Emerald City Christian Center & Sanctuary

09/06/2026

Romans 13:8-14

09/05/2026

Be cautious this week, preacher. Do not preach nationalism. It is profoundly true that you can love your country and be a Christian at the same time. It is just as true that you can be both patriotic and critical of your government. But your major task in proclamation is never to bring folks around to see the world the way you do through the lens of party politics. Your task is to confront with the Law and deliver the Gospel, to kill and make alive, to give them Jesus. Do not preach blind obedience to authorities of any kind. On the other hand, pray and reflect lest your own Old Adam get you distracted by insisting on en-vogue political alignments. Do not waste time stumping for your or anybody else’s party. - CJ Armstrong

Christians are called to love even amid imperfect institutions, imperfect marriages and families, imperfect churches and congregations, and called to love even in our clunky and imperfect society.

09/04/2026

Scientific descriptions are not stories. And that matters when reading books of the Bible like Genesis.



Watch the full version: https://youtu.be/DEShUddn8HY Main channel...

09/04/2026

“No writer in my lifetime has more shaped my life and thought—through short stories and novels and essays and poems”—than Wendell Berry, writes Russell Moore.

Sometimes, to some people, Berry could sound grumpy about heaven.

“He didn’t like the way some preachers used ‘heaven,’ just as he didn’t like the way some scientists used ‘nature.’ But he believed in both.

He believed body and soul, heaven and earth, are meant to hold together. When they do not, the result is what Berry saw as the most fundamental crisis of the modern era: the disintegration of persons and communities.

The reason Berry argued so hard for locality and connection to land cultivated over many generations is ... because, among other things, he recognized that people cannot come to love the mystery of life the way they dissect a frog.

Knowledge is rooted in imagination, he argued, and imagination is rooted in affection. We can only come to really *know* a person, a community, a plot of land, when we have come to *love* that person or place beyond utility or efficiency.

Berry’s attack on the division of knowledge from imagination, community from freedom, body from soul, heaven from earth, is at its most polemic in his essays. In his fiction and poetry, though, he shows us how to imagine what it would be like to be members one of another, to be linked together in memory and hope.”

09/02/2026

Praying untamed, VISCERAL prayers.

The most "infamous" Psalm verse is this: "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" (137:9).

What? Why is this there?

What today would be classified as war crimes were often standard operating procedure in ancient warfare, like ripping open pregnant women or dashing in pieces their little ones (e.g., 2 Kings 8:12; Isa. 13:16). If just imagining that violence sickens us, try to fathom being forced to watch this nightmare happen to those you love.

Israel did. The Babylonian soldiers seized Israelite babies and smashed them against rocks, while their Edomite allies cheered on the mayhem and murder in the city, gloating over it all (Ps. 137:7, 9; Obadiah 10-14).

A ravenous pack of flesh-tearing hyenas had more humanity in it than did the destroyers of Jerusalem on that day of diabolical horror.

So, Israel cried out to the God who says, “Vengeance is mine” (Deut. 32:35), to avenge, to repay, an eye for an eye: “O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” (137:8-9).

Unless you have seen your child murdered before your very eyes, do not stand in judgment against those who prayed this red-hot prayer. It was written in agony, prayed in heartbreak, and handed over to the Judge to do with as he saw fit.

Some are troubled by prayers such as these. I am not.

I am grateful they are recorded, for there are times in life when we all want, and need, to pray them. We need volcanically to explode in molten petitions that capture emotions for which prim and proper verbiage would never suffice. We hand our pain, in the form of untamed prayers, to God. His are the only hands tough enough to hold such burning lines. He will hear. He will know what is best.

Revenge is taken from us, and judgment falls in the heavenly court, where it belongs, with our God and our Savior, who always knows and does what is best.

*For more thoughts on the Imprecatory Psalms, see my YouTube video, "Should Christians Pray the Imprecatory Psalms?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuDpfaezuJA

08/30/2026

Exodus 3:1-15

08/29/2026

Charles Murray, a man formed in an academic culture that regarded Christianity as something educated people had outgrown found himself compelled to reconsider it on the basis of the evidence.

Christianity need not retreat from investigation. Its central claim is that the Word became flesh, entered history, was crucified, and on the third day rose from the dead. That is not an embarrassment to be overcome. It is the claim we have been given to declare and defend.

08/27/2026

08/26/2026

08/23/2026

The Gospel of Remembering the Past