In the eighth grade, my class at school participated in a mock trial. This was the biggest event of the entire eighth grade program and something that we looked forward to for years. Our trial was based on a real criminal trial from South Carolina and included witness statements, maps, and expert testimony. Each student was to be assigned a role to play in the mock trial, either as an attorney or a witness. But our class of six students was so small that we all had to double up. For example, I was both a defense attorney and a prosecution witness. What this meant was that we all had to know both sides of the case really well. What could go wrong, right?

The week finally came for us to face off two nights in a row against teams from nearby schools. The trial was held in the Charlotte Federal Courthouse and overseen by a real federal judge. We were all as nervous as could be. The first night was a success. Heading into night two, we were confident. While we were on the prosecution side that night, I took the witness stand. During the cross-examination, the other team’s attorney threw some tough questions at me. I got a little frazzled. At one point, I made some long-winded statements, then paused, and to my horror realized that I had slipped back into my defense attorney arguments. I was on the witness stand as a prosecution witness but I had said the exact opposite of what I should have said, playing right to the other team’s advantage. The questions ended shortly and I got down from the stand feeling crushed. I had failed my team. I feared that my mistake would cost the whole team any chance we had of winning.

While the jury recessed, I whispered to my teammates how bad I felt for messing things up. They were kind and didn’t seem bothered. And you know what? We still won that night. Despite my mistake, we still won because it was a fantastic team that had worked really hard to be prepared. One mistake didn’t undercut all the work of preparation.

Sometimes in life we feel like a failure. And when we’ve messed up, it’s good to acknowledge where we went wrong and own up to our mistakes. But it’s not okay to get stuck in the past. The moments when you feel like you’re a failure are the times when it’s most important to be surrounded by a winning team that has got your back. And that’s exactly what the church is. Because of God’s transformative power at work in us, we are a winning team. Don’t try to go through life on your own. It’s much better to be part of a family—because you will fail; you will mess up; we all do. But when you do, someone’s there to catch you.

“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” 1 Thess. 5:11.

How often do you lie awake at night thinking about someone who has wronged you? How often do you know you need forgiveness from another person, but you’re scared to ask for it? How often do you wonder if God can forgive what you’ve done? Giving and asking for forgiveness can be some of the most difficult things we ever do, but if we are going to thrive in our personal relationships—especially in marriage—we have to learn how to do both. What is a two-way street in marriage, however, is a one-way street when it comes to our relationship with God. God, who never sins and is perfect in every conceivable way, never needs our forgiveness; but we need his forgiveness for our rebellion against him.

Many of the Psalms speak to this very need. Take Psalm 85 for example. This Psalm begins with a reflection on God’s forgiveness and restoration of his people. “LORD, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your anger” (Ps. 85:1–3). Based on instances of God’s forgiveness in the past, the psalmist then pleads for that same forgiveness and restoration in his day: “Restore us again, O God of our salvation… Show us your steadfast love, O LORD, and grant us your salvation” (4, 7). You and I are in the same position as the psalmist. We look back through the pages of Scripture and we see God’s mercy and patience with his wayward people. And we, like this psalmist, ask God to pour out the same forgiveness and restoration in our days and in our lives. But sometimes we still have a nagging question in the back of our minds, “Can God really forgive me?”

But Psalm 85 doesn’t leave us wondering about how God will respond to our pleas for forgiveness. “Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, his saints… Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him…” (8–9). Looking back on Psalm 85 from this side of the cross, we now know why God’s people can have this confidence in his forgiveness. Jesus died on the cross and endured the punishment that you and I deserved. He paid the debt that we owed! He washes us clean from our sins and forgives us over and over again! The cross shows us the depths of God’s love and the heights of his mercy. We can be confident in God’s forgiveness, not because we deserve it (we don’t and we never will!) but because in the act of giving his Son as the sacrifice for our sins, he showed just how great his love is for us. So if you ever wonder, “Can God forgive me?” just remember that he has already given his Son to die for you. And chances are, someone you know needs to hear that God can forgive them of their sins and free them from the guilt they live in. So this week, tell them about our forgiving and gracious God.

