Grace Christian Church

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06/14/2026

Resisting God

Isaiah 57:4
Of whom are you making fun? Whom are you insulting? At whom do you stick out your tongue? You turn against God, and you are liars.

For me one of the things that makes scripture work is the idea that God does not use perfect people but He uses people who are willing to listen and live as God calls us to. Abraham comes off as a regular human with real issues and struggles. When we look at David we find a flawed man who seeks to live by faith as best he can. Then there are the son’s of Zebedee or better known as the son’s of thunder. In one instance they wanted Jesus to call down fire from heaven and another one they had a little talk with some people who were not part of their group. And yet John would be the one who was loved by Jesus the most and James would have clear influence over the early church. Let us not forget people like Naomi who loses her husband and sons and is so completely lost she tells people to call her Mara which means bitterness. The human condition is not lost on God and it helps me with my faith to understand that. If God can use angry people like Jonah to save the great city of Nineveh God can use me in my failures and my flaws. God is not confused by how broken we as humans are. As a matter of fact it is that brokenness that has God calling to us to come and find healing in Him. All of the commands and laws God gives are not meant to constrain us but to guide us in to the way of life that brings healing and real meaning to our lives. The ultimata statement of this is Jesus coming as both God and human and living as we live. No one can say that God does not know how hard it is to live as a human because God did it even to dying on a cross like a criminal. When we cry out to God we have a God who responds to us and knows our pain and already has a plan to deal with it. That we as humans reject God because we don’t want God to interfere in our lives is so stupid. God pours out wisdom to us like it is water and instead of drinking deeply we turn our noses up at it because what God says can some times be inconvenient. I do not know why people hate the Ten Commandments because all God is doing is explaining how reality works and still people want to avoid those ideas because they might get in our way. We have a God who explains the basic fundamental moral laws of the universe to us and we think they are foolish or we just plain ignore them and then we wonder why we have so many problems. These concepts are given to us not to make our lives hard but to make our lives better. There is nothing that says God has to explain things to us but God knows the pain and hurt that flows from not knowing these basic ideas and so God hands them to us for free because God knows we as humans need this information. Our faith should be built on the idea that God knows what it means to be human and wants to make being human as good as possible. This is the God I want to worship and serve, the God who loves me and cares about me.
The thing that astounds me about God the most is why does God cares about us. If you measure things in the scale of time and space properly we see that humans are nothing really. In the scale of time we live so briefly and we are gone. Then there is how small we are. There are eight billion people on this ball called earth and there is room for more. Our sun is a small star of which there are billions of them stretching further then we can even understand. I think about all of this and then ask why would God care about all of us let alone any one of us and yet based on what God tells us He knows more about each of us then we know about ourselves. And God does not just know us but He loves us and calls us His children. When we think about God’s love we often think about how we feel about people but in reality those feelings are called affection or fondness. Paul in I Corinthians thirteen makes clear that love is not about feelings but about making choices and deciding to act in a certain ways. This is what God does. God’s love is a choice that God makes about how He is going to deal with us and those choices have real effect on us. People talk about God being loving and accepting and that is true but Jesus makes it clear that the love God has for us is not soft or easy but tough and demanding. God loves us enough to accept that we are sinners and in need of help but God does not accept that we should stay in sin because God knows sin destroys us. We have a God who loves us enough to tell us the truth and to make it clear that we need to embrace the morale law God gives us for our own good. God’s love for us is so deep and powerful that Jesus goes to the cross to die for our sin and then steps out of the tomb to tell us we can have life instead of death but we have to admit we are sinners and that we need God. What we need to know is that God does not have to deal with our sin. If God wanted to He could leave us to the death and destruction sin brings but God cares about us to much for that. This is the God what we encounter and that we find waiting for us to come to for healing and peace.
