Series: Celebrate Your Recovery!
Series: Celebrate Your Recovery!
Series: Celebrate Your Recovery!
Series: Spiritual Filters
6:00pm THE JOURNEY SERVICE
Pastor Steve
Acts 15:36-41 and 2 Timothy 4:9-11
Series: Celebrate Your Recovery!
Series: Celebrate Your Recovery!
Faith Promise Sunday
9:30am The Blend
Dr. A. Brent Cobb
Mentoring People Who are Answering God’s Call to Christian Service
Faith Promise Sunday
11:00am The Bridge
Dr. A. Brent Cobb
Mentoring People Who are Answering God’s Call to Christian Service
Revelation 22
By Pastor Brad
Revelation Song
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Revelation 22:13
I’m sure you’ve been wondering what I would say on this very last devotional of 2011.
God has taught me so much this past year through this experience. Although I wasn’t quite looking forward to this assignment at the beginning, God has been faithful to me and helped me strongly finish this commitment. I am grateful for this opportunity to share my life stories with you all.
Many weeks I struggled to find the right words to share with you, and during that time I found myself trusting God more, allowing him to use me in the way that had planned for that week. You would think that I’ve learned that lesson by now.
At this year’s Thanksgiving Worship Musical, Extravagant Journey, we concluded with Revelation Song by Jennie Lee Riddle. What an exciting time it will be as we gather around the throne in worship singing to the one who has set us free from the bondage of sin.
Christ longs to say to each of us, “Welcome home, you’re forgiven, let’s eat!” It’s up to us to turn towards God and he will run to us with open arms.
Click here to view Revelation Song from the 2011 TWM Extravagant Journey. (Please note that the picture quality is reduced for web viewing.)
You may pre-order your copy of Extravagant Journey to be released in late January 2012 from the church office.
Revelation 21
By Pastor Libby
Intro to Heaven 101
I enjoy reading. Reading takes me to faraway places and to situations that I as a simple Idaho girl may or may not encounter. I love reading a good mystery.
In Revelation 21 we are introduced to the mystery of a new heaven and a new earth. We are dazzled by the myriad of jewels and precious stones of the Holy City, Jerusalem. Something we will never see in this life but in the next. We are promised by God that he will make everything new. Nothing fictional in this reading, but something you and I will experience as heaven becomes real for us.
John 14:1-3 says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
Yes it will be sad to leave what we know behind in death or in the second coming, yet there are many things John relates to us in this passage that I will gladly embrace. In heaven there will be no more crying, no more pain, fear will not be present there.
Many fictional books and movies have been written that endeavor to tell us and scare us into believing that the last days, should be approached with fear and trembling. I still remember in sixth grade uncontrollably sobbing on the night I was to leave Salina, Kansas for a new life in Oregon, right after we had watched during the Sunday night Service the end times movie, “Thief in the Night.” I definitely couldn’t sleep that night or the next! I can’t tell you how right or wrong these things are in their interpretations, but I can tell you that Christ is not the author of fear. When I read Revelation 21 I am filled with hope and longing to see Jesus. Is your name “written in the Lamb’s book of life?” My prayer is that it is and that one day there will be a great celebration in your honor as you enter those pearly gates and claim your room!
Revelation Chapter 20
By Pastor Neil
Scripture: The Revelation 20
The Victory Celebration of the Ages
Chapter twenty of The Revelation is the great celebration passage of this book. Just in case the readers are worried that there is so much death and destruction that they can’t win, John shows them graphically just how complete the victory will be. There are a great many interpretations of this chapter that have been written even in just my lifetime, though that is getting longer and longer. People invent and reinvent ideas about what this one thousand years is about and just where it is that Satan will be sent. And many an evangelist has “made hay” on the Friday night of an evangelistic crusade as he/she portrayed the “lake of fire” and the likelihood that listeners who were not “right with God” were going to find themselves right there if they didn’t get their lives straightened up.
Over the years, I’ve just about decided that all the ways this has all been interpreted can’t all be right since people don’t all come to the same conclusion about how all of this is going to work out historically. What I think I am finding is that we may have been so hard pressed to find ways to get folks saved that we put all of our attention on things other than what is the great central truth here. It may indeed be true that this terrible fate that awaits the impenitent should be taken literally. It is certain that it should be taken seriously.
However, I think that there is, in the midst of this chapter, a glorious truth to be celebrated. And that great truth is that no matter what things may look like around us in “this old world”, as my Grandma used to say it, you can be sure of one thing, Christ is victorious now and in the end of the world. Whatever else happens to you, you want to be found trusting in God come what may. In life’s difficult times and terrible disappointments, the best answer will always be found when we trust in God for His guidance and help. He is the source of help and of all we can hope for. Circumstances won’t always be changed so that we like them better. But the promise of the presence of Christ is a certainty we can trust in.
John says in verse 6 of those who are in Christ, “Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them…” All of the mayhem that is threatened in this chapter for the impenitent is meaningless for those who remain faithful. This is a message John really wants his readers to see. The final victory of Christ in our lives today and in the end of the age is the true hope of all who trust in Him. No matter what you are facing, the message here is to keep trusting in God. This is your eternal hope!
