Newport Presbyterian Church

04/02/2026

Prayer request: Please continue to pray for Gary Holt as he has been placed on a ventilator after coming through heart surgery.

10/11/2024

Thank you for your hard work this week First Baptist Church of Kenova! We have hosted close to twenty volunteers at the church this week and are looking forward to working with more as they come to help with flood relief.

12/30/2023

The conclusion of the Advent devotional was a Facebook live broadcast please go enjoy.

12/29/2023

For those of you who have been wondering- wasn’t there supposed to be another 6 days of the Advent devotional?- Yes, there were. Originally I had only planned to take Christmas Day off and pick back up with a double dose on Tuesday but the way this week has been for my workplace and the way it caused me to feel and react… to be honest I did not feel worthy of talking to anyone about loving you enemies, being a source of light for the world, or that I was living up to Jesus’s command to love your neighbor as yourself. How could I talk about Love when my heart was so full of anger and frustration at my fellow humans I could barely see straight. So you will get to hear the conclusion of our devotional but it will be a full week of lessons in one large lesson.

12/24/2023

12/23/2023

Another Friday is here and for many people it was the last day before their Christmas vacation. And spending time with family- which may be the perfect situation for today’s devotional. We are looking at Matthew 18:21-35 where Peter asks about forgiveness.

Jesus tells Peter that he should forgive people 70x7 times but that could be hard. Let’s face it people can be awful- not persons- people as a whole. When people get together they can get riled up, get loud, and become very disruptive to others. They can make life for the people not involved you know where 🔥. And when this happens you have 2 types of people the 1/2 that want to forgive them and go on with life and the 1/2 that wants them to suffer. What you have to remember is for every finger you point 10 point back at you but every time you forgive you’ve added to an endless ocean. It’s all relevance. Just because you’re destination is only 100 yards away on a map doesn’t mean you won’t have to travel a few miles to get there.

Forgiveness is a tricky thing. You hear ‘forgive and forget’ but that isn’t what you have to do. For one - if you truly forgive and forget you leave yourself open to a repeat of the offence and secondly forgiving and forgetting often leads to you burying your true feelings which leads to resentment and eventually the bottle bursts and there is more damage done. The goal should be’forgive and reconcile’, heal the wounds. If you can’t forgive you cannot be forgiven or more like won’t be forgiven.

Again forgiveness is tricky- it’s not a case of receiving a present even though you refuse to buy them for anyone else or being able to enjoy a large family dinner with all the trimmings despite refusing to feed a hungry stranger. It is the air you breathe, you can only have one lungful at at time. If you do not release the breath you’ve taken you cannot take in another, allow others a chance to breathe that air, then eventually you suffocate. Your heart must be open to forgiveness. Gods love and forgiveness go hand in hand you can’t have one without the other.

And why when Peter asks about forgiving others 7 times does Jesus respond with 70x7 times? Anyone who can do basic math knows that is almost 500 times and if you are still counting at that point you are not forgiving people you’re keeping score. We are called to forgive- it doesn’t mean forget and allow them to do it again, it means heal the wounds and move forward in the spirit of love.

12/22/2023

It is 4 days until Christmas- today is the 18th day of Advent. This year advent runs an odd time frame because Christmas Eve is the 4th Sunday of Advent so we have a full week of Christmas according to the church calendar. Today we look at Matthew 12:15-21.

It always seems that once you receive bad news or something bad happens the problems just keep coming until that’s all you’re looking at and you forget that somewhere in the world something good is happening because God is working on the hearts and minds of the people and they are learning about and experiencing the hope that Jesus brings. So while we’re facing a little trouble they are reveling in the joy- either way we are playing a part in the story of Jesus.

Matthew was trying to explain to his readers what was going on at this point. Jesus was feeling pressure from every direction- his followers were still getting caught up to speed on the plan, people were constantly wanting him to heal them, restore them, help them, the haters were getting stronger- Herod was coming for him, religious groups were trying to stop him, the rumor mill was trying to discredit him. He is seeing the end of the road but stays the course because he knows he has a role to play and has to stick to the schedule . The role he was in was written a certain way with certain points that had to be hit based on a blueprint years in the making. He is the Servant of God and he has to fulfill the requirements listed in the job description, that’s what the people were promised. However he will not use violence to achieve these goals but rather a quiet gentleness.

