Pastor’s Notes (Page 26)

• 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).

• This is Joshua 7:24-25. “And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord brings trouble on you…

• “ Theodicy” is the term given to a defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil. It attempts to answer the age-old question: “ How could God let this happen?” The body of scholarship relating to theodicy is immense and ancient in origin. I’m not going to touch it. Instead, I’d like to chisel away at a premise that is hidden in the question, namely, that God’s treatment…

• Brief opening thought: God has always been the giver of gifts to his people, and he does not change in this (Jas 1:17). So though there is a popular notion that he became truly good and generous only in the New Testament era, his motive has always been love, the outcome always grace. I was struck by this reading in (of all places) Leviticus this morning. He rescues his…

• Some background on our guest preacher this Sunday — you have to take a moment and try to imagine the world this describes. In 1989, after several years of incremental change in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, the Berlin wall comes down and Eastern Europe breaks ties with the Soviets. Just one year later, 1990, the first western missionaries arrive in the Soviet Union…