Bartimaeus Baptist Temple

Hello friends and family.  I’m excited to get to speak to you again this Sunday as we commemorate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus.  We had a wonderful time last Sunday with Joel and Dayna and the whole band worshiping together.  It was good to see everyone back who belongs with us and we had a new person come over from the nursing home.  The sad news was that Mary wasn’t with us.  Keep her in your prayers as she’s now under hospice care.

This Sunday is Resurrection Sunday.  We’ll be celebrating with a time of communion, special music, and a light dinner after the service.  I hope you can come and join us.  I’m going to be sharing from 1 Corinthians 15:1-14.  Here Paul explains how crucial Jesus’ resurrection is to the message of the Gospel.  Without it, he says, our faith is worthless!  Most people don’t have any trouble believing that Jesus was a real person.  They will usually agree that He was a good person.  We have historical record that He was crucified by the Roman government, so most people can accept that.  The problem comes when we talk about the fact that he was also raised from the dead three days later.  This is no less true for its incredible nature, and as Paul points out, there were many who saw Him after He was raised.

This Sunday, I would like to share with you two things.  First we will talk about the necessity of the resurrection to our faith.  Then I’ll give you some information that you can use when you share your faith with others and the question of His resurrection comes up.  Let us proclaim with boldness and confidence, “He is risen!”

Hello family and friends.  I hope you have found God’s blessing this week and have shared it with those around you.  We had such a special time last Sunday.  We shared from our hearts and I know that the Lord was there working among us.  Let it be the start of a new depth of relationship within our body.

Linda and I are having to use DART paratransit services right now and since we ran long last week we had to hurry off.  I hate that we weren’t able to capture Pastor David’s message on forgiveness because it goes well with what I want to share with you this week.  If you have a good memory, you might remember that you’ve heard this before, but I think it is something we need to understand.  It was one of the first sermons I preached here and I’d like to revisit it in light of the things we’ve been learning over the past few months.

One of the things we like to emphasize when we study the scripture is how it all goes together.  One thing we should remember when we read our Bible is that the chapters and verses were added for convenience long after the original text was written.  The chapter and verse breaks don’t always fall in the best places to help us understand what the text is saying.  Matthew 18 is not one of those cases.  I think it’s just right.  I’m also not a big fan of the subheadings many translations add, especially when they stray into the realm of commentary.  However I’m going to provide my own for this chapter, “To Protect and to Save.”

Jesus is telling us many things in this chapter, but we will focus on some main themes.  Protect the weak and the innocent.  Address sin with love.  Strive always for redemption.  Forgiveness is essential.  I hope this will help us to understand why it is so important that we deal with sin in our lives and in our church body as well as the redemptive purpose that is ever present throughout God’s word.  I look forward to seeing you there!

I hope you were in church with us last week!  The Holy Spirit moved us in a different way.  Usually when Joel and his group come we can feel the Spirit right from the start and we are lifted to a higher place.  This week it seemed the mood was very heavy as we began to worship but we did see the spirit move and by the end of the service we had been ministered to.  There was praying for healing and praying for finances, there was praying for our spiritual well being as well as the ministry of this church.  I am excited about what is ahead for us over the next weeks both in our personal lives and as the body of this fellowship.

This week I am going to continue on from a couple of weeks ago when we talked about why we do the things we don’t want to do.  The second part of this sermon is OK how can we change?  The scripture vs this week are in Luke the 13Th Chapter vs 1-9.  In these verses God is showing his patience with us but also showing what he expects out of us. If we refuse to produce the fruit that we are meant to produce then we will be cut down.  This is a powerful lesson that we need to learn.  God is not asking us to produce fruit that we are not capable of producing.  He expects us to use the gifts he has given us to advance his kingdom.  We cannot do that if we do not understand God’s love for us and if we don’t love him back.

I hope you will be in church this week and I hope you will invite someone to come with you. It was so nice to see Linda back in Church this week.  She has been through so much but she fighting through it every day.  Please pray for Pris as she may have to have surgery on a torn ligament in her knee.  I will let you know when we know more.  Keep doing good things and please pray for the people of Bartimaeus Baptist Temple every day.

We Love you all!!!!

Pastor David & Pris

Hello friends and family.  It was so good to be back with you last Sunday!  We’ve got to be inviting some more people who can get involved and do some of the things that we do so that there is someone who can take over when we are not able to be there.  I’m excited to be coming back to share with you next week and Linda is planning to be there also to teach the Sunday school lesson.

I was sitting here in my office one day after getting back from a visit to Linda while she was in the hospital.  I was trying to process all that was happening and how we should be thinking about it.  We trust the Lord always, but sometimes it’s hard to hold on when your world is shaking around you.  How much will she recover?  What will we do?  Can we cope with the new reality?  The Lord had already been dealing with me about what I spend my time thinking about.  It was time for the next lesson.

When I set out to post this introduction for next week’s sermon, I planned a rather straightforward exhortation about how we need to renew our minds by focusing our thoughts on the things of God instead of the things of this world.  Romans 12:2 will remain the key verse from which we will launch our study, but I see now that I was going to take it completely out of its context.  It’s important for us to realize when we read the Bible that it is not a collection of disjointed snippets that we can cut and paste together to fit our fancy.  It’s a collection of historical accounts, poetry, prophecies, and letters; divinely assembled to give us the instructions we need to live as God intended.  The book of Romans is one of my favorite books to pull from, but it is a single letter and really should be read from beginning to end.  However, we can’t really tackle that in 30 minutes, so we’ll try to extract the sense of certain parts without violating the meaning of the whole.  Let’s look at chapter 12 and maybe just a bit of 11 so we can see what the therefore is there for and see what Paul meant when he said that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds.  I look forward to seeing you there because I expect God to show us great things!

It was another great Sunday at BBT last week.  We had another good group and we really had a chance to share with each other in the Sunday school time along with the prayer requests.  Larry and Linda were still out last week so I am sorry to say the prayer request list did not get posted.  One of the prayers lifted up last week was for Larry, as he had to go into the hospital on Saturday night with an infection in his leg.  Linda got to come home from the rehab center on this same Saturday.  The good news is that Larry has been released and both he and Linda are home together AT THE SAME TIME!!!  We have missed both of them so much but I am hoping they may be able to be in church Sunday.

I talked about how important Love is in our Christian life last week, this week I want us to look at why we keep doing the things we do not want to do.  Paul talks about this in our scripture versus this week.  We will be in Romans the 7Th Chapter vs 19-25.  Paul cries out that he keeps doing the things he does not want to do and does not do what he should be doing.  Sound familiar? If you say that is not a problem for you then you are kidding yourself.  If you think that you are not doing anything wrong and that you are doing everything you should be doing then it is time for you to wake up and smell the coffee. You are in worse shape than those who know that they are messed up, because you are in denial.  I want us to look at why we are doing the things we do.  Sometimes we try to make excuses or blame others for our sin.  I hope we can look at ourselves this Sunday and maybe understand why we do some of the things we do.  It is time to take responsibility for our actions and also be able to forgive ourselves when we realize we have messed up and repent from it.

I hope you will be in Church on Sunday afternoon to share what you have with a group of people who really want to share what they have.  I am so excited about the future because we serve a great God and he has great things planned for us.  Keep doing good things ever where you go and keep praising God regardless of your circumstances. He deserves it!

We Love you so much

Pastor David and Pris