Matthew was telling the story after the events had happened so he already knew the ending and can use that hindsight to show how Jesus played his role to perfection. How he went about restoring the brokenness of the world. Jesus saw the nations were running full tilt towards violence and anyone wanting different was squashed and ignored- you know the squeaky wheels are the ones that get the grease. They also were willing to trample each other to be #1. But not the Servant- he was Hope, a light in the darkness. He was going to do things different no matter what.

If Jesus is Hope then all who are weary and worn down by the bad things in life can look to Jesus and remind themselves that they are a part of the story and the Servant is here to help.

12/21/2023

Healing requires faith- faith that the doctors know what they are doing, faith that our immune system is strong, faith that the medicine will work. Today we see where the faith people have is the best cure for anything, even death. Let’s look at Matthew 9:18-26.

Jesus had healed the paralyzed man and was still hanging around teaching when one of the Roman officials came to him panicked because he had no other options- his child had just died- and as he had nothing to lose at that point he decided to have faith that this man who was said to be able to perform miracles could help. As they went to the man’s home another person in need of healing decided to take a leap of faith and believed that just being able to touch Jesus’s coat would improve her situation. Upon reaching the official’s house Jesus was able to stop the mourning and reverse death.

Recalls happen- we hear about them all the time. Beef, vegetable, canned goods, all sorts of items because they have been contaminated by some dangerous agent. We are used to it by now and have tests to find them, medication to treat them, and ways to prevent them from getting us sick. These did not exist for 1st century Jews or the people who were before them so they had extensive laws regarding cleanliness and purity in regard to both food and people. By following these laws they avoided infection and transmission of diseases that could have been fatal to the population. People deemed unclean were separated from society just like sin separates us from God.

Matthew would have been writing his gospel primarily for the Jewish community of his time and many of the details he includes would stand out to them. The official showing such emotion and desperation for Jesus to help for one; the Roman officials did not show emotion in any way, they always had a public face of calm and arrogance. It was almost as if life in this small village in Galilee/Judea was beneath them, like the people were beneath them, so to see one so frantic and begging a Jewish man from Galilee for help would have been a shock. Also according to the law the two most unclean things were blood disorders and dead bodies and the process of regaining the status of clean was extensive so come our second and third shocks: the woman who just knew that touching the hem of his clothes would help her that she was willing to risk the anger of a whole crowd of people when she made them unclean on a chance and Jesus himself being willing to touch a dead body.

Now according to Jewish law every person the woman touched, since she had a blood disorder, was now unclean and would have to bathe, wash their clothes, and wait 24 hours before they could be out in public again as her touch had ‘infected’ them but instead of passing her unclean status onto Jesus by touching him she herself was infected by him, by his purity. He even told her that her boldness and faith had allowed her to save herself. Then he gets to the official’s house to find people mourning and tells them to stop and go home because the child is fine and they laugh at him until he grabs the child’s hand, which they see as a co**se and therefore unclean, and she gets up from the bed. Jesus has always had the power to cleanse the unclean, to eradicate everything that polluted the world, get rid of what was defacing and destroying it; the miracles were just the beginning of what he had planned. He was going to save us all not just a small handful. He was going to deal with every sin and, the ultimate destruction, death itself.

We’ve developed new ways to handle uncleanliness here in the modern world so we don’t have to stress as much over our diet or what we come in contact with, but half of the things we’ve developed are killing our planet so we’ve started looking for alternatives to the chemicals we use to try and reverse the damage. We now worry about our pollution from the chemicals and containers affecting our environment as the 1st century Jewish leaders did about the purity laws. And just as we are tasked with changing our habits and finding other ways to make our world cleaner while protecting our environment, the early church was tasked with finding ways to deal with the pollution that exists in people’s hearts and minds. We are still tasked with addressing the issues that arise from that pollution.

