Grace Harbor Community Church

There is always more that could be said in every sermon, but generally application is the first thing to be cut when trying to figure out what needs to stay. Each Monday you can check back here to read a short bit of application from the text of Scripture studied the day before. The aim is that it would help us continue thinking about the truth that helps us shape our lives. With football season just around the corner we’ve decided to call this new segment on the blog “Monday’s Extra Point”. 

With that said, here is the very first Monday Extra Point – Jesus IS Coming Again! 

What we read about in Luke chapter 1 is an incredible moment in salvation history. God had not spoken to His people through a prophet in over 450 years, and now the most anticipated promises of the Old Testament are beginning to be fulfilled in the news about the births of Jesus and John. John would serve as the forerunner to God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. John’s role was to prepare the people for Jesus’ coming to earth with a message of repentance. 

Zechariah, as the future father of John, struggled to believe the angel’s message in 1:18. His struggle to believe the angel’s message about the birth and ministry of John may stem from the fact that he and his wife were very old, or it could have been hard to believe, because for thousands of years the anticipated messiah had not come. This is a bit of speculation in terms of pinpointing the source of Zechariah’s unbelief, but when it comes to our own, I think we can identify with the latter reason.  

We’ve been told by Jesus Himself of His physical return (Matt. 24:30; Rev. 22:12), yet after 2000 years of not seeing His return it’s easy to succumb to a spiritual complacency in which the greatest promises of the Bible are no longer anticipated. We fall into the line of thinking that leads us to believe that Jesus will not come today or tomorrow, or even this year, because He didn’t come yesterday or the 2000 years before yesterday. But since the day and hour have already been set by the Father (Matt. 24:36), we can’t apply statistics to our understanding of when Jesus will come again. If you were to set a date for your wedding on August 9, (my anniversary), then the chances that you are going to have your wedding celebration with all of your guests on July 1st are zero. You are no more or less likely to get married on July 2nd or even August 2. You are getting married on August 9! And when August 9 comes around, it would be foolish for you to assume that you were not getting married on that day since you weren’t married on August 8 or any day before that. The day, even the hour, of Jesus’ return has been set by the Father. That could be today. It could be tomorrow. It is no more or less likely. As the bride of Christ, we are to be in preparation today. We want to be ready. Let us repent towards God and live by faith in His Son Jesus today, because as we saw yesterday in Luke chapter 1, it will happen, because God has spoken. 

What was Jesus really like?

If you’re a Christian, that’s an important question, because you are claiming to follow Him? If you’re not a Christian, that’s an important question, because even if you are not deliberately choosing to reject Him, there are billions of people in the world that you live in, who claim to be followers of this man. 

So what was He really like? Who is it that so many people give their lives to following? 

Well, anytime you have a historical figure this interesting there is bound to be more opinions and interpretations of life than we can find. Modern scholarship presents us with several different understandings of what Jesus of Nazareth was like and who He really was. Some would say that He was a Jewish nationalist – a political fanatic. Others refer to Him as a good teacher, a moral philosopher of the day. Other religions actually make the claim that he was  prophet. It’s common for non-religious people to say that He was simply a good man; an advocate of social justice; or maybe just a guy that lived a long time ago. Some of the best selling authors of the day like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens believe that Jesus was not good, and that following Him, like belief in God, is inherently evil.

So again, who really was Jesus and what was He really like? 

To answer that question we want to go one of the original sources here on Sunday mornings and hear from some of the eyewitness in the book of Luke. Luke is a good place to go for this investigation.Luke was a Gentile, a doctor, and a credible historian who believed that if Christianity were true then it would have to be rooted in real historical events that were acts of God. Therefore, more so than the other Gospel writers, Luke wrote his account of Jesus based on historical evidence gained from his own investigation. He begins his book in 1:1, “Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us. It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed.” To this end, Luke wrote a 2 volume book dealing with the beginnings of Christianity known as Luke-Acts. In these two volumes, Luke wrote more of the New Testament than any other writer, including Paul, in terms of length. Throughout it, Luke gives evidence of being a careful researcher who talked with eyewitnesses, read other accounts, compared stories, and compiled data. And he was in a good position to do this. The title for Theophilus suggests that he was a member of higher Roman society and could have possibly funded Luke’s investigation. He was also the traveling companion of Paul who would have known the apostles and introduced them to Luke. 

