No More Room

No More Room – I have cried in anger far more often than I would like to admit. I have cried in sadness and hurt and have felt better for having done so. I have been overwhelmed with pride for all five of my children, Tracy, my parents, and many other times, people, and situations. I recognize that I have been blessed in so many ways, but I have never had to ask someone to stop blessing me.

Malachi 3:10 tells us  that God wants to bless us so much that we beg him to stop because we can’t take any more. “Trust me now in this” says the Lord, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour you out such a blessings that you will not be able to receive it.” WOW! Can you imagine that? Have you ever experienced that?

I was fortunate enough this last week when the Holy Spirit brought this verse to my mind continually one day. Not only did God bring it to mind, but he brought a name with it each time. Finally, it happened so many times that I got the message. God wanted me to share this verse with the person he named. I pulled out their E-mail address and typed out the message, telling them that I felt God wanted them to walk through this day with this verse in mind.

Later that night I talked with them on the phone. “Tell me that verse one more time,” they said, so I did.

“Well, let me tell you about my day,” they said. They proceeded to tell me about the stressful event they had to face earlier in the day. They knew things would be OK, but still there was that anxiety about the events they faced. They read “their verse” and decided that everything would be fine because it all rested in God’s hands. 

The marvelous work you may already have guessed. Things were far more than OK,  way past being adequate, than surviving or getting by. Things were blessed, and the blessing was beyond anything they could have imagined.

God is waiting. Your blessing is stored up. In fact, there is so much of it stored up that it takes massive floodgates to hold it all back. The Divine hand is on the lever, waiting to throw open those gates and unleash a blessing of his love and presence so great that you will not be able to conceive of it or hold it in. The wonderful part of that blessing is that when it is unleashed on you to that extent you have to share it in order for it to keep coming. As you share it and pass it along the Gospel is preached, Christ is proclaimed and God is glorified.

 Pastor Craig

Easter +1

We are among the early disciples. It is the week after Easter, and we have seen Jesus a few times already. We wonder among ourselves where he goes when he leaves us. He never seems to spend the night. He’ll stay for supper every now and then, but soon after he disappears, sometimes literally. Then we are left to our own wonderment and questioning. We talk about this new kingdom he describes, and we are sure that he will bring it about any day.
Fast forward to today. None of us have seen the physical presence of Jesus in our lifetime. He hasn’t dropped by, at least not physically, in almost 2,000 years. We still wait for the kingdom. In the meantime, that group of people who had all things in common seem to have forgotten that.
On the surface, we are churches and not the Church that Jesus commanded us to be. We split over baptism, we split over social justice issues, we split along racial, national, ethnic, and language lines, we split over the interpretation of Scripture. I wonder, what would those first disciples think of us. We they find a True Church left and exult over those who had remained pure? If so, who would it be? You? Me? Someone else entirely? Would those disciples find only splinters of a True Church, pieces of what was once a whole, shining and beautiful for one brief shining moment before we took Church and turned it into religion.
In this country, we are less persecuted from external forces than we are by one another. We make brief attempts to unite, but something always pulls us back apart. We are the modern Tower of Babel, talking past one another and never hearing Truth from brothers and sisters in Christ simply because they are “they” and not “us”.

At the same time, I must say that some of those differences and divisions are necessary. There does, indeed, come a point where God calls us to stand for something. The Church must recognize that in its call to the world to come to salvation in Jesus Christ there is also a call to leave the thinking, acting, talking, living, and even dying ways of this world behind. We can no longer be so inclusive of everything that we do not stand apart on anything. The Scripture is clear that that should be a difference between believers and non-believers. However, within the life of the Church we are to claw and cling to every bit of connection and union that we possible can. Where we must create distance, we must do it with gentleness, tenderness, and love. And where we can find points of agreement, we must cling to those with all our might in order that the Kingdom of God might even be revealed on earth through us and the people of this earth might see us with the same eyes as they saw the very first Christians.

Pastor Craig

Easter Sunday

Lent – Lent is a long process. We don’t generally observe it the way it was intended to be observed. It is not one of those joyful times on the church calendar. Lent is a time we think about our sinfulness. We think about the price that had to be paid for us to enjoy the benefits of the family of God. We purpose in our heart to repent from our Sin and try to lead a life more glorifying to God, just like we did the year before.


There are few of us who like to concentrate on our failures and shortcomings. It is much more appealing to think about our successes and achievements. Bringing to mind one more time the ways we have failed as a spouse, a parent, a child, a disciple of Christ. . . Please, we feel bad enough already.

