The second of the Summer BBQs is here! This Sunday stay after church for another epic BBQ. Everyone is welcome! Click Here (after you go into the main email text) for the invite and what to bring. See you Sunday!
Just as God is always working on our hearts, it seems there is always construction at the school where we meet! (see what I did there?!) Don’t let that deter you! We have an ongoing issue with the gate/fence to the parking lot this Summer. We have to monitor so we don’t lock any Summer Concert in the Park people in after we are done with service. If the gate ever has cones in front of it, just move them and drive right on in. Sorry for the inconvenience. If you want to help with pre-service parking control let me know. Thanks!
There are many ways people determine if a church is thriving. What metric is best to measure whether a church is thriving? Size of the church is a popular one. Making attenders happy is another. How much money people give is one we don’t like to talk about, but is definitely used to measure thriving. In the New Testament one of the major ways the Apostle Paul measures whether a church is thriving is by how the church’s members use their spiritual gifts. The Bible measures a thriving church by how they serve one another for the common good (1 Cor. 12:7) by using their spiritual gifts. This can be true in big churches, small churches, rural churches, urban churches, etc.
This Communion Sunday we will worship, pray, and fellowship to the glory of God! Join in for worship, then join together at The Point for a communion fellowship meal!
The first of the Summer BBQs is here! This Sunday stay after church for another epic BBQ. Everyone is welcome! Click Here (after you go into the main email text) for the invite and what to bring. See you Sunday!
As we gather this Sunday in church we will continue in our sermon series in Romans. The main sermon theme this Sunday is the command to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” This happens in a number of ways that we will talk about this Sunday. One is to study the Bible together. At The Rock we do this in small groups. I want to highlight the start of a small group designed to “be transformed by the renewal of our minds.” This group will study theology together on the 2nd and 4th Mondays of each month beginning on June 26. I’ve found small groups are one of the best ways to transform ourselves to be more like Jesus. Please consider joining this small group. If you have any questions please ask me. Come this Sunday and be inspired to renew your mind!
We are in the middle of graduation season. Whether one is graduating from kindergarten or graduate school, there is always something that comes next. A good question to ask upon graduating is, “What now?” A kindergartner is going to apply their vast knowledge to succeeding in the first grade. A graduate student will apply everything they learned in their program to excel in their chosen career. In the book of Romans, our preaching series brings us to a “What now?” moment. After the first 11 chapters of explaining the gospel of God, how we become righteous through Jesus, and of God’s unfathomable mercies to us, we are left with the question, “What now?”
Is God knowable? Yes! Is God unknowable? Yes! I believe Romans 11:33 teaches that both of these are true in different ways. God is absolutely knowable through the Bible, creation, and the person of Jesus. We have information about God that leads us to worship in spirit and in truth. On the other hand, God is also unknowable. God is infinite. God is unsearchable and inscrutable according to Rom. 11:33. We absolutely cannot know everything about God. There are mysteries to which we do not have access.
The Bible’s declaration in Romans that all of Israel will be saved is mind-blowing! How will God save an entire ethnic nation? Is this consistent with God’s salvation by grace alone and faith alone? Romans 11:25-32 answers these questions. And in answering questions about Israel gives us Gentile Christians some good advice. Advice in the form of warning - warning against pride and arrogance on our behalf. These warnings are instrumental and deeply tied into our spiritual growth in Jesus!
A great temptation of majority cultures is to think they are superior. The more people involved in a population, a cause, or a belief system, the more power over the minority they wield. It is human nature to become arrogant, proud, and complacent. Assumptions are made by the majority culture that they are preferable to minority cultures simply because they have the greater numbers. It is a fallacy. It is dangerous. And according to the Apostle Paul in Romans, we must remember to never let being in the majority lead to thinking we are better than others.
