Strings on fingers, dates circled in red, and desktops shingled with sticky notes are old-school.  Now we depend on digital calendar, app, and text reminders to prompt us to be where we should be and to do what we should do.  As our knowledge and activity increase our ability to remember diminishes.  The more we know and do, the less we remember.   I now appreciate the maxim of an aged mentor who decried, “I don’t need to learn anything new.  I just need to remember half of what I already know.”

Remembering is important.  Without memories we lose our mooring, identity, and purpose.  Anyone who has experience with dementia knows this all too well.  God has made our world for remembering.  The fabric of time is woven in the warp and woof of celestial and biorhythmic cycles designed to help us remember.  Weekly sabbaths and annual holidays are memory prompts.  And the ability and desire to record information, history, and expression teaches us that ‘remembering’ is a core distinctive of what it means to be human.  

But remembering transcends time.  The Bible tells us that even when we stand outside of time in eternity we will still remember.   The songs of the redeemed are inextricably tied to experience, to the epic story of redemption. And throughout scripture both Old Covenant and New Covenant worship are rooted in a command to remember.   To remember what God has done.   Remember what God has said.  Remember what God has promised. Remember who God is.  And who is God.

We are easily tempted to make faith and worship about us.  Prone to place ourselves at the center of all things.  So, the Bible calls us back to our chief end; to glorify and enjoy the one who is the center, the source, the purpose, and the end of all things.   Week in and week out, biblical worship is a covenant renewal; a remembering of God’s covenant of grace.  We are too apt to forget; to forget who is God and who God is.  To forget what He has done, what He has said, and what He has promised.

In the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21-24, God explains how the Ten Commandments are lived out in community, what it looks like to be ‘the people of God.’  But a community ethic is not enough.   What makes them his covenant people is God’s presence, promises, and purposes.   As he wraps up the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 23, the Lord explains how He will bring Israel into the inheritance He promised and gives us a road-map for the Christian life.

Join us as we examine Exodus 23:20-33 as we unpack God’s plan to bring His people into promised rest and consider what this plan teaches us about the Christian life.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Nine months.  Only nine months and our little corner of the world becomes and international hotspot, an epicenter in the path of totality.   At 1:30 pm on April 8, 2024 we will experience a total solar eclipse.  Friends old and new will flock to central Arkansas to get a front row seat.   Are you ready?

The last total solar eclipse visible to Norte Americanos was in August 2017.   Our family traveled to St. Louis and navigated many adversities for 3 minutes of celestial glory.   A total solar eclipse is not to be missed.  As it begins colors in the landscape become more vibrant, contrasts sharper.  Shadows cast through leafy trees cover the ground with hundreds of tiny crescent shaped images of the advancing eclipse.  

At the height of the eclipse, temperatures drop and birds fall silent.   It is eerie but glorious.  And for a brief moment you can take off your ISO 12312-2  approved eclipse glasses, put down your pin-hole projector, and behold the heavenly declaration of God’s glory.  The God in whom there is never a “shadow of turning,” whom nothing can eclipse.  

Our trip to view the eclipse of 2017 included a brief camping stop at Crowley’s Ridge State Park.  Every hotel along our trek had no vacancy.  I could not believe we were able to secure a spot at the park’s campground.    But I soon discovered why.   Crowley’s Ridge, like all our Arkansas State Parks, is a beautiful place in the world and a lovely place to camp.  But, and I repeat, NEVER in August.   Surrounded by northeast Arkansas rice fields, its vibrant, thriving mosquito culture rivals the ancient plague of gnats.   We had only one tent.  The manly men planned to sleep in hammocks.  It was the sleep of the undead.   The perpetual hum of the mosquitoes was at once torturous yet glorious.  

Millions of mosquitoes were gathered in joyful assembly for their nightly ritual of feeding and singing together.  The hum of any one was almost imperceptible, but together their buzzing was pervasive, inescapable.   In the hours of suffering, I recalled what was written of Scottish Praying Societies whose collective prayers on the Friday night of each Communion Season sounded to one Scottish traveler like the buzzing of bees throughout the countryside.  

The sound of saints in joyful assembly should always be like this.   One of my pastoral delights is to hear this hum before and after worship on the Lord’s Day. And to hear the tiny voices of the smallest children singing the Doxology and joining in with the Lord’s Prayer.  How joyfully, thankfully, excitedly do we gather for worship? 

