Waterbrooke Church

This Sunday, we studied another great Psalm – Psalm 19.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world” (Reflections, 73). What makes this Psalm so beautiful is that it opens up to us God’s glory not just in creation but in His Word. 

Here’s the challenge that we all face: We live in a world of both glory and catastrophe. We behold the majesty of billions of stars in a northern night sky. We feel the warmth of the summer sun as it caresses our faces as it makes its way across the Minnesota sky. It is glorious! Yet, inside and all around, simultaneously, we feel deep brokenness. Injustice and corruption plague the world where we work, create, and play. Sin continually tempts us and draws us away from enjoying God’s glory. Beholding glory creates a deep ache for God’s glory to fill all the earth and all our lives for all eternity. Herman Bavinck writes, “The gravity and the vanity of life seize on us in turn. Now we are prompted to optimism, then to pessimism. Man weeping is constantly giving way to man laughing. The world stands in the sign of humor which has well been described as a laughter and a tear.” This is where God’s word becomes precious to us. It helps and guides and restores and revives us in a world of glory and catastrophe. 

Waterbrooke Family,

This Sunday was Father’s Day. For our message this week, we spent a little time together meditating upon Psalm 23. The twenty-third psalm is without a doubt the most well-known and, I would suggest, well-loved of all 150 psalms. And I think rightly so.

This psalm brings the assurance that from beginning to end the Lord, Yahweh, shepherds his people through all the storms of life and brings us safely into our eternal home with Himself forever. It is a psalm of enormous comfort. It is a psalm of rock-solid hope and peace. What we often don’t recognize is that it is also a very personal psalm from the Son about his Father. 

One commentator reminds us that the Psalms are the most quoted part of the Old Testament in the New Testament. He writes: “This was not because the Psalms seemed to them to cover the full range of human emotions – a psalm for every mood. Not at all. It was not sentimentalism or anthropocentrism. Rather, it was because the Psalms were about the Messiah, the Christ of God.” Come this Sunday as we consider the twenty-third psalm through the lens of Jesus. It will prove to be an amazing picture for us of the purest and highest Father and Son relationship that led to our adoption into God’s family. Because Psalm 23 is about Jesus, we can be sure that He will shepherd us all the way home! Looking forward to worshiping with you all!

New Series this Summer - “Sing to the King.” It is a study of the psalms with a focus on God’s provision of a righteous, redeeming King for His people. That King is Jesus. Thank God that He is the King that we all need but could never find. In a world where leaders are perpetually flawed and fallen, there is One who can be trusted.

This Sunday, in our series called “Sing to the King”, we considered Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is one of the two “gateway” psalms (along with Psalm 1) that are designed to be the lenses through which we read all of the other 150 psalms. Psalm 2 declares that as aggressively evil and unjust as the world around us might be, nothing can withstand God’s zeal to establish the kingdom of His Son.

Do we realize how passionate our God is for the entire cosmos to be under the reign of His good King? The world might be passionate to throw off God’s rule over their lives, but it cannot compare to God’s passion to bring all the nations out from under sinful human tyranny and under the just, good, and faithful rule of King Jesus.

This Sunday’s message is called "Yahweh’s Chosen King". Come and be encouraged and filled with awe and hope at a God who will not rest until every corner of the earth finds its rest under the reign of King Jesus.

Pray for our church family and pray over your hearts that Christ would meet with us and minister His wonderful grace to us.

This Sunday, our sermon was entitled “Pursuing Godliness.” Often, in the western world, we think of our spiritual lives as a private or personal matter between us and God. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the New Testament, our personal godliness is a crucial part of the church’s mission to proclaim and to protect the truth of the gospel in a world in desperate need of Christ. This Sunday’s message will be taken from 1 Timothy 6:6-19 and it is a postscript to our study on the letter of Ephesians. 1 Timothy was written by the apostle Paul to encourage the pastor of the church at Ephesus to remember how crucial the church is to the mission of God in the world. Paul writes, “I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:14-15). How we live as the church upholds or undermines the truth of God. 

Kevin Dibbley, Senior Pastor

God’s people continually need encouragement. You do. I do. Our missionaries do. In the mission of God, it is easy for Christians to forget that God has designed the church to build one another up and to encourage each other in the faith. This side of heaven, the Christian life is fraught with perils. We are in a spiritual battle. It is often discouraging and tiring. Yet, we are not alone in this.

This week, our sermon, from Ephesians 6:18-20,  was called Fostering a Passion for Prayer. As the apostle Paul comes to the end of this letter to the church, he calls for an all-out commitment to prayer. Paul knows that human effort and ingenuity cannot advance the kingdom of Christ. Unlike Muslims who respond to an external call to prayer 5 times a day, Paul wants believers to respond to an internal call to prayer continuously. 

Kevin Dibbley, Senior Pastor

As we continue working our way through Paul's letter to the Colossians, we are encouraged to prayerfully live our lives and walk before the world in a manner which shows how beautiful Christ is.  Our personal contexts are a means through which God intends to communicate grace; both to us and through us. Though they may not be glamorous by the world's standards, we're in the service of the King!

Andy Keppel