Presby-Musings

The Bible is One Big Story filled with heroes and villains, great adventures, epic battles, love stories and astonishing tales.  It’s also the story of a “once and future” King who picked the most unlikely people to help him share the story of God’s amazing love, and how far God was willing to go to save the world. Today we are continuing our summer sermon series, One Big Story.  And what we're going to be learning over the course of this summer is one very simple fact:  "God can use you no matter what." You might think that you aren't good enough to be used by God... You might think you're too old, too young, too busy, too messed up, too much of a sinner... but God doesn't care about that.  God loves you and wants to use you no matter what. We'll be encountering some of the great characters in Scripture along the way---characters that undoubtedly dominated many a Sunday school class for some of us church-y types. I'd like to think that t...

I've always had this thing for the story of Gideon from the book of Judges in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Gideon has this miraculous moment where an angel from God tells him that he's supposed to lead an attack against a more powerful tribe that is terrorizing the Hebrew people.   And Gideon asks, "Why me?  I'm not up to that.  I don't think that will work for me.  You're asking the wrong guy.  Give me a minute, and I'll think of some other excuses."   That's my not-so-literal translation of the conversation from the ancient Hebrew.   And the angel of the Lord answers, "Uh, yeah.  Did you not just hear what I said?"  To which Gideon says, "You said you would help me save Israel, fine.  What I need is a sign that this is for real, that I'm really supposed to do this."   Then he says, "I'm going to ask something impossible.  I'm going to put this wool fleece outside tonight and will check it in the morning....

This Sunday we'll begin a brand new sermon series that will begin our church's journey through the Old Testament .  We'll be encountering some of the great characters in Scripture along the way---characters that undoubtedly dominated many a Sunday school class for some of us church-y types. I'd like to think that this sermon series is kind of a "Sunday School Remixed," sort of thing.  We're going to be going over some familiar ground for many of our church members but hopefully we'll all learn some things that surprise us when we do.  And if you are tuning in and you don't have much of a history with the Bible---you will definitely get the chance to learn more than you bargained for if we do this right... Part One of this first series in our study is centered on the story of Gideon and is entitled: "Ancient Stories: The (Very) Reluctant Hero ."  This story comes right out of Judges chapters 6 & Judges chapter 7 In the first...