Becoming a Christian guarantees that you will never be alone. Faith in Jesus gives us instant relationship with God. And faith in Jesus gives us an instant community of brothers and sisters in Christ. This means a lot in a world described by the United States Attorney General as having an “epidemic of loneliness.” And it means a lot when we feel as if we are the only Christian at any given time in our life. Romans reminds us of this truth once again. We are taught that God always has a “remnant” of faithful believers in Jesus.
Romans 10:21 is a deeply profound and relevant verse. It is profound in the fact that the God of the Universe has his arms open to sinners all day long. In other words, continually for all time God wants to help people find their home in the arms of God. It is relevant today because according to the Surgeon General of the United States we are in an “Epidemic of Loneliness.” People are searching for meaning in a world filled with fear, anxiety, loneliness, political fighting, and social media nastiness. God patiently loving a “disobedient and contrary people” is beautiful. And it is a powerful example to us as Christians, and The Rock as a church.
I’m so thankful someone told me about Jesus. It was actually a number of people, in various ways, telling me about Jesus in writing, from a stage, and in person. Each of them was used by God. And each of them had beautiful feet… wait, what??? That is how the Bible gives honor to people who announced the good news of Jesus in Romans.
Easter Sunday in upon us! Let’s celebrate together this Sunday at 9:00 am. Invite your family, friends, and neighbors. Come early to enjoy coffee and donuts. And come ready to worship and celebrate our risen Lord Jesus!
Easter Season in upon us!
The next 2 weeks are as follows:
Palm Sunday - 4:30 pm, April 2
Easter Sunday - 9:00 am, April 9
One of Toyota’s marketing campaigns demonstrates how easy it is to buy a car by having a big “easy” button. The premise of the campaign is to play on people’s desire for things to be easy. There is enough things in our world that are hard! Let’s have something that is easy! The Apostle Paul suggests that obtaining Jesus’s righteousness is easy. Why? Because Jesus has done everything for us, in our place, to obtain the righteousness that we need to stand before God - it does not get any easier than having it done for us. But not everyone accepts easy righteousness.
Hi, my name is Heather Buchta, and I have been part of the Rock Covenant Church since 2004. I love Jesus, writing books, and obstacle course racing. Many times, non-racing friends will ask, “Why don’t you go on American Ninja Warrior?” It always tickles my heart that friends believe in me like that. However, there is a trick that most of us normal folks miss. ANW competitors are so talented at obstacles that they make it look effortless. You see them on television swinging like a weightless monkey, but most of us on the same course would be a sack of slippery potatoes. You don’t see their hours off screen, and the all-consuming training. They are, what I call, “next level.” Our pastor Curt Beeson reminds me of those athletes, but in a spiritual way.
The title of this post seems like a weird statement. “God is Free to Act.” Our first response may be, of course God is free to act. God can do what He wants! And you would be correct. That is actually Paul’s point in Romans 9 - God can do whatever He pleases! But many Christians would say God is not totally free. God is restricted. God is confined by one important factor. God is not free to act when it comes to human free-will. Free-will trumps God’s activity according to some Bible-believing, well-meaning, Jesus-loving Christians. This is a tricky issue. An issue that has caused division in the church over the centuries. And we must confront these two seemingly opposing points of view this week in our Romans series!
The Bible is sometimes hard to understand. The Bible sometimes confronts us with topics that confuse and, even, anger us. The Bible sometimes brings up more questions than it answers! Does this make God unjust? Does this mean we should give up understanding God? Does this mean “the word of God has failed?” (Rom. 9:6) The answer to each of these is an emphatic, “NO!” But is does mean that in order to attempt to understand an infinite God revealed to us, we must wade into the deep end of the pool. We must bravely enter into areas of the Bible that challenge us. This Sunday in Romans 9:6-13 is one of those areas!
People reject Jesus for many different reasons. Some reasons make sense. Some reasons are surprising. Some reasons are unexpected. The nation of Israel rejected Jesus. The ones who God had been grooming, teaching, and promising the Messiah throughout the Old Testament rejected Jesus. Unexpected. The same is true with people today. Some who we would think have every reason to follow Jesus, reject him.