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Grace Christian Church, 70466 Norkwalk Road, Kimbolton, OH (2026)

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.

05/24/2026

A House of Prayer

Isaiah 56:7
I will bring these people to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. The offerings and sacrifices they place on my altar will please me, because my Temple will be called a house for prayer for people from all nations.”

The church’s positive influence on the world cannot be understated. Making that statement might be considered controversial in today’s political climate but as a historian the data is clear. No other evidence need be advanced but the fact that it was Christian nations that ended the legal slave trade in the modern world. England not only outlawed the slave trade but then sent navel forces out to prevent the slave trade from even happening. William Wilberforce was the man who drove the political fight to end legal slavery and he did it because of his Christian faith. The power of the church to affect society over the centuries and millennia is not in dispute. A clear movement of God has shaped large groups of people over history and understanding the power God has through the church can help us develop a great trust in the God who loves all humans. We need to be clear that the church is made up of humans and that means that the church is not a perfect entity but God can still work through it and that is what we need to know. What tells me about the power of God to work is that each church by itself seems not to have much power but when God gathers his people amazing things can happen. Today the missionary movement of the nineteenth century is treated as an abuse of nonwhite people but in fact that movement put in place people and organizations that would have a huge impact in the two world wars. It is an easy thing to say that God used these people to save hundreds of thousands of lives. As imperfect as it is God works through the church and that can help us build a real value for the church and what it means to us and our faith. Our faith is not in the church it is in the God who uses the church and that tells us about the meaning and purpose of the church. Being in church does not save us and yet at the same time it is the church that God uses to send people out into a dying world to speak of the salvation from sin God offers. To most people the church does not seem like a very important thing but to God who established the church it is the vehicle that is used to change the world in very real ways. It is interesting that the people who understand the power of the church are not believers but those who hate the church. There is a reason one of the first things that get destroyed by atheistic political ideas is the church because they know the ideas and principles God teaches real value and effect on people and that teaching happens in the church. If the church had no power the enemy would not try to corrupt it and to divert it from the purpose God made it for. The church does not change society because that is it’s intention but the church changes society because the God who redeems sinful humans is taught about in the church.
It helps my faith to know that God works through imperfect people in the church to communicate His love for every human and Jesus’ work to transform sinful people into redeemed lovers of God. God’s work in the church is to speak to the broken state of humans and to tell the world there is another choice about how to live that fills people’s lives with hope and joy. The work of the church is not to save people but to equip people to go into the world and to live with such peace and righteousness that it has a powerful impact on the world. Think of the church as a tool box and each person in the church is a tool in the hand of God. It is not us but God working through us that changes the world. God’s work through the church means that the church is not just some institution or organization but it is God personally working in each humans life to remake them into what God longs for them to be. We find such joy and hope in this God who knows us by name and calls us to the church because it is in the church we will find the tools and training we need to be the people God wants us to be. Our God is personal and not some far away authority that just wants to control us. What God teaches us is to bring healing to us and to build in each human the things they need to find real meaning and purpose in life. God does not command us so much as He calls to us and invites us to find in Him the solutions to the things that trouble us in life. Sin is destroying us and Jesus is the one who comes with the answer to our sin. This is what the church does and it tells us about the God who established the church to save broken people and bring healing to every human. Let us serve and worship God in church and then go out into a world that needs to know the love that God has for people.
One of the problems that we get into is that we think of the church as an institution instead of a place where we can connect with God on a personal level. We get together as a group to celebrate and worship God but each of us come as single individuals who are loved by God. The call that God makes is not to the church but to each person and their place in the world. It is only when we know this do we understand the power of what the church is all about. In our verse we hear the voice of God wanting to lead people to His place not to control them but to fill their lives with joy. And the words “my house of prayer” ring with the longing of God to have a deep effect on our lives and the world. God calls to us to come to Him and to follow Him because He has the answers to the things that we need in life. Our faith is based on the idea that God wants to give us life and so He speaks to us about our sin not to make us feel guilty but to tell us what is wrong because He has a plan to fix us. Obeying what God teaches does not save us but it is a response to God’s call to us and his offer of salvation from the destruction sin brings. The words “house of prayer” are so wonderful because it tells us God not only calls to us and tells us things but we are invited to spend time talking to God. Prayer is a place where we both submit to God’s authority and we fall before God to speak to Him about our pain and our need for healing. In scripture we find over and over that God speaks to people in very personal ways and that tells us God is interested in hearing what we have to say. When God decides to destroy S***m and Gomorrah God takes input from Abraham. We are told Moses talked with God like a friend talks to a friend. The house of prayer is a place where God and humans meet because God wants it and God longs for us to meet with Him. And look at what happens when we answer the call of God to come to Him and meet at the house of prayer. We find joy and I like that a lot. Our God wants us to fill our lives with good things like hope, peace and joy and part of that process is accepting God’s invitation to be part of the house of prayer God Himself builds. When we meet with God as a group of people God works in powerful ways that change people, nations and whole societies. This is the hope we have in the living God who loves us and brings healing to us because we need it.
A cool thing I like about God is that He makes things very clear. In this verse God starts by leading people to the house of prayer but them God compounds on that thought. The house of prayer is to be for all nations which tells us that God is not just speaking to the Israelite people but God wants all people to be part of His house of prayer. God explains how the house of prayer becomes a place for all nations and it is based on the idea that when we live by God’s ideas the world will notice. Living by what God teaches makes us better humans and that pleases God. It is not the obedience but the fact that when we live by what God teaches us that our faith grows so that we become what God longs for us to be. That Isaiah uses this term twice to describe the vision God has speaks to who God is and what God thinks about. God gives us His wisdom and shows us about our sin because we need to know those things but they are not what makes our faith and creates the house of prayer. It is our faith in the living God and that we trust in the work of Jesus on the cross that brings us to the house of prayer. That God uses this term to describe His Temple is so wonderful because it speaks to how God wants our faith to work. Humans need God because of our sin but God redeems us because He loves us and does not want us destroyed by our sin. When we grasp this concept we become part of the house of prayer. All of this is based on the idea that God wants to be pleased with us. God’s anger is righteous and it is for all the right reasons but God does not want to be angry with us. The proof of that is the cross. Jesus goes to the cross not because God is angry but because God longs to redeem us and to have us learn how to live as we were meant to live and that pleases God. How can we reject a God who wants us to be pleased with us. Best of all is that God is not pleased by our obedience but the hope, peace and joy that our faith produces. The house of prayer is a wonderful thing because it tells us about the God who loves us.
Nothing is more exciting then the fact that God wants to build a house of prayer because it pleases God to do so. The joy God feels when we come to Him and seek His salivation is unprecedented. The God who created the universe by just speaking wants to save us from our sin and is willing to die to do it. In a house of prayer we come before God because He has invited us and calls out to us to come and speak with Him. This is a God worthy of worship who we can trust what He says. When God teaches us it is because He wants us to find healing in His words and strength in living by God’s ideas. Learning to love a God who wants to bring joy to our lives so that we can trust in Him is a God who is one we can feel safe in. Let us look to the God who calls us to a house of prayer because it tells us who our God is and what he is all about.