The proof of God’s love for us is so powerful and real that it only takes a little bit to grasp how much God loves us. At the top of the list is Jesus, if there is anything more powerful then God becoming human to take on our sin I don’t know of it. Second to Jesus is the fact that God lets us choose Him. This is such a intriguing concept that it deserves a little consideration. God could force us to obey Him but to do so would mean that we do not respond out of love but force. Thus God calls to us and invites us to come and find in Him all the things that really matter in life. But God never forces us to live by His ideas. If we choose we can let sin destroy us but that is not what God wants. In our verse we are looking at we find the tension between the God’s morale laws of the universe and those who would reject those ideas. In this verse God is asking why people would reject His wisdom and you can feel the pain God has as He knows that rejecting Him only brings death. We have God desperately trying to save us from the destruction we have caused in our lives and we reject it because is means we would have to submit to God instead of our own selfishness. In the verse we have three things that after all the years between when they were written and now they still resonate. These things troubled God back then and still trouble God now because God knows the price of sin and it is not Him who will pay it. People who are making fun of God and who insult God and who stick their tongue out at God are throwing away the only real hope they have and it distresses the God who loves people and does not want them to suffer the pain they are stepping to. God is trying to save people and those people reject Him. We find in this verse what is so sadly very basic human behavior. To resist God is to choose death and that is not something God wants for us and the proof of that is Jesus. The evil that lives in the human heart is so terrible and despicable that it would have us make fun of the only hope for life and peace that we could have. And God still lets us choose one over the other, that is love.
Because I am a historian by training I notice things from a historical and cultural perspective. An interesting thing is that every culture we know about has a worship of god or god’s. We also know that humans are prone to want God in their lives. People have to be taught to say there is not God. Recently we have even learned there is a place in our brains that when simulated it feels like you have had an encounter with God. Humans were made to be connected with God and we want God but there is a problem, God is inconvenient. Wanting God and obeying God are two different things and so there is this tension that we as humans have. Resisting God arises from the evil that is in our hearts that is opposed to God. Our verse puts it so cleanly when it says, “we turn against God.” Just like Adam and Eve we choose to ignore God not because we hate God but because God gets in our way. This is the entire point of the Bible. God is always calling to us to come to Him but we don’t want to because it means we will have to submit to God’s authority instead of ours. Here is where the last phase makes a great point. We are made liars because we will not admit we need God and come to God and live by His ideas and concepts. The truth is this sets up a system of battle between us and God. God is the truth. All things that are real, true and right come from God which means rejecting God turns us into people who are false and who are not connected to reality. I love that God makes this plain because we are the problem not God. We are the people who turned against God and we are the ones who tell lies so we don’t have to face what is real. Once we go down this pathway it is hard to come back and that is why God has done all He has to make it clear how to fix what we have rejected. That we have a God who loves us and longs to make things right even though it is our fault is such a hope for us but we must confess we need God and then bow to His authority in our lives.
One of the things I have learned over the years in my reading and studying of scripture is how God thinks about our rejecting of Him. Yes, God is angry about that but it is not for what so many people think. We have an angry God because God knows what happens when we choose not to listen and learn from Him. Just as a parent gets angry with his child because the child is choosing to do destructive things does not mean that the parent hates the child or is even angry at the child. The parent is angry because he knows the price of those choices will bring pain and hurt that the parent does not want the child to suffer. When we resist God instead of submitting to God there is a cost and God knows how bad that cost is and does not want us to experience it. God loves us and longs for us to come to Him and find peace instead of fear and healing instead of brokenness. Let us accept the invitation form God to come and become the people God wants us to be.