Though he is a credible historian, he writes passionately about what he understands to be an account of salvation history. At some point in his life, he came to believe that God’s saving purposes for the world were fulfilled in Jesus. Luke assures Theophilus that he has done a thorough amount of research, and that what he has written is reliable. That’s the kind of information that we want as well. Since the claims about Jesus are of eternal significance, we are not interested in opinions or interesting theories, but in the truth. As Christians, the doctrine of Christ is something we rest our very souls upon. We cannot afford to be wrong. 

That is why we are turning our attention to the book of Luke in our new series on “Getting to Know the Real Jesus”. Please join us. 

Getting to Know the Real Jesus

July 29	The One Foretold	Luke 1
August 5	Humble Beginnings	Luke 2:1-24
August 12	Sent By God	Luke 2:25-52
August 19	Not What You Expected	Luke 3
August 26	The Son Of God	Luke 4
Sept. 2	Friend Of Sinners	Luke 5:1-31
Sept. 9	Uniter or Divider?	Luke 5:31-6:11
Sept. 16	The Good Teacher	Luke 6:12-49
Sept. 23	The Object of Real Faith	Luke 7
Sept. 30	True Followers	Luke 8:1-21
October 7	Lord Of Everything	Luke 8:22-56
October 14	The Messiah	Luke 9:1-36
October 21	The Devoted One	Luke 9:37-62

Due to a scheduling conflict with the hotel we will not be able to meet there in the morning. Instead, we will gather at 4 pm at Olney St. Baptist Church on the East Side of Providence (100 Olney St). Please join us as we gather together to bring praise to our God!

Though Abraham Maslow would put Love/Belonging at the center of his hierarchy of basic human needs, the fundamental need (for us as individuals and for us as people in general) is to be reconciled to God - that is to have fellowship with our Creator.  This is why Jesus became incarnate and this fellowship is what all His people experience with Him and with one another.  This fellowship is true fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.  Of course, the question follows: Who has this fellowship and how do we know?  After all, don’t most people at least assume they are naturally in some level of fellowship with God by virtue of being created by Him?  The letter of 1 John helps challenge us to examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith.  Let us use John’s categories of the truth test, the love test and the life test so that our joy may be complete (1 John 1:4).

Fellowship With God

June 10	Fellowship w/God Through The Message	1 John 1:1-10
June 17	Fellowship w/God Through Personal Holiness	1 John 2:1-17
June 24	Fellowship w/God Through Truth	1 John 2:18-27
July 1	Fellowship w/God Through Holy Love	1 John 2:28-3:24
July 8	Fellowship w/God Through Humble Confidence	1 John 4:1-21
July 15	Fellowship w/God Through Victorious Confession	1 John 5:1-21

Each week presents itself with a to-do list. Whether you write it down or it simply exists in your mind, it is the all-important list. If stuff on that list can’t get done, in our minds, it is not a successful week. When that happens we believe we have reason to stress out or get angry or to simply be unhappy.We make the same kind of evaluations when it comes to the hour or the day based upon what we feel is important for those times. That is also true for our lives.

We are always expending ourselves for whatever it is that we believe is most important, and we should do that for the things that we believe are truly important. The challenge is that with the pull of advertisements, friends, stuff, family, or the prospect of enjoyment, it is sometimes hard to know what is really important. It’s hard to know how these things are supposed to come together to serve a greater more important purpose.

Death tends to bring focus and clarity. The reality of the brevity of life is a helpful aid to understanding what is really important. I don’t think that the many problems and apparent crises that we regularly face quite look the same when faced with the near prospect of death. The goals we set for ourselves in the workplace are seen with a new perspective. You’ve probably heard it said that the businessman on his deathbed never wishes that he spent more time in his office. You may have personally experienced the burden to say what you’ve always wanted to say but had to due to fear, because it was pretty clear that you didn’t have much time left with the person.

Well, in this new series in the book of 2 Timothy we get to hear from the apostle Paul as he faces the reality of an impending death by execution, and through the help of the Holy Spirit, we want to think more clearly about what’s really important in this life. Come join us.

What’s Really Important?

