Remarkable faith is often found in the most unremarkable places.  Jesus exclaims this in two gospel stories involving those outside God’s covenant people.   First, Jesus declares of the centurion who asks healing for his servant, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”  And later as Jesus and his disciples vacation at the seaside, a ‘Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.’”  Jesus tested her by putting her off, but she persisted and received healing for her daughter. 

Jesus, no doubt, shocked his disciples when he “answered [the Canaanite woman], ‘O woman, great is your faith!  Be it done for you as you desire.’”  A Canaanite?  A Gentile dog?  No, a woman of great persistence in prayer! Evidence, Jesus says, of a great faith.

Scripture teaches us about the remarkable promise and power of believing prayer.

“And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”

Luke 11:9-10

But also warns us that prayer is no mere talisman.

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 

James 1:6

Even contemporary artist, Jelly Roll, angsts over the tension between itinerant, half-hearted prayer versus faith in the grace of a merciful God in his popular song, “Need a Favor.”

I only talk to God when I need a favor
And I only pray when I ain’t got a prayer
So who … am I, who … am I to expect a savior, oh
If I only talk to God when I need a favor?
But, God, I need a favor!

“Need a Favor,” Jelly Roll,

What does you prayer life look like?   Who does your prayer life resemble?  Is it more like Jelly Roll or the Canaanite woman?   Is your prayer more afterthought than wrestling match?   If you had been at Peniel would you have said with duplicitous Jacob, “I will not let you go until you bless me?”  Do you let go easily in prayer?  Or hold fast in unshakable faith?

Join us as Rev. Bill Holiman leads us to examine Matthew 15:21-28 and consider ‘believing prayer.’  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. 

Staff of life or anathema?   For thousands of years bread has been a non-negotiable, the staple of every meal in virtually every culture.  Growing up, a meal without biscuits and meat was not a real meal.   But now, bread is an outlaw at our tables.  Banished from our diets and our mealtimes.

In our modern agriconomy, yield, not genetic integrity has become the core metric.  Ancient grains have sustained life and promoted health and nourishment since the dawn of time.  But are now supplanted by weapons-grade gluten that wages war on our bodies and immune systems.  And beyond that skyrocketing carb consumption and expanding girth has pushed us to ‘go Keto.’

Bread, once offered at every meal, has now become the enemy.   But our war on bread comes at a cost.  A cost to our health, to our pleasure, to our fellowship.  And not insignificantly, it comes at a cost to our theology.  Bread is a big deal in the Scripture.  It is the ubiquitous agency of worship and fellowship in the story of redemption.  It is central to hospitality and celebration.   It is emblematic of God’s daily providence.  Yet it also represents a motive for workaholism, theft, and apostasy.   And last, but not least it represents the redemptive work of Christ and unity in his body, the church.  

Melchizedek met Abraham with bread and wine.  God gave bread every day for 40 years to feed the people in the wilderness.  On feast days, the people of Israel waved fresh loaves before the Lord as a fellowship offering.  The widow of Zarephath experienced God’s daily faithfulness through inexhaustible provision of bread during a drought.  The Psalmist warns not to work for the bread of anxious toil.  In the Proverbs, Agur son of Jakeh warns us to pray for daily bread so that we might not “be full and deny [God] or … be poor and steal.”  The Lord reinforced this in the Lord’s prayer where we are taught to pray “Give us this day our daily bread.”  

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, “the house of bread.”   His betrayal was sealed by sharing bread with Judas Iscariot.   And feeding five thousand men and their families with bread precipitated the crisis that moved Jesus from populist hero to theological pariah.   As that crowd followed him around the lake to make him their King by force, he startled them with his response.

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal…”  Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst….

So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”  When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.                                

John 6:26-27, 35, 41-42, 60

Jesus shared bread with his disciples at the Last Supper and continues to share it with us at the Lord’s Supper as a sign and seal of his broken body in his saving work of redemption.   And Paul notes that the loaf of bread we break in this supper represents the unity within the Body of Christ.

Bread is a big deal in the Scripture.  It is so important that it is provided as one of the abiding symbols in the Tabernacle that reflect true heavenly realities.   On the north side of the Holy Place, in front of the veil, God commanded that a table be constructed to display a perpetual offering of the Bread of the Presence.   The Kohathite tribe of the Levites baked twelve loaves each week and replaced them every Sabbath.  The old loaves would then be eaten by the priests in a Holy place.  

This bread was a symbol of God’s promise to provide physical and spiritual nourishment for his people.  Just as the ark reflected God’s provision of eternal life, the Bread of the Presence revealed God’s commitment to provide for their physical and spiritual lives here and now.  And as Jesus noted in John 6, like everything else in the Tabernacle, the bread prepared the people for the “living bread that came down from heaven.”

Join us as we examine Exodus 25:23-30 and consider God’s instructions for a table in the Tabernacle to present the Bread of the Presence and what this bread means for us.  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. 

