First Presbyterian Church of Baton Rouge

The noise and strife, fear and anger in our world tears at all our souls. It wears us down. We need not only good analysis. We need a supply line to the only Source that can sustain us. God’s people have found for 30 centuries that the psalms do just that. They fill us in. They open us to the presence of God.

Welcome to the opening day of Restoring Your Soul Through Psalms! May Christ’s Spirit guide your prayers through Psalm 23 this week.

Senior Pastor Gerrit Dawson teaches us the basics of how to read a psalm to encounter God. By the end of the hour, you will have heard from the Lord!

Christianity identity is received. It’s a gift that comes from placing your life in Christ’s hands. Shed your baggage, pride and stubborn will in order to enter the gate of the City whose walls are salvation. Before you make the decision, those gates look very narrow. Rumors are that life in the city is constricting and dull, oppressive and confining. But the people on the ramparts are shouting a different message. Come in! It feels like death. And it is. You have to drop your pride, your personal identity markers, your goals of what makes for security and well-being. You have to take up the song of praise to the LORD of the City. It’s a narrow pass. But inside, you get reclothed. You get gifted with a new identity that is actually the one most like you all along. You get identity as a beloved, redeemed child of the High King. You become part of his massive re-blessing plan in the world.

We have a vision. We have a message of highest hope. We have a gospel. Good news. Good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people. For unto us a savior has been born. A savior has lived the life of true flourishing love and faithfulness. A savior has died to cleanse away our stains. A savior has risen to break death. A savior reigns who beckons the world to come to him and be part of the building of his great City. Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became the Son of Man, is the Lord of this City, and there is room for all who come. Could there be any better vision for our world than the City of God whose walls are salvation and whose gates are praise?

Interaction with the world, even enjoyment of its good, is not what undoes us as Christ’s people. Our over-identification with the world is not simply because we have common cause with the affairs of the world. Rather our failure to lift up our hearts, to see Christ in heaven and give thanks is what undoes our mission and compromises our witness. As citizens of the City of God, we may participate in the life of the world, striving with it, thankful for it, bruised by it, hoping for it, knowing that this is not our truest home. We touch these things but lightly. We do not possess anything and so we possess everything. For we belong to Christ and all things are his (I Cor. 3: 22-23).

Why would a good God allow suffering? Why would we be joyful amidst suffering? What can suffering do to us?

On Sunday, July 19, we welcomed to the pulpit our former associate pastor Dr. Alec Flynt. Arden and Alec and their three children (Caleb, Elizabeth Gray and Lydia) moved to Mobile in 2013 to plant Covenant Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama.

Watch Alec's message on God's sovereignty.