The rest God gives on the Day of Rest should never be anesthetic or palliative.  It should energize our minds, our bodies, our souls, our aspirations, our hopes, and our assurance.  God ordained worship to draw us powerfully into His glorious triune life.   A mentor once defined worship as “work of the Holy Spirit in the Body of Christ to the glory of God the Father.”  Simple, yet profound.

As God prepares his people Israel to move from life as a fellowship of sufferings in Egypt to a communion of the saints in a land of Promise, he gives them, through Moses, a blueprint for life-together in covenant community.  This Book of the Covenant, found in Exodus 21-24 begins and ends with instructions regarding worship.   As the blueprint concludes in Exodus 23, the Lord bookends practical instruction about how to love and live with others with our worship. 

For the covenant child, our loving and living with others is never mutually exclusive of our loving and living with the Lord, our God.   Without worship, the Christian life is hollow, wraithlike, vaporous; a vanities of vanities.  God intends worship that is joyful, thankful, redemptive, and restful not dull, drab, or tedious. 

A church billboard invites attenders to “Expect and Experience!”   And some preachers report, “the Lord showed up and showed out today.”  While these statements reflect some problems, in both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, the reminder to come expectantly to worship is needful.   What do you expect?  How eager are you for the Lord’s Day?  Of giving, including our worship, Jesus taught.

“Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

Luke 6:37-39

Pressed down, shaken together, running over, falling into your lap and down to the hem of your robe.   This is the kind of joy, grace, peace, and rest the Lord delights to give as the communion of the saints takes visible form in public worship on the Lord’s Day.   Are you ready?  

Join us as we examine Exodus 23:10-19 and consider the blessings God intends for the worship of the gathered people of God.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

We take gift wrap seriously.  It is no mere covering to delay the inevitable.  My children take gift wrap to whole new levels of artistry and concealment.  The packaging is often as stunning as the gift.  Hours of thought and craft unfold to reflect the gifter, giftee and gift.  And beyond creative beauty, my children delight in suspense.   Gifts are wrapped in multiple layers, textures, and shapes.   Though we are somewhat predictable in our gift choices, the presentation never fails to surprise.  No amount of shaking, squeezing, assessing can reveal the contents.

For giver and receiver, the anticipation, surprise, and drama of the giving of a gift is often as much the gift as its contents.   My dad understood this.  Gifts, announcements, special occasions always came with a dramatic story.  What my dad lacked in artistic creativity, he made up in theatrical presentation.   Especially at the holidays.  

On Christmas Eve, Daddy would allow us each to open two gifts.  They were always presents from our Nana and Granny Wallace.   We knew exactly what they would be, what they should be.  They never changed. But Daddy kept us guessing, nonetheless.  Nana would invariably gift us a new pair of winter pajamas.  Christmas Eve would not have been Christmas Eve without fresh, festive pjs.   And Granny Wallace always gave us knitted house-shoes.  She was a prodigious knitter.  Each pair would be unique, personalized for each of us in some telling way.

I was always fascinated by those house shoes.  How did Granny create such intricate patterns and careful contours with just two needles and one long piece of yarn?  And how did she construct them so that they did not quickly unravel under the relentless shuffling of an eight-year-old boy.   The clever knitter knows how to cast a thing of beauty and durability, though every creation is vulnerable to the slipping of a single knot.  If the knot is not strong, a moment of stress can quickly reduce a hat, a sweater, a pair of house shoes to a nondescript pile of yarn.

Life can be like that.  We think our lives, our relationships, our culture are durable, solid things in and of themselves.   That their structure, history, and resources guarantee continued existence and growth.   But they are all vulnerable.  Their durability depends on what knot ties them off.   Whether they are tied off by the solid knot of God’s revealed Word and sealed by the grace of the gospel.  Or not.  Only that knot will hold up under moments of stress and sin.  

Sin is the disintegrative entropy that pulls us apart at every seam.  Only God’s good, gracious, and binding grace given in both the law and the gospel form the knot that will keep our lives from unraveling and becoming a disordered pile of yarn.  Contemporary discussions of ‘social justice’ are legion.  And a modern, secular, progressive culture disdains the ancient paths, simply because they are ancient.   Yet it is the Bible’s instruction on social justice that is more progressive, compassionate, and caring than any contemporary progressive has even imagined.