In the colder months of the winter, we all appreciate a good fire. I love sitting by a fire on a cold night and feeling its warmth; there’s just something so peaceful about it. In the cold temperatures, we long for the warmth of a fire. If you sit by a fire long enough, your body absorbs its warmth. Eventually you get warmed up and you can leave the fire for a little bit and still feel warm from the time you spent in front of the fire. Then eventually you feel the cold coming in again and you feel the need to go back to the source of the warmth once more. But just looking at the light of the fire does not warm your body. In order to get warm you have to be in close proximity for a sustained period of time. If someone just walked by the fire without even stopping and thought that would be enough to keep him warm, we’d call him crazy. 

But all too often, that is what we try to do with God. Sometimes we act as if we can just walk by God briefly on a Sunday morning and stay warm all week from that one brief encounter. We live busy lives, crammed to the max, but we squeeze in a little ‘God-time’ once a week and wrongly expect that we can run off of that for the other 167 hours in the week. Brothers and sisters, the reality is that we must stay near God. You know that life is hard. All week you’ll be facing difficulties and decisions and temptations and just walking by the fire once per week is not enough. We need more time daily in God’s presence in order to keep the spark of faith alive inside of us. Hear the words of Asaph:

So this week, I just want to exhort you to stay near God. Spend time in his presence each and every day by reading his word and by praying. Get close to his throne every single day and let your soul be warmed so that you live each day with his strength, not yours. In the presence of the Lord there is peace, there is hope, there is true life. Each day the world tries to throw water on the fires of your devotion. So each day, draw close to God and refuse to let anything else pull you away from him. He is honored—and we are safe—when we are with him.

Have you ever eaten honeycomb? A friend of mine brought some to school once and shared it with our class. It’s considered a delicacy in many cultures, and although some prefer not to eat the beeswax, it is edible too, along with the honey. The honeycomb has a very unique texture and of course it’s dripping with the sweet flavor of honey. In Psalm 19, David compared the joys of knowing God’s words to the drippings of the honeycomb. He said, “The rules of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:9b-11).

David was a man who loved God’s word. He not only read it and contemplated it but he also loved applying God’s word to the way he lived. To follow in David’s footsteps, we first need to spend time in God’s word. That is what our 2025 Bible reading plan is designed to do—give us some external accountability and guidance to help us have consistent time in God’s word each day. And if you’ve been following our Bible Reading plan that we began in January, congratulations! This week we will reach a milestone. We will finish Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. (Because there are more days in the year than chapters in the New Testament, we will spend the last few months of the year rereading select New Testament books while we finish reading the entire Old Testament in one year’s time.)

But if we want to follow in David’s example and delight in God’s word, then we need to go beyond just reading it. When we read God’s word prayerfully and meditate on it throughout the day, sharing it with others and trying to apply it to our own lives, then God opens up our hearts to delight in his law. “I long for your salvation, O LORD, and your law is my delight” (Ps. 119:174). Ask God to open your heart to his word, not only to receive it, but to love it and to live it. By the power of his Spirit inside us, God writes his law on our hearts. Through the strength and comfort of the Spirit, we can learn to follow God with a full heart and with joyful obedience. This is the essence of relationship with God. And it all starts with reading and delighting in God’s word. God has given you his word. He invites you to open it, read it, delight in it, and ultimately to delight in God himself.

Who Will Follow Jesus?

There are many people who are fans of Jesus, but who will actually follow him? Jesus does not call on us to merely agree with his teachings: he calls us to live out his teachings in our lives. For those of us who were born into and raised in Christian circles, there is a grave danger that we content ourselves with merely hearing and agreeing with Jesus’ teachings without doing them. Do you remember the words of Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the Mount? He said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:24-27). Fans hear his words and will even praise the wisdom and brilliance of his teaching, but disciples–true followers–hear and do his teachings. The call of Christ is a call to action. It is a call to leave the world behind and follow our Lord in life, through death, and to life beyond. So, who will follow Jesus? Will you? The words of one hymn ask it this way: 

(“Who Will Follow Jesus?” Words by E.E. Hewitt, Music by William J. Kirkpatrick)

We do not live in a silent universe. By God’s grace, our world is filled with music and laughter and speech. We take these things for granted, but they are some of God’s greatest gifts to us. And yet, while music and laughter and speech are wonderful, they are not the most important reason I say that we do not live in a silent universe. Far more important is the fact that God himself has spoken to us.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see that God is a God who speaks. He creates the world simply by speaking it into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). After creating Adam and Eve, he spoke to them before they spoke to him: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply…’” (Gen. 1:27-28). Language itself and our ability to speak is a gift from God and a reflection of that fact that God is a communicative God. He created mankind in order to give of himself to us, to communicate himself to someone outside himself. By his very nature, God is a giving God, a communicating God. He delights in revealing himself to us so that we can know him.

