is how do we find out? How does God speak today?

Joseph’s life is about to take a radical turn. God is about to reveal the reason why everything has gone the way that it has and give another generation deep confidence in his ability to work through all circumstances, including through some rare means.

Central to this passage are these two dreams of Pharaoh and Joseph’s ability, with God’s help, to reveal the interpretations of them. We will see this pop up again in the Old Testament when we get to the prophet Daniel of Lion’s Den fame. These are the only two occasions where we will see a Hebrew practice dream interpretation, so this is a rare moment in Scripture (Matthews). Both times are strange visions with no real obvious interpretation. We know that God can speak very clearly, even with pagan rulers, through dreams. We have even seen that in Genesis when God warns Abimelech in a dream not to touch Sarah, Abraham’s wife: Genesis 20:3 “But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife.” No ambiguity there, huh? God was able to protect Sarah even when Abraham wasn’t.

So why not just do that here with Joseph? Couldn’t God have intervened on Joseph’s behalf through a very clear dream like that to Pharaoh? Couldn’t he have just spoken to Pharaoh plainly about a famine coming and, oh by the way, you need to use Joseph as your administrator? He could have. So why? Let’s explore that as we tackle our main point today: God’s control is comprehensive, and God’s control is good

Why does God bother with our bodies? What happens to them when Christ returns, and what does this mean for how we treat them now? Find out in this edition of our Sunday Evening lectures on the Apostles' Creed! 

Could you have predicted what the last five years of your life would contain? I can tell you that there is at least one year none of us saw coming. The number of jokes about 20/20 vision, seeing clearly the way forward in a new decade were made viciously ironic in arguably one of the most confusing years of our generation. Even here locally, we could never have guessed exactly who we would lose and when, leaving us astonished year after year.

But we also couldn’t have predicted the joys of the last five years either. Who would have guessed the number of children that now sit in our midst! Many of them didn’t even exist five years ago! We’ve added many new families, grown our school, and seen our denomination grow and stay faithful to God.

As much as things have indeed changed in the last five years, most day to day operations felt like, well, day to day operations. It seemed like many weeks or months would go by where we just waited. That great theologian Dr. Seuss once weighed in on waiting in his book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go. In the midst of a lifetime of travels, the great doctor said, you will find one place that will fill you with dread, the waiting place. It is a place where everyone is just waiting, waiting for a phone call or a train to come in, and he calls this “a most useless place.” Instead, he says, you should be going where the boom bands are playing, where things are happening.

Now, the venerable doctor is onto something, but his emphasis isn’t quite right. Though waiting is often seen as a blight, and stirs our minds to see it not right, it isn’t the wait that is useless, you see, it is often the means God forms you to be. Things aren’t only happening with the boom bands. Things are always happening, even in the waiting place, because our God is always at work, not in fits and starts, but never slumbering or sleeping.

We will see our two points today God is working even when you don’t see it and God’s return motivates our faithful working.

Tonight, we come to a most critical part of the creed. This is critical for a number of reasons, not the least of which because this is the gospel. The good news is that sins can be forgiven. This is our message that we preach to the world, and we are the only ones able to proclaim it. Political organizations can preach help, but they can't preach forgiveness. 

Getting the gospel wrong has led to just about every problem that the church has. We can so easily misunderstand it because we are sinners. We are born with a bias against understanding it. So we need to take the time to walk through this carefully. Some of these things are going to (hopefully) not be news to you, but this is a great opportunity to see where you heart might have missed the comfort and encouragement you are entitled to or where it has gained undue complacency that you are not entitled to.

You have heard it said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. I’m here to add a third certainty to life: temptation. Temptation exists everywhere because we still have sin within us. Its power has been broken by our putting our faith in Christ and having the Spirit living inside us. This means that we don’t have to sin every time temptation comes along like we did before Christ. But we aren’t away from sin’s presence yet. And if there is anything we learn about temptation is that it is persistent, usually more so than we are.

Joseph’s case turned out to be different than a lot of ours. Despite the constant temptation, Joseph, quite impressively, resisted it. One theologian thought that Joesph’s ability to rule himself was more impressive than running the country of Egypt (Matthews). How do temptations actually work? How did Joseph resist them so well? How can we learn how to resist temptations better? Do things always go better when you resist temptation? We will try to answer those questions as we look at our two points today: Temptations want your loyalty, yet only God will be loyal to you.