Posts by Pastor Eric (Page 22)

• Consider this: “Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill.…

• All things being equal, our children will become some version of who we are — not what we teach them, but who we are. Most people who read the two great imperatives of Deut. 6:5 and following (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart… you shall teach [these words] diligently to your children”), pass over the former and invest heavily in the…

I occasionally wonder if my walk with God is not a form of compromise, a shadow of what the New Testament portrays as an ordinary life with God. When the mother of James and John, and the brothers themselves, reveal their undying interest in self-promotion and exaltation (Mt 20:20ff), Jesus asks “are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” Answering in…

• Please consider joining us for the Light and Life Banquet in support of Care Net of Puget Sound. This is a ministry primarily to teenage girls who are in a frightening, dark hour, and who find at Care Net clinics older women who surround them with the love of Christ and provide answers to their questions. The banquet is Saturday March 29th from 6:30p.m. to 8:30. We have…

• A few thoughts on why you need to care about missions. It’s no coincidence that a lack of global missionary presence has accompanied the rapid decline in size and spiritual vitality of mainline denominations. Missions work depends on maintaining a difficult tension between Christ’s love for the world and his insistence that he is the only way to the Father (a doctrine…

• An urgent prayer to start off: Johanna Cederholm will be having open-heart surgery tomorrow for a bypass and a valve replacement. She’ll be at Virginia Mason in Seattle for 5 or 6 days, then rehab at Snoqualmie Valley Hospital in Snoqualmie. We love this woman and she means a great deal to us. Let’s pray for the procedure, that the valve specifically would work well,…

• We value all human life because it is the intentional creation of God, and therefore not ours to destroy. So we strongly support Care Net of Puget Sound, and so we are hoping you will attend the Fernando Ortega concert at Crossroads on Friday Feb. 21, and urge your friends to do so! Ticket sales are going more slowly than we would like. Hoping you can help with that!…

• If God grants me the longevity of my parents, I am a year or two into the final third of my life. A few years ago, just after turning 50, I asked a friend in his early 70s how quickly the 20 years between us had seemed to go by. He smiled, held up his right hand, and snapped his fingers. That made sense to me. I remember my dad at age 60. The next time I turned around…

Last Sunday’s sermon could be taken as a withdraw-from-the-world message. So Paul’s observation comes to mind: “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world” (1 Cor 5:9-10). Paul’s view is that the…

• “ I will give you thanks in the great assembly; among the throngs I will praise you” (Ps 35:18).