However, the purpose is not to keep us in that dark place. The purpose of Lent is to arrive at Easter with a greater appreciation and knowledge of the depth of God’s love for us. “For God so loved the world. . .” That was written for you, not just for the masses, not just for the whole world, for you.

Hot summer days are just around the corner. You will be out in the yard mowing the grass, weeding the flower beds, edging the sidewalk or driveway. You’ll try to get it done in the morning, but sometimes, the work will stretch into the hot part of the afternoon. The sweat will make the grass and dirt stick to you. You’ll wipe the sweat from your forehead only to find you now have a big dirty smudge left behind.

Finally you finish and head inside. The shower feels so good! Being clean once again is almost the best part of the day. You didn’t realize how dirty you had gotten out there in the heat and the grass and the soil.

It’s the same way with our lives. We never realized how unclean we had become. We compared ourselves today the worst of the world and our community. God has always called us to be like himself. We are made in his image. We should be like him. We simply settle for be more like him than others around us. We never really expected to be JUST like him in every way.

It is only when we compare ourselves to our Creator that we realize how far into the darkness we have wandered, how much the uncleanness has become a part of us, and how badly we need the righteousness and cleansing power of Jesus Christ. Easter is the reminder of that end of the day shower that has cleansed us from everything and allowed us to be fit to stand in the presence of our Creator, Savior, and King.

Pastor Craig

New Beginings

I have the great privilege of writing this article during Easter week, the time of year when we celebrate the victory of the Gospel. It is a strange thing to declare victory after the chief figure in the story has recently been crucified in the most humiliating and painful way known to humanity at the time.


The Good News of Easter is entirely about the victory of Easter Sunday over Good Friday. The message contains hope in the midst of depression. The message offers forgiveness in place of guilt. The message restores relationships when there are hearts that are cold. The message offers clarity in the midst of confusion.

The message of the cross will not get you a raise at work, will not fill your bank account, will not make you popular, and it will not make everyone who has hurt you come and express their sorrow and ask forgiveness.

The work of Jesus Christ will offer you the strength to forgive even in the face of the injuring party never asking for forgiveness or confessing wrong. The work of Jesus Christ will enable you to see your part in the hurts that have driven you and your mate apart, and Christ living in you will help you to begin the process of restoring that relationship.

Easter is about new Life, not a different life. Easter doesn’t involve a remodel. Easter is about tearing down and starting over. Christ is not going to patch the holes. Christ is going to build a new you from the ground up.
Everyday, I see people trying to live their life apart from the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. I see them try to do right, try to decide wisely, try to restore relationships, and try to offer forgiveness. I think the problems come when they try to do this through their own will and effort.

Apart from Jesus Christ I am not a very forgiving person. It would be easy for me to dwell on the injustices done to me years ago. It would be easy for me to forget the injustices I committed even earlier this day.
Apart from Jesus Christ I am not very wise. It is easy to act quickly and pray later. It is easy to strike out rather than seek reconciliation or understanding. It is easier to throw out excuses for continuing down an unproductive, or even destructive, path than it is to do the hard work of turning around in humility and making our way back through forgiveness.
During Easter I am joyous that the one who conquered death continues to conquer sin, death, and failure in me and lead me closer to himself and his Eternal Life!

Pastor Craig

Praises!

How can things go so wrong so fast? Palm Sunday is a day of celebration. It is a day when the disciples must have felt the Kingdom of God was only hours away. They may have thought about freedom from Roman rule. They may have thought about places of honor and responsibility that each of them would be given. They DID NOT think about being in hiding and in fear for their lives four days later. They DID NOT think that imprisonment and execution would be their own fate at some point in the future.

This was supposed to be the highlight of the ministry to date. Jesus had entered the city to the cheers of a multitude. Obviously, the people were on Jesus’ side, and the authorities were scared. They had asked Jesus to keep it quiet, to calm the crowds. Jesus, in what must have seemed like an outburst of emotion to the disciples, said, “This is a moment that requires joy and celebration. If the people are silenced, the rocks themselves will proclaim the same message!”

We all recognize that the Christian life has its ups and downs. We, like the disciples, have been ecstatic when we feel the presence of God working in and through us. We love the march of the victors, heads high, shoulders back, chest out!

