Blessings to you, family and friends of BBT.  Here’s your weekly update.

Once again we would like to thank Harvest Oaks Church for coming to bless us last Sunday.  Associate pastor Mark Cimino taught us from the parable of the sower during the Sunday school time.  Pastor Jay shared a message reminding us that this is not our home and we should conduct ourselves accordingly.  If you missed it, we have the podcast episodes up.  But we can’t reproduce the excellent and ample spread they served us afterwards.  For that, you had to come.

I hope you all had a great time with family and friends over the holiday.  Most of all, i hope we all remembered to express our gratitude to the Lord who made it all possible.  We all have something to be grateful for.

As of this morning, I still didn’t know what I was going to talk about.  I was sitting on the couch having coffee with Linda as she did her morning Bible reading, which included John, chapter 17.  We started talking about it and I asked her if she would read it out loud for me.  I was struck anew by the wonder of it.  Have you consider that this is the one place in the Bible where God prayed for you?  How is that even possible?  To whom, after all, would God pray?  Herein is part of the mystery surrounding the Trinity.  That’s our theological word that describes the nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  They are separate, yet one God.  I’m not going to try to unpack that for you this Sunday, but it is necessary to touch on it to explain how I can say that God prayed for you.  Jesus has just been sharing with His disciples prior to His crucifixion.  He ends his instruction with this prayer for the disciples.  But it wasn’t just for them that He was praying.  He says in verse 20, “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word;”  So, if this is the prayer that God the Sun prayed to God the Father on our behalf, we might want to pay particular attention to what He said in it.  For the sake of time we’ll focus on verses 20-26, but I urge you to read the whole chapter for context.  There’s way too much here to cover in 30 minutes, but I think we can get some very important truths in the time we have.  Come and join us as we look into this unique and amazing prayer.

In His love,

Larry