Feb 5	The Gospel	2 Timothy 1:1-10
Feb 12	Loyalty	2 Timothy 1:11-18
Feb 19	Endurance	2 Timothy 2:1-13
Feb 26	Derek Bass	Psalm 13
March 4	Joel Sedam	Psalm 14
March 11	Faithfulness	2 Timothy 2:14-26
March 18	Understanding	2 Timothy 3:1-9
March 25	Travis Rymer	Psalm 15
April 1	Revelation	2 Timothy 3:10-17
April 8	Perseverance	2 Timothy 4:1-8
April 15	Derek Bass	Hosea
April 22	Salvation	2 Timothy 4:9-22

As we wrap up this series on spiritual depression, here is a helpful excerpt from one of the books that was helpful in the preparation for this series.

“One final cause of depression in the Christian is the sovereignty of God. Hard though it may e to accept, the ultimate cause may be, “It pleased God.” This, however, is not some sheer arbitrary, sadistic, and pointless infliction of suffering. Not at all. God has wise and loving motives and purposes in all His dealings with His children. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that God will sometimes allow His children to descend into the depths of the depression “to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled; and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon Himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends” (WCF 5.5).
A well-known example of this is Job, where God allowed Satan to afflict His beloved servant. A lesser-known example is Hezekiah. “God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart” (2 Chron. 32:31). This does not mean that God actually left Hezekiah. God will never leave nor forsake His people. This is not an objective leaving, but a subjective leaving. God withdrew Himself from Hezekiah’s spiritual feelings so that he lost his sense of God’s presence, protection, and favor. So Hezekiah felt like God had left him. But God had a wise and loving purpose in this. It was to test Hezekiah and to reveal to him what was in his heart when God’s felt presence was withdrawn.”

- an excerpt from Christians Get Depressed Too by David Murray (pp 66-7).

Tim Challies, the pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, recently wrote an article in which he said that facebook is making us miserable. Not because it’s stealing all of our time, but because “Facebook is all about making life seem joyful – we “like” one another’s happy status updates, not the sad ones; we post photos of our parties, not our funerals; we use it to celebrate births and marriages and new relationships, not to mourn deaths or remember break-ups. Facebook is meant to be a happy place for happy people. But it doesn’t seem to work out so well. We all think everyone else is happy, but we don’t feel the joy.”

That doesn’t stop us from doing the same thing though. We put up our best photos, and project the best image we can of our life. And while it’s easy to do that behind a computer screen we try to do the same thing in person, even when it comes to Christianity. I was recently given a book that I think illustrates the contemporary view of Christianity. It was by a popular author on living a good Christian life. This book was for adults, but it had a lot of pictures in it. The pictures were of young, physically fit attractive people, with perfect teeth, apparently having fun. It’s pretty clear what kind of life the good Christian lives. And so in churches throughout this country, every Sunday people put on their Sunday best. They put on their smile, they’re always “doing good” when asked how they are doing, and of course they are “happy” to be in church. Perhaps this is why so many of the modern worship songs are happy upbeat songs about our experience with God.

Carl Trueman, a professor of theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, made this observation and wrote an article called, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?”. He says, “A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party – a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is – or at least should be – all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship?” He notes that the Bible’s own hymnbook, the Psalter, has a high proportion of songs that “is taken up with “lamentation, with feeling sad, unhappy, tormented, and broken.”

Scan the pages of the Bible and you will find men and women whose spiritual journey included what we call today depression. Moses, Hannah, Jeremiah, and Job come to mind fairly quickly. Martin Lloyd-Jones argues from biblical evidence that Timothy suffered from near-paralyzing anxiety. Pastor and author Steve Bloem writes, “The Psalms treat depression more realistically than many of today’s popular books on Christianity and psychology. David and other psalmists often found themselves deeply depressed for various reasons. They did not, however, apologize for what they were feeling, nor did they confess it as sin. It was a legitimate part of their relationship with God. They interacted with Him through the context of their depression.”

God’s Word has a lot to say about suffering. It’s not random or meaningless. Suffering is one of God’s chosen means for sanctifying His people and bringing Himself glory in this world. We understand that when it comes to the suffering of the body. Depression is a painful form of suffering in the heart and mind. Depression, then, can be applied to the various kinds of trials that the book of James says we will face knowing that the testing of our faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:2-4).

For that reason, it’s important for us as a church to consider for the next few weeks what Scripture has to say about this area of life that Christians do and often experience. We don’t want to waste our depression or any form of suffering. As Christians, we want to know how to suffer well, and to do so together, because we want endurance so that one day we might be mature and complete, not lacking anything, including the joy of the Lord.

