Good Friday

 This week is always a busy week.  I am excited because we celebrate the resurrection of our Savior on this coming Sunday.  And that means that two days earlier we celebrate good Friday.  Every year it is a reminder that we call something good that no one would seemingly call good.  

In life, death is never truly good.  Even in cases where death is a occasion filled with the joy of knowing that our loved one has gone on to an eternity with God there is still sorrow.  While we might try to make death seem more palatable, it is never good.  I know this because it is not a part of the creation that God called good.  And I know this because it will not be a part of our lives of eternal and unending joy (when we have placed our trust in Jesus.)  Death is in the Bible called an enemy.  It is not good.  And so to call the day on which we celebrate the death of someone is an odd thing.  How can death be not good, but the death of Jesus be commemorated as good Friday.  

It is because of what His life and death accomplish for us.  It is good because the work that He finished is transferable to us by the mercy of God.  All those who are covered by His blood and have responded in faith can be in a right relationship with God.  Because of Jesus.  And that is a very good thing.  We hope you will celebrate Good Friday - perhaps with our church - see you at 6 PM on Good Friday!

Resurrection

 We are coming up in a few weeks on the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I say it this way because we often think about Easter for all of the wrong reasons.  We think of the eggs and the candy and the bunny and we forget that this holiday was and remains a distinctively Christian holiday.  We celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior - Jesus Christ.  We do this because without the resurrection Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15 that our faith is in vain.  If Jesus is not alive by the power of the resurrection we have no point in gathering and worshiping.  

This means that this coming holiday is arguably the most critical for us to maintain as distinctively Christian.  Our church still has an Egg Hunt as an outreach, but even we should reconsider this as we should reconsider what it says to our community about the importance of what we celebrate.  If we believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ IS the most crucial part of our faith, why would we surrender it's celebration to a love of reproduction, nature, spring or worse.  We should hold these days as critically as they are important to us.  

May God help us to demonstrate in what we say and do that the living Christ is the most important part of these next few weeks.

2 months gone

 It is March, 2026.  As I get older I seem to notice the passing of time more and more.  2 months would not have been something I noticed a short while ago.  When I use that word "short", each of us have a different idea in mind.  For me it goes back less than 2 years - before I had been diagnosed with my second round of cancer.  Before I spent nearly 3 weeks in the hospital.  It seems that each day, each week and each month and year since then has been measured differently. 

It is interesting that Psalm 90:12 says, "Teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom."  (NASB)  What intrigues me is that we have to be taught, by God, to number our days.  You would think that counting days is fairly simple, and yet it requires God's help - to be taught to number them.  We would tend to count them wrongly without His help.  And we want to number them rightly because that is part of us presenting to God our wise hearts.  Wisdom is found in numbering our days correctly.

Do you count your time properly?  Are your days and minutes and hours and weeks and months and years monitored according to how wisely you are spending them?  What does God have to teach you about how to use your time?  Perhaps we have more to learn than we think!