Throughout the Old Testament, God at times communicated directly with his creatures, although he usually communicated with his people through prophets, men specially commissioned by God to speak on his behalf without in any way lessening the authority or truthfulness of the message and without overriding the creativity and personality of the messenger. And the culmination of that recurring theme of God speaking is seen in the arrival of the Son of God himself, who is God and comes and speaks the very words the Father gave him to speak. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” (Heb. 1:1-2). The God who spoke the universe into existence, who spoke to Abram in the land of Chaldea, and who spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai has spoken to us through his Son. It is God’s greatest self-revelation. The revelation through Jesus explains and clarifies all previous revelation, and is the subject matter of all successive revelation through the apostles and New Testament prophets. 

Because we do not live in a silent universe, but one in which God has spoken, you and I are confronted with one very important decision: will we listen to God or will we refuse to hear his voice? There is no neutral option. We either welcome his voice, or spurn it. The universe is not silent. God has spoken. Will you listen to him?

It’s that time of year again! Summer is over, and it’s back to school! Stores are decked out with back-to-school supplies and the buses are on the road again. You may not be directly impacted by the school year calendar, but nonetheless it still serves as an important marker in the passage of time (and we can’t escape it; like it or not, we all notice the increased traffic and longer commute times). I kind of enjoy the back-to-school season. It means Fall is coming soon, and with it, cooler temperatures. For many people, the start of the school year is also a season of new beginnings. It’s a new semester, a new set of classes, and a chance at a fresh start. Even if the school year calendar is no longer a part of your family’s routine and calendar, you can still make it a time of new beginnings and a fresh start.

And what better time to renew our commitment to being students of the Word of God than the back-to-school season? While the world around us is returning to the classroom, let’s resolve to return to the Scriptures and reaffirm our devotion to God and to his word. As you’ve probably heard me say before, Christianity is about much more than just information, but information is nevertheless crucial to our faith. The Christian faith makes truth claims about historical events and people and most importantly, about the coming of one certain person–Jesus Christ–in the first century AD. And it’s in the pages of the Bible that we read about God’s plan finding its fulfillment in the coming of Jesus the Messiah. So while faith entails more than information, it will starve unless it is fed with the facts and teachings of the Scriptures.

So my encouragement to you this week is simply to always be a student of the Word. Be like the Christians in the ancient city of Berea, who, when they heard the teaching of Paul and Silas, “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Read your Bible, take notes in the margin, underline, highlight, listen to it on the way to work, and pray about what you read in its pages. Do whatever it takes to get in frequent contact with the words of God. And when you read a passage that stumps you, call up a friend (unlike in the game show “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?’ you get unlimited opportunities to phone a friend in your walk of faith). Studying the Bible with a study buddy often helps you see things you could have missed on your own and makes your study all the richer. So this back-to-school season, let’s all go “back to school” in the Bible and study God’s words that he has given to us.

I remember a time in my childhood when I was a very bad gift giver. It was my oldest brother’s birthday, and I wanted to be noticed for giving him a gift, but I didn’t have much that I was willing to part with. So I hatched a simple solution. I gave him some little toy or something of mine (I don’t remember exactly what it was) and within a few days, promptly took it back! I wanted to be seen as a giver, but I didn’t want my giving to cost me anything. Perhaps you had a similar experience when you were young. Eventually we grow up, have a little more, and usually find it easier to share our things with others. But we never entirely outgrow the temptation to give that which costs us nothing or next to nothing and still congratulate ourselves for our generosity, like I did when I was a child. 

There was an event in the life of David that reminds us of the importance of resisting the temptation to give God gifts that cost us nothing. In 1 Chronicles 21, David did something that displeased the Lord. Evidently his desire to take a census of the people was somehow a reflection of something in his heart, perhaps a misplaced trust in human strength instead of God’s strength. Consequently, Israel was suffering under a plague because of David’s actions. Burdened with the knowledge that the people were suffering for his own wrongdoing, David begged the Lord to let the punishment rest fully on his own shoulders, and not the peoples’ (1 Chron. 21:17). Then the Lord instructed David to go and offer a sacrifice at the threshing floor that belonged to a man named Ornan. David immediately went there and found Ornan threshing wheat. When David requested to buy the land from Ornan, Ornan offered to give David not only the piece of property, but also all the wood and animals he needed for the sacrifice. David’s response is striking: “No, but I will buy them for the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, nor offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing” (1 Chron. 21:24). 