So please join us for the next four weeks as we begin our new series on “Spiritual Depression”

Spiritual Depression

Jan 8	When I Feel Forgotten	Psalm 77
Jan 15	When I Feel Forsaken	Job
Jan 22	When I Feel Like Giving Up	2 Cor. 1:3-11
Jan 29	When It All Feels Meaningless	Ecclesiastes

Due to a scheduling conflict with the hotel we will not be able to meet at the Courtyard Marriott at 10 am. Instead, we will meet at Olney St. Baptist Church at 5 pm that evening. Olney St. Baptist Church is located on the east side of Providence at 100 Olney St., 02906. Please join us as we continue in our new sermon series in the book of Judges.

The firing of Joe Paterno resulted in a massive riot on the campus of Penn St. University. Paterno was a living legend in the world of college football. Students and fans were shocked that the University would end a man’s career going into his 46th year of coaching a winning program. It wasn’t just because Paterno won football games, but also because this man gave back to the community. He was well thought of and well liked.
The shock of what happened at Penn St. this week has been felt far beyond the world of college sports. In response to the firings, Al Mohler, the President of The Southern Baptist SeminarySeminary, wrote an article in his blog saying, “When the facts became known, the firings of both Paterno and Spanier were inevitable and necessary. Both men had credible knowledge that young boys were being sexually abused, and neither did anything effective to stop it…The detonation of the Penn State scandal must shake the entire nation into a new moral awareness. Any failure to report and to stop the sexual abuse of children must be made inconceivable.”
What’s more shocking; the firing of a football legend and a college president, or the outrage of people over the firing of men who had credible knowledge of young boys who were being sexually abused, and did not do anything effective to stop it.

If we take a step back and think about that for a minute I think we will find something terribly unsettling about the human heart. Indeed, before we sit in judgment over anyone else, we ought to acknowledge that our own hearts have led us to overlook what is right and good, even reject what is right and good, in exchange for something that is neither – evil. All of us have sinned. God is good, righteous, loving, just and He is infinite and holy in each of those attributes, and yet, we have chosen to be against Him and all that He is by doing things that He is clearly against and rejecting things that He is clearly for. No matter how well our lives are thought of by others or ourselves, God is to be praised precisely because He will not overlook any such sin committed by us.

The Old Testament book of Judges is an incredibly relevant book for us today. Judges is the account of Israel’s history as they enter into the land that God had promised that He would give to them as Abraham’s descendants. But while it is historical, it is primarily concerned with what God was doing in these historical events. In particular, Judges is concerned with how God’s special relationship with His people is expressed in both judgment and salvation. One thing is for sure by the end, sin meets God’s judgment, making us utterly dependent upon His mercy.

Please join us on Sunday mornings as we look at what God’s Word has to say about our predicament and His solution in our new sermon series in the book of Judges.

“Here We Go Again…”

Nov 20	Another Option	Judges 3-5
Nov 27	The Word Will Set Us Free	Psalm 12
Dec 4	Another Try	Judges 6-8
Dec 11	Another Disappointment	Judges 9-12
Dec 18	Another Chance	Judges 13-16
Dec 25	Christmas	Luke 2:39-56
Jan 1	Only One Hope	Judges 17-21

We are excited to have Matt Schmucker come serve us on October 30. Matt is going to speak to us about a topic that Jesus spoke quite a bit about as well: hell. In fact, almost every reference of hell in the New Testament comes from Jesus. Recent book publications have given many a voice on the subject. The national media has since joined the discussion. We want to turn again to the source of this discussion. Please join us to hear from God’s word on what Jesus had to say about something which is of eternal significance of what Jesus had to say.

Matt was born in Pennsylvania into a large Roman Catholic family (seven sons!). Matt was converted as a senior at the University of Maryland where he graduated with a double major in finance and marketing in 1985. He joined Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. in 1991. He has served Capitol Hill Baptist Church since 1991—in administration and as an elder, aiding Mark Dever in the vital work of renewing a local church. Matt served 9Marks as the executive director from 1998 through 2010. In his current role as vice president, he focuses on church and pastor consulting, conference planning, book editing, and speaking. Matt lives on Capitol Hill with his wonderful wife, Eli, and their five children.