Church Family,
This past Sunday we tackled a considerable chuck of Acts spanning 6:8-8:3. In this passage Stephen, one of the newly appointed servants of the church, faced false accusations that he was a threat to the Law of Moses and to the Temple. But Stephen sure does know his scripture and lays out an incredible historical summary of the Old Testament to make two irrefutable points. First, God’s presence is not and has never been bound to the physical location of the earthly temple. Rather, his presence is all consuming and so He is with His people in all places at all times. Second, the Jesus about whom Stephen has been preaching is not a threat to the Law of Moses but its fulfillment. At the center of the Law is a promise of a righteous one to come and make atonement for the people of God, that righteous one being Jesus whom Stephen’s accusers rejected and killed. The accusers cannot refute Stephen’s words, but they also refuse to accept them so they plugged their ears and killed him so they would no longer have to contend with what he was saying. Let us pray this week that we would not be like Stephen’s accusers. Let us pray that God would pull our fingers from our ears so we might hear his words that confront our stubborn hearts and selfish agendas, for it is such words that bring us the joy of drawing near to God.
Youth Retreat
Our youth will be going on a camping retreat this upcoming Labor Day weekend. Our hope is that this retreat would help build a stronger sense of community within our youth group, and more importantly that it would ground our youth in a desire to seek God and honor him as they start a new school year. In particular, we will be considering why it is important to study the Bible and answering questions like “how can such an old book be relevant today?” or “how can something written by so many people over such a long time have a cohesive main idea?” We ask that you would be praying for this trip, not only for safe travels, but especially that it would be a fruitful time that leads our youth to a greater sense of amazement at God and His Word.
A Bible-Believing Church
While we are still in our slower summer days, it seems worthwhile to use some of the space in the news blog to consider some of the convictions of Light in the Desert Church. Coinciding with the focus of the youth retreat, we wanted to take a second to highlight what it means that we are a Bible-believing church. While we believe that the Bible was written by human hands and contains clear markers of its human authors, like stylistic decisions and grammatical particularities, we also believe that every word of the Bible was directly inspired by God. This means that the Bible contains no falsehoods and so should be the measuring stick for everything we believe and do. This also means that the Bible is necessary for us as the means by which God has chosen to reveal himself to us, and especially to reveal the Gospel, the work of Christ for our sake, which is the central focus of the Bible. If you would like to read more about what we believe about the Bible or other convictions of Light in the Desert Church you can do so here.
Grace be with you,
Logan Murphy
Pastoral Intern