05/17/2026

Good Rules

Isaiah 56:2
The person who obeys the law about the Sabbath will be blessed, and the person who does no evil will be blessed.”

Does anyone else remember the American Bicentennial? It was my blessing to be a young person at that time and I remember the celebrations and the talk of the freedom that people experienced because America was a nation based on the idea of people being empowered not government. It is a little disappointing that we are now in the two hundred and fiftieth years of America and it just does not seem to have the same sense of celebration that I remember in my youth. Freedom is a fundamental desire of the human heart and we should commemorate any nations that have worked hard to make freedom a central part of who they are. Humans long for freedom because we have a God who wants us free to be the people we were made to be and that is why one of the subjects that often occurs in scripture is the idea of humans being free. We are told that Jesus comes to set us free from the slavery of sin and Paul in First Corinthians chapter ten verse twenty three speaks about our freedom and how it can be misused. A large focus of the story of God’s work with humans is God’s desire to give us real freedom and to empower us to use that freedom in a way that will help us grow and develop as God made us to do. When we allow sin to control us, we live not as free people but as people who are under the control of forces that destroy us and bring pain and suffering to us. The interesting thing is that God also knows that freedom is not easy and can make people very nervous. That is why God gives us a guide of how to get real freedom and how to then handle that freedom. God understands that freedom is not free and if we are to keep the freedom God give us we need wisdom to know what to do. We are blessed in the fact that God not only tells us how to get free but also how to then keep that freedom and that is one of the things that tells us about how amazing our God is and is a reason to worship and praise God. Humans struggle with so many things but we have a God who knows our problems and offers solutions to us. Jesus taught about both the faith we need and how to live as people of faith because faith in God is what sets people free. To trust in the living God is one thing but to know how to live each day as people of faith is much more daunting and so God gives us the wisdom we need to make it through each day. Believers in Jesus have been liberated and know what real freedom is and we should speak of that to those who are still held captive by the evil of sin. Faith in God is the most powerful force in the world that gives freedom to anyone who will trust in God and we need to speak to the world about this God. Knowing God and knowing what Jesus does on the cross tells us so much about what our faith is all about and what we who believe are involved in. Christians are the greatest movement for the setting of people free that has have happened and nothing like can be found in any other place like it.
When our first child was born, I was in grad school and Debbie was working and we were living in the married student housing of the university I was attending. Debbie and I had only been married for two years and we are still trying to understand what being married meant when this child came along and to say we were lost would not be wrong. For Debbie it was a bigger battle then for me because she wanted to be the perfect mother and Debbie never did anything half way. The problem was she had not grown up with a good mother and so had no real idea of how to be a good mother. That is when another woman in married student housing stepped in. She and her husband were older and they already had two kids and another on the way so being a mother was not new to her. Nothing was ever said it just happened but this woman must have seen Debbie struggling because she just began showing Debbie how to care for our child. This humble woman did not make Debbie feel stupid but just dispensed wisdom that was a great help to my wife and child. When I think about how God works I remember this woman and how she stepped in. Because we as humans are broken by sin we lack the ability to make the best choices for our lives but we have a God who wants to step in and give us the wisdom we need. God never forces Himself on us but humbly offers the knowledge we need to make our lives work like they should. The fact is the instructions God gives are a basic explanation of how the universe works and to ignore the ideas and concepts God gives is to bring harm on ourselves. Knowing how important the information God has is God should force us to obey but God only offers the wisdom and we are the ones who must choose to use the information God gives. Our faith is all about a God who wants us to know things about how the world works because that material will make our lives better and I like that about God. Let us look to God because His teachings set us free and help us to build lives of real meaning and purpose.