After giving the Ten Commandments, God teaches Moses how to teach people to unpack the moral law in the daily business of managing servants, anger, property, and relationships.  And Old Testament laws are not for individuals only, not extra for experts, but for life together.  The persistent use of plural pronouns reminds us that the law anticipates life in community.  And instructs us what it means to love the Lord our God with heart, mind, soul, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves.   It is not left for us to decide what this means.  God gives detailed explanation and illustration in Exodus 21-24 as well as Leviticus and Deuteronomy.   Hardly antiquated, primitive thought, the Bible’s laws of social justice are the only knot that ties off the easily unraveled relationships in our lives. 

Exodus 22:16-23:9 seems to be a hodge-podge of various laws.  But there is a cord that binds them together.   They are not framed conditionally but as absolutes. They remind us to guard the dignity, worth, and rights of others as fiercely as we would guard our own.  Without this concern, the law and society unravels.   It is ‘covenantedness’ that is at the core of law-keeping.   It is ‘otherly’ love that gives proper impetus and motivation to do all God commands.   Without this, the command to love our neighbor as ourselves is always contorted by our desire to love ourselves at the expense of our neighbor.

Join us as we examine Exodus 22:16-23:9 and examine what the Bible says about our responsibility to love our neighbors as ourselves rather than using our neighbors in order to love ourselves.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

It is a sensory feast.  Brightly colored, exotic flowers.  The fragrance of flora, coffee, and traditional culinary offerings.  Row upon row, stall upon stall of every conceivable offering.  Purveyors of every conceivable craft engage their commercial dance with customers to entice and negotiate.  Local woodcraft, spices, flowers, foods, toys, coffee, and festive traditional clothing pile on sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures to overpower yet delight.  The city market in San Jose, Costa Rica is an experience not to be missed.  With all the natural treasures of this incredibly biodiverse country, San Jose’s market is easily overlooked.   

My daughter and I tried to take it all in.  We passed a stall of traditional Costa Rican dresses. Long flowing skirts and ruffled blouses, intricately embroidered and brightly colored, caught our eye.  This would be a perfect keepsake of our adventure.  The young lady attending the booth assisted us to find the size and style Emma needed.  The prices seemed reasonable and the exchange rate favorable.  So, I prepared to pay the price listed on the tag.  The proprietor frowned.  She brought out her calculator and declared in broken English all the merits of her product.  A little slow on the uptake, it finally dawned on me that the “price was not the price.”  It was just the starting point for the dance.  

My willingness to pay an arbitrarily assigned price, though better for the seller, was not the way it was done.  I was to offer half.  She would counter with 90%, to which I would counter-offer 75%.  Then, and only then, could the sale happen.   Costa Rican culture expects to establish the price of everything through negotiation and mutual agreement.   It would not do to pay the sticker price!  Commodities simply do not have a fair market value.   Their value is intrinsically connected to the relationship between buyer and seller.  And so, every price is unique. 

This is an important insight.  The value of things is not an intrinsic quality.  Nor entirely dependent on laws of supply and demand.  The value of a thing, in significant ways, reflects the value of the one to whom it belongs and the relationships of those who share it.  The prophet Nathan makes this shockingly clear to David when the prophet confronts the King about his sin with Bathsheba, telling him a story about the rich man’s wanton theft of a poor man’s only lamb. 

Do you understand this?  That the value of another’s things reflects the degree to which you value them?   How careful are you when someone loans you something to treat it with care and return it promptly?  How concerned are you about guarding what is under your care, your habits and possessions, to ensure they harm no one?   Do you take responsibility for the impact your things have on others?   The law speaks of liability.  But these concerns are more about our love for one another.  Our possessions are, in many ways, an extension of our relationships.  And the means through which we love our neighbor as ourselves. Or not!

It is easy to gloss over property laws in the Old Testament.  Most of us don’t have a donkey or an ox?  Yet, anything more than a cursory reading quickly reveals timeless principles to instruct us in the our care for our own property and that of other’s.   Do we accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions, our negligence, or our unfaithfulness in the use of our neighbor’s possessions?  Does our love for our neighbor as ourselves extend to our fences, our dogs, our shared spaces, our care for things borrowed?  Does our neighborliness make it clear that we are the covenant people of God?  Or confirm the world’s suspicion that our faith is a hypocritical cover story?

Join us as we examine Exodus 21:28-22:17 and examine what the Bible says about our responsibility to love our neighbors by the way we use our things, what happens when we fail to exercise this love, and why it matters.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.