Tailgators are not mythical creatures. Nor are they a pregame parking-lot party.  Tailgators are coworkers, or perhaps strangers, who follow you through access restricted doorways without presenting a code, badge, or retina.  Under the pretense of expediency, efficiency, and even courtesy, tailgators pass undetected and unauthenticated through restricted entries.

Tailgating is the number one entry point for hackers.   We think of hackers as sinister teenaged eastern-European computer geniuses.  In our imagination they operate from a babushka’s basement and wear only black hoodies. But the truth is much more mundane.  Often security breaches begin with a tailgator, passing through a secure door on the coattails of another’s politeness.  Southerners are particularly vulnerable to the tailgator’s nefarious pretense.  We love to hold the door.  After gaining physical access, the hacker finds an empty cube and a helpful administrative assistant and poses as ‘the new guy’ who needs network access.

Companies spend millions on network, data, and physical security to prevent unauthorized access but often fail to eliminate the threat posed by an artful insurgent.  Such is the hazard of a free society.   Though with the proliferation of AI and facial recognition defense against such artful insurgency is improving.   Yet no human system of access control is fool-proof.   The only fail-safe access control ever constructed was the system of access God built for his covenant people.

The Exodus, and indeed the larger story of redemption, was never a story of deliverance out of oppression.   It is a story of deliverance into an abiding relationship with a Holy God.   God told Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go that they may worship me.”   This was no ruse or pretense.  God’s purpose all along was that they would know Him, serve Him, dwell with Him, love Him, glorify Him and enjoy Him. 

The biggest barrier to this plan was never Pharaoh’s hard heart, but the deceitful hearts of God’s people.  Sin is a completely effective barrier.  It forms an impenetrable access restriction to a holy God.  And our presumptuous, pagan attempts to gain access through moral or ritual works will never open the door to our return.   As Jesus noted, “with man this is impossible.”

But Jesus also said, “But with God all things are possible.”   God makes covenant with Israel at the foot of Sinai.  The terms of this covenant are outlined in the moral, civil, and ceremonial law.  The demands are overwhelming.  Yet the people respond, “all that the Lord has spoken we will do.”  Their promise far outstripped their power to obey.   In a few short days, they would shatter every command and craft a golden calf.   And Moses would shatter the tablets containing God’s promises.  

If the covenant depended on perfect obedience, their access would be forever denied.   But even before they built that calf, God gave Moses plans for something better to build.  A tent of meeting where God would dwell among them and provide access through the means He appointed and accomplished.   And to illustrate this, God begins the blueprints for the Tabernacle with instructions regarding the Ark of the Covenant.  

First things first.  God did not command the tent then plan its furnishings.   The focus of the Tabernacle was not its covering, but the Ark which provided a covering for something else – man’s sin.   The ark was the key to man’s access to God.   The ark was the authenticator that gave man the access to God that no good deeds, ritual, or incantation could possibly grant.

The ark was, however, a picture of the gospel.  An illustration of what was to come.  It presents the clearest explanation of Christ’s work anywhere in the Old Testament.   In the ark we see man’s condition, his need, and God’s gracious provision.  God’s law placed within it, God’s presence enthroned above it and at the point of intersection the atonement cover where unholy men are given access to a holy God.  Ultimately the New Testament tells that Jesus is the mercy seat, the one who makes atonement. 

In Romans Paul writes, “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.” (Romans 3:25)  The word for “sacrifice of atonement” is literally the Greek word used to describe the atonement covering the Ark of the Covenant.  And again, in Romans 5:1, Paul writes, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.”

Tailgating is frowned upon where you work.   Everyone’s access depends upon their own credibility.  But with God, access is never granted because of our credibility.  The only way for us to enter is to follow Christ through the door.   The badge of his perfect and final sacrifice is the only credential that can get us through that door.   As one theologian noted, the Tabernacle has numerous doors, but they all say ‘keep out.’   Yet God designed perfect access to his presence through our great high priest and a day of atonement.   The author of Hebrews captured it perfectly.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. 

Hebrews 4:14-16.

Join us this week as we examine Exodus 25:9-22 and consider God’s instructions to Moses regarding the Ark of the Covenant and unpack its promises for us.   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. 

Bleak and colorless.  November calendar photos are invariably the blandest of the entire year.  October boasts vivid fall colors.  December is trimmed in bright red and green.  But November is muted grey and brown with somber landscapes and usually fog.   You might expect January to be the least interesting, but November always takes last place.  

As a child something else characterized November.  It was “Stewardship Month.”  To avoid the unpleasantness of preaching on ‘giving,’ our church confined the topic to the month of November.  The rest of the year preachers and hearers were off the hook and could rest easy.   No one invited friends to church during November.  And we all girded up the loins of our minds for the deep dive into ‘stewardship.’ 

