• Like Christmas, we have lots of visitors at Easter. Please be praying that Christ would be present and working by his Spirit in all our services: Palm Sunday; Maundy Thursday (7p Communion Service); Good Friday (5p + 7p); Easter morning (8:30a + 11a). Thank you!
• Tonight, in honor of Palm Sunday, we’ll be praying for the kingship of Christ in our personal lives, in the Church, and in the world/eternity. His Lordship extends over all creatures, all places, all times.
• A quarter of a century ago, a PCA denominational official went to the microphone at one of our presbytery meetings and warned us in solemn tones that our churches needed to adapt to cultural trends or we would be irrelevant and gone in another 10 years. As the young pastor of a tiny congregation, part of me panicked. Adaptation and relevance weren’t really my thing. Yet even as I went home and second-guessed everything I was doing, another voice was saying, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8), and I knew those words applied not just to his person, but to the constancy of his character and lordship over all cultures, all creation.
• This present moment, one of relentless cultural change, feels like another opportunity to panic. Economist Thomas Sowell, a black man in his 80s with a dry sense of humor, recently wrote that 60 years ago if you believed in equality for all people you were a radical. If you believed that same thing 40 years ago you were just a liberal. But if you believe it now (he has Critical Race Theory in mind), you are a racist, since such quaint notions of equality are just vestiges of white privilege. Sowell is not just showing us the irony of a passing ideal, but the complete inversion of one. Such changes now come, almost weekly, one after another.
• Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. He does not change like shifting shadows. In the midst of a world in constant motion, he is unmoved. A thousand years are to him like a day, and the events of all years, all days, occur only because they are according to the counsel of his will. Job felt this in his bones, so he said “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth” — even when all other cultures, nations, and peoples have fallen.
• There is no crisis capable of demanding that the Church conform to the changing world. The fact is, though the world was made through him, it did not know him. His own people did not receive him. And yet to some in the world, he gave “the right to become the children of God” (Jn 1:10-12). That’s why even in complicated and changing cultural settings (like Corinth), our mission will always be to “preach Christ and him crucified.” His sheep know his voice. When we capture his voice faithfully by preaching the word he has given to us, those he is calling will hear and come. Our adaptation is to him, not to the world. The greatest gift we offer to this broken world is the unchanging Christ.