06/07/2026

Rest in God

Isaiah 57:1-2
1 Those who are right with God may die, but no one pays attention. Good people are taken away but no one understands. Those who do right are being taken away from evil 2 and are given peace. Those who live as God wants find rest in death.

Has anyone else thought about how thick the Bible is? Think about all the words that God has written down and how much material we have to direct us into the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. We have a God who wants to talk to us and wants us to know how the world works. God hides nothing and speaks about the human condition with clarity and certainty. The more time I spend in God’s word the more my faith grows just because of the sheer volume of stuff God talks about. From the very beginning God discloses how broken we are but instead of letting us be destroyed by our sin God then spends millennia explaining how He can fix us if we will let Him. One of the things that used to be a problem for me was the law and all the commands’ God gives but I have come to understand that those commands are there to teach us how to be the people God made us to be and we desperately need that guidance. This is what astounds me about God, that God even cares about us after we have rejected Him and we have chosen our destruction over Him and the life He wants to give us. That God does not just command us to obey Him but He allows us to choose Him or not is so great. Instead of demanding obedience God spends the effort to persuade us that He is the answer to the questions and problems in our lives. God teaches us and speaks to us about how life should be lived. Those commands God gives are there to explain to us the reality of how the world works. There are simple things like promoting life over the death that sin brings. And then there are harder issues about owning things but also sharing the things we own. Thousands of years ago God addressed the male-female issue we face today because we needed guidance on how to live and work with other people. I always go back to the Ten Commandments because it is such a great example of God explaining how the universe works. Nothing has changed since those words were written thousands of years ago. When we live by those ideas that God expresses in such simple language the world is better and when we ignore those concepts the world is worse off. The Bible is thick because we are not very smart and God has had to spend a lot of time and effort explaining things over and over to us. There is real blessing in the fact that God wants to speak to us and tell us things we need to know. To know the hope that flows from learning from God about how to live our lives is such a wonder and fills our lives with a joy that is hard to grasp at times. Listening to God and learning from Him is not easy but it is worth the effort because our God is a redeeming God who longs for us to find peace instead of struggle and power to live lives that bring goodness and righteousness into a broken world.
On our property we have a shed filled with equipment and products designed to foster the well being of animals. All of that stuff is not there because we like having it but those things are there because we need to use them in the process of taking care of animals. In short all of that stuff is there because it is part of a life style we have chosen. God’s words to us are the same kind of thing. The Bible does not exist because God just wanted to tell us things about the world and how it works. Scripture is there because it is designed to foster a life style that we have to choose. Being people of faith is not about some rules we have to obey if we want to get to heaven but it is about living a life directed by God because the ideas and concepts God teaches us cause us to want to choose that life. In the book of James we find a discussion about what our faith means and James writes that if our faith does not shape how we live then what is the point of that faith. The idea here is that we have to do more then just say we believe in God because even the enemy believes in God. Faith in God is a willingness to take what God tells us and to have it direct our lives in a real and meaningful way. God has gone to great lengths to restore the broken relationship we have with Him so that we can come to Him and know he wants to bring healing to us and not condemnation. We don’t just read God’s words but we read them so they can frame how we live. This is one of the great things about God and why I praise and worship the living God Jesus. Knowing what God says allows us to choose to live as He calls us and in doing so we find hope, peace and joy.
It is not clear to me if it is because I am getting older or if it was always there and I just missed it because God wanted me to focus on other things but I find that I see God speaking about our pain more. To see it best all you have to do is go to the Gospels and see Jesus at work. Just thinking about how much time Jesus spent dealing with the painfulness of life impresses me and tells me so much about the God I worship and serve. The verse we are looking at now speaks to the pain of loss and the end of life and what God has to say is interesting. People who have chosen to live by the precepts and laws about life that God gives find blessing even in death. Again the idea is not that a person’s obedience gives them peace but the faith in God that caused them to live by God’s commands brings peace. We see both the human side of our faith and God’s side. In this verse we see the human side of not noticing people being gone and not understanding why people are gone when we do notice. I love that God speaks right to the great fear most people feel when we think of death. Losing people is a terrible thing and to think about our own death is even worse. The whole idea of people not noticing is such an interesting thing because if we are not noticed in life we hope that someone would notice that we are gone. That sentence “Good people are taken away but no one understands.” was written thousands of year ago but we still ask that same question today. God does not hide that there are things we don’t understand that bring pain to us and this is where we have to learn to trust God in this. We have a God who addresses the issue of death and loss and the pain that flows from that which gives us hope but not in the way we always want. Dealing with the grief and sadness that rises from death is not something God hides but instead He puts the subject out there to invite us to come to Him and seek hope and peace in Him. Humans struggle with the problem of death and so God tells us things and show that even in death God knows what is going on. Our fear and pain are answered by God because it is God who knows how we are built and wants to let us know we can trust in Him. Let us look to God not because it will make our pain go away but because it will deepen or faith in God.
Now we get to the God side of things and we learn God’s thinking. Our pain and our suffering is seen in a very different light by God and I have to say that I like God’s take on this more then my human thinking. From God’s perspective there is a real and concrete blessing that comes from doing good but it is not what we as humans want to hear. God blesses people who do good by removing them from this reality. Think about that, God clearly thinks there is blessing in death and His reasoning makes really good sense. Death by God’s thinking is not punishment but ransom and relief which to some degree takes my breath away. When I first read this verse it was a long time ago when I was starting out in ministry. I came across it when I was preparing a funeral. It seemed odd at that time and almost unfair. At the same time it did give hope in a way that I could see would give people grieving the loss of someone something to hang onto. Only after years of spending time with God in prayer and devotion did I gain a deeper understanding of what God was getting at here. Our hope is not in this life and as a matter of faith we have to deal with the evil and pain of life and God sees the death of those who seek Him as a change of status to a new and better place. Look at the words used here. First is that death takes us away from evil. Because we have built a relationship with God it is such a simple thing to be translated from this evil world to the glory of the throne of God. Those who trust in the things God tell us about how to live then give us hope in death. Next are the words peace and rest. We could send years on the word peace but let it just be stated God is the source of all peace so to be with God is to be at peace in a very real way. The word rest is important because God is very concerned about rest. God Himself takes a day to rest after six days of creation. When we look at the law the concept of the Sabbath is all about rest. Every seven years a whole year is to be spent in rest and every fifty brings two years of rest. The basic idea is that rest is the stopping of striving and to sit in the hope of God. Death for those who trust God is a place of rest from the battles of sin and evil and that is such encouragement.
We cannot miss the key component here in this verse. Three times we are told that it is those who are living as God calls us to that find the peace, rest and removal from evil. Our faith and trust in God calls us to learn how to be the people God wants us to be and there is real hope in that. Be careful here it is not our obedience that makes this happen. Jesus condemns people that just follow the law but miss faith in God. Our learning who God is and our seeking to be people who trust in the living God cause us to then live by what God teaches. What is really cool is that the more we learn to live as God teaches our faith will also increase. Finding rest in God is all about trusting in God and knowing even death is a blessing if we will be what God longs for us to be. Seek God with all of our might because when we do there is nothing that God can not use as a blessing to us and the world even death.

