Seventeen82

This post was originally sent to the members of Chester ARP Church as a pastoral letter written in response to the school shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, TN on March 27, 2023.   Like most of you, I watched the news in horror Monday evening as the reports came streaming in from the most recent school shooting in our country. Sadly, these kinds of reports have become all too familiar to us.    I remember standing in the lobby of Burgaw Hall on the NC State Campus as the news from Columbine High School was reported in 1999. I was shocked that someone would open fire in a school. But that was then. In the 24 years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 15 of their classmates and injured another 24, we have seen over 350 more active shooter situations on our K-12 school and college campuses. That is staggering.    Thankfully, most of those situations have not ended in mass casualties. However, that does not mean that the collective numbers of those sh...

Do you seek God’s direction in every aspect of your life? Or, do you have the same struggle as I do in which you make your decisions and then ask God to bless those decisions or to rescue from their consequences?   If you had the chance to ask the Apostle Paul any one question, what would it be? Would it be theological? Would it practical? Would it be historical?   Because of my pragmatic nature, I think I’d ask him to give me 3-4 things that a Christian should do to grow in his or her faith.  Since I can’t ask him that question, I’ve thought about what actions he might identify as essential for a Christian to live a faithful life as I’ve worked my way through 1 Thessalonians with our congregation. I’ve concluded that he would say there are four things that we must do, in addition to placing our faith in Christ, in order to be faithful throughout our lives. They are:  Read and believe the Bible (1 Thessalonians 2:13) Live your life in accordance with the Bible...

As our political environment has gotten more and more charged over the past year, I have been asked multiple times how we are to pray for our political leaders. The place to which I often turn when answering this question is 1 Timothy 2 where Paul wrote the following to Timothy:   “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:1-4 ESV).    In this passage, Paul gives great wisdom that is as helpful to us as it was to Timothy when it comes to praying for our leaders. The first thing we are to do is: pray for them. Make it a habit to actually pray for your leaders, those at the local, state, and national levels. Sometimes we ask quest...