However, we also know the lows that come when we think all is lost, and God has abandoned us. We know anxiety and fear. We have experienced doubt and uncertainty. We have our own moments of faithlessness, leaving only the stones to cry out our Savior’s praises.

As we end Lent and begin Holy Week, let us commit to the proclamation of the Gospel in good times and bad. May we not be only among the cheering throngs on Palm Sunday only to disappear on Good Friday, or even to find ourselves calling for crucifixion.

Pastor Craig

New, Not Just Improved

My parents received a unique offer this last week. A local auto dealer offered them what they paid for their car when they bought it new several years ago. The first thought they had was very similar to thoughts you probably are having. “I’m going to be expected to upgrade and buy something closer to the top of the line from this manufacturer.” Or, “I will have to choose from cars that are currently in stock, and all that will be in stock will be high end, fully loaded vehicles that cost two or three times what we paid for this other vehicle when we bought it.” In fact none of those were true.

My mom and dad will be allowed to choose from any car the manufacturer makes. If that vehicle is not on the lot, it will be shipped or ordered at no additional cost to my parents.  Frankly, that leaves me asking, “How do I get a deal like that!?”

Well, here it is. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new!” Yes, it is the deal of a lifetime. Everything old can be turned in, broken or not, dirty or clean, and something brand new will be put in its place. You won’t get a something assembled from the old, broken parts of your life. You will get a new life, a new outlook, a new point of view!

If that be the case . . why do we hang on to the old? Do we expect the fine print from God? Do we think he will back out of the deal and we will end up with nothing? Do we expect him to be a liar and we will find out that we have something that only has a new paint job on the outside and is all busted up and rusted out on the inside and underneath? Do we view God the same way we would view a used car salesperson?

The reformed faith does not believe that to be sinful does not necessarily mean that we are as wicked and evil as possible, so that truly sinful people are people like Hitler, Osama bin Laden, or someone on Death Row for some awful crime. No, the reformed faith believes that to be sinful, or totally depraved, simply means that sin has entered every nook and cranny of our lives. It is not just the things we do; It is the things we do not do. It involves our attitudes, our unforgiving heart, the things we worry about instead of resting in the provision of our Creator, and so much more.

Life in Jesus Christ allows us to leave behind the old junk we carry around and move on to something new and fresh, something that allows us to better live out the life Christ lived, something that allows us to forgive and to accept forgiveness, something that allows us to reach out to those in need with true compassion, to understand rather than judge, and to live in peace rather than to suffer with anxiety. Come and trade in the old for something totally new!

Pastor Craig

Where is God?

 It is said that Martin Luther was once asked, “Where was God before heaven was created?” It is reported the Luther gave the answer, “Off building hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering spirits and inquisitors as would ask the question in the first place!”

While the response probably does give rise to a chuckle in most of us, the question does remain. Where is God? Where is he now? Where was he when. . .? Fill in that void with the question you asked when you needed him and he felt far away.

There are, of course, the theological answers, answers with big words but lacking in practicality. Then there are the answers we give our children, “Up in heaven’” or “He’s in your heart,” answers that are long on the practical aspect, but short on depth.  Both of those answers are, for their own part, good and adequate.

The question must have intrigued Luther somewhat for in another place, when he was lest testy he gave a more complete answer. Luther said, “After he had created all things, he was everywhere, and yet he was nowhere; for I cannot fasten nor take hold of him without the Word. But he will be found where he hath bound himself to be.”

There are two VERY important parts to that statement. I cannot fasten nor take hold of him without the Word. God has chosen to rest fully and completely in the Word, the Word being Jesus our Christ. If you desire to know God, know Jesus Christ. In fact, God cannot be found through any other means. It was Jesus who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” There is no back door. There is no alternative way. Other religions won’t get you there. Sincerity isn’t the answer. A relationship is the answer. God has made a way for you to find him. Isn’t that marvelous?

The second part is just as amazing. He will be found where he hath bound himself to be. The infinite God is not like a feather tossed on the breeze, one minute hear and the next somewhere else. No, through his amazing grace God has revealed his location and will remain there, calling your name.

Where is this place? Once again we go back to the foot of the cross. God promises to be found in no other place, in no other philosophy, in no other religion other than that to which he hath indeed bound himself.

Jesus Christ has come to make God known to you. The one that is everywhere but can be found nowhere has chained himself to the person of Jesus Christ, the same Christ who wants to come and set up residence in your heart, the same Christ who wants a relationship with you.

Where is God? Out looking for you!

Pastor Craig