For our next book, we are reading one of the classics by a terrific Christian
author: Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. If you have been looking for a good month to join the discussions, this would be a great time to come. We will post more information the closer we get to the discussion.
Just a reminder that our normal Tuesday night Bible study is not being held at the church. Our book club will meet at the Panera on Southgate, and the Bible Quiz team will meet at the church.
When? 6:00pm for both.
What? The rest of Dorothy Sayers’, Letters to a Diminished Church
This Sunday, we have a lot going on with missions at LHC. During the service we will have with us and have a chance to honor several local ministries and missionaries we work with.
For the sermon time, we are going to have a conversation with Brad Novosad, missionary to college campuses, and David Nicholson, missionary to Mormon communities in Utah. We will hear about their hearts, their work, and pick their brains about what it means to reach our communities for Christ.
Immediately following the service, we are going to eat a meal together. We have nursery care and activities for elementary aged kids as well. During the meal, we will have a silent auction and raffle – with all proceeds going to the missions work of LHC.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
How would you finish the phrase, “Love is…”? We could, and we often do, put all kinds of things and people into that sentence. We use “love” to apply to a radical array and variety of items in our lives. I love a well made mocha. I also love my wife. I love hiking in the Colorado Rockies. I also love my friends. Because we use this word to apply to so many different things, we often lose sight of the power and meaning of love. Sometimes, when a word means almost anything, it comes to mean almost nothing.
So, what does it mean that “God so loved the world” that he gave his one and only Son? John uses a powerful word for love here, and we ought to look at it in at least three ways. This love is attention. When we have a deep love for someone or something, it consumes our attention. They are on our minds often if not all the time, and we are interested in their well-being and their condition. To love a thing is to give our attention to a thing.
I started reading Gary Thomas’ Pure Pleasure the other day, and I found one of his opening premises to be right on the money. He writes, “Spiritual triumph begins and ends with finding our satisfaction in God above all things.” He argues that the best way to deepen relationship with God and find true spiritual transformation is to find our joy and pleasure in Him, instead of being frightened into obedience.
There are two ways to encourage a walk with God, one through fear of the consequences of sin, and the other through love of God. We ought to never ignore or stop paying attention to how sin robs us of life and destroys our relationships, but we need to pick up the theme of love and joy and pleasure in God.
Are we excited about what life with God in this world can be like? Or are we afraid of what sin will do to us? Both questions are valid, but for some reason we tend to ignore the first and most enduring reason for life with Christ.
Do I seek God because I love Him? Do I want His life in mine because I am spellbound by His glory? Does my heart long for the beauty and majesty of God?
Several of our teens are involved in Bible Quiz – a discipleship ministry devoted to getting teens
to interact deeply with Scripture and be involved with adults and sponsors as mentors. Their work turns into competition every few weeks, and this weekend they will be at LHC.
I encourage you to come and be inspired by what our teens are doing in memorizing and learning God’s Word.
Schedule: 10:00am through 4:00pm.
Are you aware of all we do for home and foreign missions through LHC? Do you know who we support, what they do and where they are? Do you want a chance to not only learn the answers to these questions but have an opportunity to meet several of our missionaries?
Then Missions Week is for you! From Sunday the 14th to Sunday the 21st, LHC will devote its service and Bible Study times to focusing on the missions we help support around the world, and talk about how we can do more.
Our schedule looks like this:
Feb 14th, Sunday am: Home Missions Emphasis with guests Nate Banke (campus missionary to CSU) and Brad Novosad (campus missionary to CC and UCCS).
Feb 14th Lunch: Missions Banquet at church. We will have raffles, a silent auction, and several missionaries and local organizations will be with us to meet you.
Feb 16th, Tuesday 6:00 pm: Bob and LeAnn Bachman with Convoy of Hope will be our guests. They will share what they and Convoy have done around the world in compassion missions.
Feb 21st, Sunday am: Foreign Missions Empasis. Jay Risner, missionary to Africa, will be our guest speaker.
The Assemblies of God has a long record of presence and assistance in Haiti, including (currently) two full-time missionaries, and over 200 churches. The AG relief organization, Convoy of Hope has been to Haiti many times on various relief projects over the last several years.
If you are looking for a good organization to donate through, you couldn’t do any better that these. Go to www.ag.org, view the video and click on the banner to the right, “Help for Haiti” to donate.
The book we begin in January, 2010 is a wonderful and convicting look at a church universal that needs to recover its roots in Christ to make any kind of real difference in the world. Dorothy Sayers, though known for her fiction, writes powerful essays to the church encouraging us back to what she calls the drama of dogma.
From the Amazon description:
What must a person believe to be a Christian? Dorothy Sayers lays out age-old doctrines without prettying-up or watering-down. She brings them vividly to life by showing how the Bible, history, literature, and modern science fit together to make religion not only possible but necessary in our time.
So whether you are reading the great works of Western literature, thinking about your place in God’s universe, or simply dealing with the thousand-and-one problems of daily living, this powerful book has words of both challenge and comfort for you.
Our first meeting will be Tuesday, January 19th at 6:00pm at the Panera on Powers and Carefree. We will cover the first 6 chapters.