David refused to offer a sacrifice to the Lord that cost him nothing. He was fully vested in what he was doing and was more than willing to incur significant expense if that was what it took to make things right. I wonder, how often do I give the Lord that which costs me nothing? Do I ever give to the Lord the way I gave to my older brother so long ago, wanting to be noticed as a giver but not wanting it to cost me anything?  Do I just give enough to convince myself that I’m a giving person, or do I give even when it costs me? May God strengthen us to give ourselves–and all that we have, and all that we are–to him and to his cause.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year since we moved to Kentucky and I began working with the Worthington congregation. The year has flown by. I just wanted to stop and take a moment to thank you all for giving me this opportunity to minister and preach here. Thank you for welcoming us and taking good care of us. Thanks for the way you have been patient with me as I got settled in and got my feet under me in my first full-time ministry. It’s obvious to me that you are personally invested in the church here and that you all don’t expect me to do everything. Everyone pitches in and plays their part. And this is how it should be, because no person can do it all on their own. That’s why God has given us the church, which is made up of many members (1 Cor. 12:12). The church is not made up of “professional” or “expert” Christians and then “regular” Christians; rather, there is a job for everyone to do. And those jobs are not all the same. The members of the body have different functions, but one goal and one purpose.

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; there are varieties of activities, but the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (…) All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor. 12:4-7, 11). It’s not that my role is more important than your role or that your role is more important than someone else’s role. Every role and every job is important. God has gifted us each in unique ways. And we are stronger when we each use those gifts to the fullest possible extent. When we each use our God given gifts “for the common good” the result is that we are all strengthened and built up. 

So thank you for what you each do for our church. I know that there is work and planning that goes largely unnoticed, and I’m sure there is more that goes on behind the scenes than even I know about. Whatever your contribution is to the work here at our church, thank you! Whether it’s seen or unseen, thank you. Keep up the good work, and keep on keeping on. Thank you for welcoming me to the work here at Worthington, to work alongside all of you for the good of this church and our area. Working together as a team with one goal and one mission, we will continue to believe God’s promises and trust in his provision and work for his glory.

PepsiCo’s mission is to “create more smiles with every sip and every bite.” Microsoft’s mission is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” And McDonald’s mission is “to make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone.” These are three of the largest and most iconic companies ever. We’ve all consumed Pepsi products, used Microsoft Operating Systems, and eaten at McDonalds. But in the grand scheme of things, the missions of these companies just deal with temporary things: sugary drinks, computer software, and sometimes controversial burgers. The church has a mission too, but it’s on an entirely different level. Unlike those companies that were born from an initial idea and grew and adapted into what they are today, we were given a mission by our Lord–a mission that we are not free to adapt or change. The way we carry out the mission may change, but the mission itself stays the same. 

Simply put, the mission of the church is to make disciples of all nations. Jesus gave this mission to his followers shortly before his ascension in Matthew 28:28-20. He said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

The mission essentially boils down to making disciples of Jesus and then teaching and equipping those disciples. A disciple is one who follows Jesus, and the process begins when someone shows interest in the gospel. It continues when they put their trust in Jesus, turn from their sins, and are baptized into Christ. But baptism is not the end, it’s just the beginning. After their baptism, disciples must then be taught all the rest of the things that Jesus taught us so that they can continue to grow and mature in their discipleship to Christ. These disciples then go and make more disciples, and the cycle of disciples making disciples who make disciples continues endlessly until Jesus returns.

Where can you go this week, and who can you tell about Jesus? Our Lord’s mandate for us is to go and make disciples and we must be striving to do that, otherwise we are unfaithful to our mission. And remember, we must never say no for someone else. We may think that they will reject the gospel, but we dare not neglect to share the message with them because we think they will reject it. God may surprise us with the way some people respond. It’s not our job to decide if we think they will accept Jesus or not, it is our job to share the message of Jesus with accuracy and clarity to anyone and everyone, trusting the power of the word of God to do the rest.