First Presbyterian Church - Joplin, Missouri

05/31/2026

Please join us LIVE at 5 pm for our end of season choir performance!

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

05/31/2026

Please join us in person or online today at 10:30 am!

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

05/29/2026

The many languages of Pentecost were God’s way of saying, “This welcome is for you, too.”

Every person who walks through the door brings something the body needs: a story, a gift, a voice, a way of seeing God that can help the church grow.

You are welcome here is not a slogan. It is part of what the Spirit has been saying from the beginning.

05/29/2026

Paul’s concern was never that the Corinthians lacked gifts.

It was that they were starting to treat those gifts like status.

The Spirit does not give gifts so we can rank ourselves against one another. The Spirit gives grace for the common good, so the whole body can grow, serve, and move together.

05/29/2026

Spiritual gifts are not spiritual credit.

They are not proof that we have earned something from God. They are grace, given freely and meant to serve more than ourselves.

The gift comes with relationship, and the relationship comes with a call.

05/29/2026

The founding promise of the church is not that a few chosen people get to carry the Spirit. It is that the Spirit is poured out, shared, and set loose.

05/29/2026

Moses reaches the kind of exhaustion that does not sound polite or put together.

He tells God he cannot keep carrying the people like this. And God does not rebuke him for being overwhelmed.

God gives him help.

The Spirit is placed on seventy elders, and the burden Moses has been carrying alone begins to be shared. Then Eldad and Medad start prophesying outside the tent, reminding everyone that the Spirit is not owned by the people in the expected places.

Moses could have protected his position. Instead, he imagines something better:

What if all God’s people shared in the Spirit?

05/29/2026

Anyone who has carried responsibility for too long knows something about Moses in the wilderness.

The people are tired. The complaints are constant. The past starts looking better than it really was. And Moses, who has been leading them for years, finally reaches the end of himself.

His prayer is not neat or spiritual-sounding.

It is honest.

Why is this so heavy?
Why am I carrying this by myself?
I cannot do this alone.

That kind of prayer may not sound pretty, but it is faithful. It tells the truth before God.

05/29/2026

There is nothing wrong with planning. Churches need structure, calendars, and people willing to make the coffee and unlock the doors.

But Pentecost asks a harder question.

Have we become so careful, so managed, so committed to what worked before, that we no longer know how to make room for the Spirit to move in a new way?

The Spirit has never been easy to contain. That is not a problem to solve. It is what keeps the church alive.

A church that has finished being born is a church that has stopped breathing.

05/29/2026

The problem with Pentecost is that we keep wanting it to become a formula.

But Acts 2 does not give the church a clean strategy to repeat. It gives us a story of the Spirit moving beyond everyone’s control.

No committee planned it. No one branded it. No one had time to make it respectable.

The disciples spoke in languages they had not learned, the crowd was confused, and the first public reaction was not admiration. It was suspicion.

Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit is not something the church manages.

The Spirit is the reason the church exists at all.