05/31/2026

Leadership

Isaiah 56:10
The leaders who are to guard the people are blind; they don’t know what they are doing. All of them are like quiet dogs that don’t know how to bark. They lie down and dream and love to sleep.

A part of my thinking and study over the last few years has been looking into the nature of God. What things do we know about God and how do they all fit together? Developing this understanding has helped build a faith that stands when all other things fail. Everyone knows the big things about God. First is that God is The Truth and then we know what flows from that is God’s righteousness and love. It is the next level of things that have caught my attention. How does God’s righteousness and love work in everyday situations? A quality that often gets bypassed when considering things about God but seems central to who God is and what our faith is all about is that God is a generous God. As we look at how God operates and what God does we see that God just gives things to us that we do not merit or even deserve. This happens long before we get to the grace, mercy and forgiveness that God gives that represents that highest form of God’s generosity. Simple things tell me the most about this generous God. When we read in Genesis, we see that God spends time trying to convince Cain not to kill his brother. God does not have to do that but that is not how God works. When Cain does act God then holds him accountable and I think that is a part of God’s generosity also. Abraham is another place where God is generous because Abraham is not what he should be but God keeps working with him and Abraham grows to be the man of faith God wants him to be. Over and over we see God stepping in and giving more then we should get. Of course the best example of God’s generosity is Jesus. There is nothing that says God has to deal with our sin issue but we have a God who does not want us to die because our sin and so in His generosity God offers life to us through our faith in Jesus. God’s generosity is shown in the simple fact that He gives us His word to learn from. The wisdom God hands out for free in scripture is so wonderful and so helpful to all humans even atheists understand the power of what God gives to us. Often we speak of the grace, mercy and forgiveness of God and that is quite frankly short hand for all of God’s generosity. Grace is all about God giving us what we need but don’t deserve, mercy is about God not wanting us to suffer the full weight of our sin and forgiveness speaks of God taking our sin on Himself so we can have life instead of death. The response to God’s generosity is to be thankful and to grasp just how wonderful God is and so build a relationship with God that will transform us into what God longs for us to be. Our God is generous because we need Him to be and so He pours out all the things that will help us be what we were made to be and that is the God we worship and serve with joy and love.
It is important to note that God does not use His generosity to manipulate us because all people enjoy the grace and mercy of God even if they do not believe. The generosity of God is there to tell us the kind of God He is and to speak to what God wants to do if we will submit ourselves to His authority. This generosity points to a God who wants to offer more to us if we will learn to trust in Him and accept His greatest generosity the forgiveness of our sin. A point God makes over and over is the wickedness of the human heart and how it brings destruction to us and that we need God to intervene if we are to have any hope of avoiding the destruction sin brings. Because of our condition, we find the generosity of God at work again. God speaks of how wicked our hearts are to warn us so we can understand where our biggest problem is. It is not God’s plan to make us feel bad but to alert us about our problem and to offer a solution. This is where God is at His best because God does not have to solve our problem. We are the one’s who have sinned and we deserve the death we get but God does not want that. We have this God who offers a fix for our broken lives because God hates that we are broken and wants to fix us. To comprehend how great what God offers is we have to know how terrible the human heart is and the evil that it can produce. Our hope is that we have a God who is not afraid to tell us about this and He does it not to condemn us but to let us know He offers an answer to our situation. God does not have to do this because it is not God’s fault but God knows we need help and so in His generosity He offers to fix us. The God of creation is a great and wonderful God who gives us hope and fills our lives with joy instead of worry and fear.