How do we do that? Take a minute and place yourself in the position of one of the key players in this drama, get into their thoughts, try to experience their faith or disbelief. If you feel bold enough imagine yourself in the place of Jesus during these events - what does this passage say to you?

12/20/2023

Today we look at another kind of healing- a psychological healing by Jesus. Matthew 9:1-8 shows us the case of a paralyzed man who was dealing with a weight unimaginable.

In this episode of Jesus’s ministry a paralyzed man is brought before Jesus by his friends and is forgiven by Jesus. The priests who see this event start to mumble and scoff at what Jesus has done and Jesus rebukes them. Then, to prove that he is who he is and can do what he has done, Jesus tells the man to walk which increases the number of people who believe in him.

Authority- the word has a bad rap. We more often hear it and associate it with having the power to hurt, abuse, and repress people. We see authorities as power hungry tyrants or people put in place to control others, we associate it with violence and, in some cases, someone or something we cannot trust.

We have only recently begun to realize that Authority also means to be in control and be able to do what you want- but we usually refer to this kind of positive authority as autonomy because that kind of control is something we can usually only apply to ourselves.

Jesus has authority. He has the authority to teach, authority over disease, nature, and demons, and most importantly to be God’s representative on Earth. Jesus wielded the authority of a leader not a dictator, he led with love instead of fear and drew people to him.

I know what you’re thinking- a charismatic leader who drew people in with love?-Cult. But cult leaders authority may start with love but eventually they turn to fear as they lose control showing their authority to be false. That is why the priests were so upset at Jesus’s words and actions to them it was the beginning of the loss of their authority and the rise of Jesus’s authority as the son of God. This is why Matthew includes multiple stories about Jesus controlling his surroundings in a row.

The heart of Jesus’s authority is the forgiveness of our sins. Most of the healings Jesus performed were physical but this one was psychological. The man wasn’t paralyzed by a physical malady but by the weight of guilt and shame. In modern understanding- he was deeply depressed. He was fortunate to have friends who loved him and had faith that he could be cured. Jesus responded to that faith and used his authority as God’s son to forgive him of his sins so that he could forgive himself.

We can see where this is leading- Jesus is the savior of Israel. He had the authority to deal with Rome’s oppression and with sin and evil themselves. He could challenge death itself. Just as he dealt with the man’s sin and restored his ability to walk and live a new life so would he face sin itself and restore us all through his resurrection.

We see the seeds of the forces that will crucify Jesus, the men who want everything to stay as it is with them being the ones who have God’s authority to forgive sins through the Temple and penance- the established order. The resentment they feel at the loss of power will lead them to take the matter all the way to the top of the hierarchy and give Jesus the opportunity to display his ultimate authority by defeating the grave and walking away leading us into a new life.

12/19/2023

So for this Monday during week 3, A time for healing, we are looking at Matthew 8:14-22.

We all have rituals that we do on a daily basis. Our daily rituals are what keep us sane and help us get things done. They help us feel in control of our world. But there are things that we would interrupt or even forego our rituals for- most of them revolve around the severe illness or death of the people we love.

One of the most important rituals for 1st century Jews was to start their day with a prayer. It was such an important ritual to them that the only thing that was more important was taking care of the dead. So the words Jesus said to the man who asked to go bury his father before following Jesus resonated deeply with the people listening to him.

He essentially tells the man to let someone else take care of burying the dead and follow him immediately. Jesus had just spent the day at a home belonging to one of his disciples. He had come to the house and upon seeing his mother-in-law was ill and in need of healing cured her and others had heard he was there and came for healing. At the end of the day he asked the people to go to the side of the lake as he was very tired and was looking to rest.

This passage comes right after Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount but before he calms the storm. His actions during the passage is connected by Matthew to yet again prophecy from Isaiah identifying the promised Messiah aa one who would take the infirmities of the world upon himself. His words showed the importance of his mission as he wanted people to know what kind of future they were signing up for prior to actually following him and that the mission was so important that it had to come before anything else in their lives. Jesus was sent to heal a broken world full of broken people, whether that brokenness was of body or spirit didn’t matter he had come to heal them both. Would we be willing to let go of our rituals and follow Jesus anywhere at anytime?