Recently I have been reminded how dangerous electric power is and now safe it has to be to work every day in our houses. From breakers to GFI outlets there are so many things that it takes to make electric safe to use in our houses and we should be very glad for all of them. Imagine not having electric power to use to make our lives easier. Electric is so useful that we don’t even think about it until we have a power outage. To some degree our verse relates to the same thing about faith that safety devices do for electric. When we stand in eternity no one is going to ask us about our church attendance but at the same time this reminds us there is a blessing in spending time with God. A few years ago I began to think about the whole Sabbath issue and what God wanted in commanding it. Yes, there was the easy part that everyone could see that it was a time to worship and give God the glory He deserved. There was also the component of the sin offerings but there is more then that to the Sabbath and the blessings that flow from it. I think the best place to start is to consider how powerful the very idea of the Sabbath was. How a person thinks about the Sabbath will demonstrate what they think of God and the role He plays in a persons life. When the Israelite people were traveling through the desert, their camp was centered on the Tabernacle to remind everyone that God should be at the center of their lives. Treating the Sabbath day as holy will change how we think about our God. Going to church is the same thing. If we go to church just because it is what we do church will not have same the impact that those who go to church to seek the Holy God. Church attendance does not save us but how we think about going to church and the purpose of going to church will either mean finding the blessing God seeks for our lives or missing an encounter with the transcendent God. There is so much about the Sabbath that God commanded that bring blessing to us without even knowing God has something special attached to the Sabbath. God clearly wants the Sabbath to be a day of rest and that rest is connected directly to God resting after six days of creation. When we have time to rest, we have time to sit and to think about God and what He is doing. On the Sabbath day we also have time to think about the Holy and the sacred and that leads us to thinking about God. Let us speak of the blessing of the Sabbath day.
The importance of the Sabbath is then backed up by the next phrase which tells us that there is a blessing for those who do not do evil. When we hear these words most of us don’t think we do evil so it should be easy to get this blessing but that is not what God thinks. Scripture tells us that our hearts are evil and that without God the only thing that will come out of us is evil and that is where the Sabbath comes in. By obeying the laws about the Sabbath people are set up to over come the evil that is in their hearts and to then find the real blessing God gives. I know that the Sabbath and church on Sunday are not the same but because the law was fulfilled the Sabbath now is found in Jesus and church is where we celebrate Jesus so I want us to think about the power of church to help us deal with the evil that plagues our hearts. Going to church does nothing for us if all we are doing is going to church but if we go to church because it is where we gather to worship the God who saves us the church has great power. The blessing that flows from church is not being in church but that the church helps us better connect with God and our fellow believers. At church we find the place where we are confronted by our sin and also reminded that we are not alone in our struggle for faith and trust in God. Just as how people thought of the Sabbath brought blessing so does blessing flow from church attendance. We are not saved by church but church is where we gather to give God the glory He deserves because He is the one who saves us. Evil cannot be dealt with unless we have God and both the Sabbath in the Old Covenant and the Church in the New Covenant are where we find the strength and faith to deal with the evil in our hearts. Let us find blessing because we do not do evil because we have spent time worshiping and honoring God. Part of the solution to evil is found in both the Sabbath and the church so let us honor God by being in attendance.
What I like about this verse is that it gives us an idea about the process of faith. We all like the idea of faith but the actual doing of faith is hard but God who knows how hard faith is gives us the wisdom to understand what is going on. Learning to trust God takes real work but God has given us what might be called short cuts to building faith. Each of the rules and laws God gives us has a purpose and is meant to help us build our faith in the living God. We do not have to have great faith all at once but if we follow the process we find in this verse we will see that we and grow and develop in our faith over time. Our verse shows us that as we learn one concept another will flow out of that and we can build a love for God that changes us and the world around us. Obeying does not save us but obeying what God teaches us will help us to be people who find the hope and peace God wants us to have.

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