Because we are approaching our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American experiment, I have been considering what the founders of our country thought about the human condition. Our founders understood that to really know how to institute a government they needed to consider how humans acted. What our founders appreciated was the complexity of the human situation. Humans need to be governed but the problem was that government would be run by humans and so they tried to give the government enough power to work but limit that power so it would not be corrupted by humans. I think that our founders were considering verses like we are looking at when they worked on the Constitution. Our verse describes how leaders can be corrupt and incompetent and the idea is this is compared to God who is not any of those things. Human leaders struggle with both being able to do the job of leading and also dealing with the corruption power brings. We know from all of history that this is an issue that has not been solved by any government and it all has to do with the problem of the evil in humans hearts. Yes, there have been good people who have led their people but we know even the best of people fall to temptation. If there was ever a great leader is was king David and yet even he failed the test. No one is good enough all the time and that is why we need to submit to the authority of God and let Him lead us in our lives. God knows that we are weak and that we are prone to corruption and so God offers to lead us. In our verse we see that God understands that the purpose of leaders are to guard people and I like the idea that God sets the standard so we know what is required of leaders. In the next breath God also shows us the weakness of human leaders which God describes with considerable detail. What God is doing is making the point that humans are weak and they fail and that is for leaders as well as any other people. I bless God for doing this because it informs us about where to put our trust and what to really believe in. Humans governments are never going to be good and should be limited but learning to trust in God will give us the leadership we need. Our hope is not in our leaders but in the God who is generous and who teaches us how to be what we should be. Let us trust in God and not human leaders because we will find greater peace in doing so.
This verse is such a great step in comparing the leadership of God and the leadership of man. The evil and incompetence of man is shown for what it is and God condemns it not because it is corrupt but because it does not do what it should do, guard people. For God this is so troublesome because He is the great leader who guards His people. It all starts from the very beginning with God telling Adam and Eve not to eat something. God knew what would happen to them and He wanted guard them from the evil. One of the things the Bible does is it is a form of God being a guardian to us because the Bible outlines the things that are dangerous and it tells us to watch out for them. Comparing humans as leaders to God can be disheartening but it serves a purpose that can help us. Even though David did evil he is still considered a great leader because his heart was set on the things of God. Moses was a great leader not because he did great things but because he spent time listening to God. A good leader is one who sets his heart on God. Moses did not want to be a leader but God made him one. Best of all is the leaders who seek God seem to bring the most joy and peace to people. As a historian I know the arguments people are going to make about religious leaders being some of the worst leaders and I agree with that. I did not say religious leaders I said people who seek God to lead them so they can lead others. Even Jesus condemned the religious leaders of His time because they were filled with selfish and self centered desires. The center of a good leader is the humbleness to know that they need to be led and so they seek God to teach them and to help them so they do not end up like this verse. We have a God who knows how to lead and wants to lead each us of but we must humble ourselves and submit to the loving authority of God and that is not something easily done. Leadership is an important thing in our lives and who is leading us makes a real difference. If we let God lead us and trust in His guardianship over us we will become the people God longs for and the world will be a better place for it. What glory and wonder it is to have a God who loves us like he does and always does the right thing.
Knowing this verse can be a big help to us as we think about our faith and how it interacts with the world around us. Faith in the living God has real impact on how we live and if it doesn’t then what is our faith good for. In the book of James we are told that our faith needs to shape how we live because what God has to say has real effect on what is going on in the world. The question then comes to us, do we want people leading us who listen to and seek to know God’s leadership. Each and every person of faith has to make that choice and this verse tells us what happens when we seek something other then God’s work and will. As people of faith we should long for the leadership of the living God working in men and woman and from them will be leaders that can be trusted and will bring hope and joy to the world. Choosing the righteous living God or corrupt broken humans seems to be an easy and clear choice.

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70466 Norkwalk Road
Kimbolton, OH
43749

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+17402556996

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