‘Stewardship’ was our euphemism for the giving of tithes and offerings.  The November series resembled a spiritualized fundraising campaign preparing us for the new year’s budget.  Stewardship month jaded us that the topic of ‘giving’ was an unpleasant but necessary part of the Christian life.  And so, we missed out on one of the most joyful aspects of covenant life and treated ‘giving’ as an embarrassment to our apologetic for a life well lived.

Along with “all Christians are hypocrites” the other darling mantra of skeptics is “all they want is your money.”  Without a proper view of the grace of giving, we cower apologetically at these slogans.  Thrown back on our heels, we treat the topic of giving as anathema and only refer to it tangentially, quick to translate giving into convenient service not sacrificial gratitude.  

But the Bible is very clear that giving tithes and offerings is an indispensable part of our Christian life.  Indeed, “God loves a cheerful giver.”  By cheerful giving, we celebrate all the attributes of a giving God, his grace, his provision, his faithfulness and his goodness.   Our practice of giving is a powerful barometer of our delight in our God and faith in what we profess to believe about him.

As God brings Israel out of Egypt, the most important part of their deliverance is preparing them to abide in him.   Only slightly less than half the entire story of the Exodus is focused on the Tabernacle and the priesthood.  God gives the ethos of covenant life in the moral and civil law.  In the ‘Book of the Covenant’ the people are taught to live with one another.  But the Tabernacle teaches the people how to live with their God. 

In Exodus 25 instructions for the Tabernacle begin with ‘giving.’   It was the first sermon in the series.  Not tucked away in November. Giving is the starting point.  The abiding life in Christ begins and consists in a recurring pattern of grace and gratitude.  Gratitude expressed through giving and worship.   Giving that is voluntary, joyful, and Christ-centered.  Are you giving? Is your giving voluntary, joyful, Christ-centered?

Join us this week as we examine Exodus 25:1-9 and consider voluntary, joyful, and Christ-centered giving.   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. 

A child’s play takes the mundane and makes it magical.  Cooking, going to work, driving to the store, mowing the lawn and even vacuuming.   Adults long to finish all these.  To move on to better, more important, things.  But these are the very works children treasure in their play.   They spend hours enjoying what their parents spend hours lamenting, avoiding, and despising.

Play is often where children learn to cultivate the important rhythms of ‘real life.’  Rhythms that are drudgery to us.  But rhythms that represent the bulk of our living.  We try to escape them, complete them quickly, delegate them so that we can focus on more quality time with our families.  Not realizing that the normal routines of life are the quality time.  

Our children learn to do important things in life by watching and imitating us in our routines.   Imitation is more than a sincere form of flattery.  It is the way we learn to be and do what we are made to be and do.  Especially in our spiritual lives.  The Bible reminds us in Ephesians 5:1 that the key to discipleship is to “imitate God as dearly loved children.”

In God’s Word, he does not merely command or commend a way of life to us.  Rather, he provides a pattern based on infinite, eternal, and unchanging realities.  He gives us the law to teach us to imitate his holiness, goodness, wisdom, and truth.   And he gives us worship as a pattern for how we are to know and draw near to him.  God reveals himself to us in covenants -promises He makes and guarantees by his word.  And we are to approach him by receiving and renewing his covenants.  

Over and over in the scriptures, God’s people worship him through the renewal of covenant vows.   Week in and week out, day in and day out, covenant renewal is the pattern, the rhythm of God’s grace and his people’s gratitude.   Tabernacle and Temple worship followed this pattern.  And this pattern still directs the trajectory of Christian worship. A trajectory of worship and life that glorifies and enjoys God.  

We see this pattern first unfolded to the people, through Moses, at the foot of Sinai.  First in the giving of the law in Exodus 20-23.  Then in the people’s formal commitment to the Covenant in Exodus 24.  And finally in the description, building, and dedication of the Tabernacle and the priesthood, described in Exodus 25-40 and then in Leviticus. Often these parts of Exodus and Leviticus seem little more than tedious and uninteresting footnotes to the narrative of deliverance.  Yet the pattern for worshipping and for living is the climax not the appendix to the Exodus.  

Exodus 24 is a powerful moment.   The Law in all its terror and depth has been given.  How will the people respond?   Before they heard it, they cried out, “all that the Lord requires we will obey.”  But what about now?  Will they continue in covenant with the Lord, or turn back and return to Egypt?  In this moment we see their commitment and God’s acceptance.  They commit to obey all He requires.  And he provides a gracious pattern for approach that accommodates their inevitable failures but marks them as men and women, boys and girls accepted by him as his own.  

All our worship follows this same pattern.  Acknowledging God’s call and its requirement, confessing our failure, letting God’s means of grace consecrate us, finding acceptance with God through communion, and then receiving his commission to “go and make disciples of the nations.”   This pattern shows us how we are to approach the inapproachable God.  How we may truly love him and be loved by him.   And provides a weekly reminder that our calling, confession, consecration, communion, and commission are the pattern of life in union communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Join us this week as we examine Exodus 24 and consider the pattern God has given us for worship and for 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. 

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.