Sims Corner Church

06/17/2026

This was the week the war ended on paper, if it sticks. The United States and Iran announced a framework to halt their hundred-day war, lift the American naval blockade, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with a signing set for Friday and oil falling almost five percent in a day. By a conservative count it is the fourth time this war has been declared over or paused since February, and the President and Vice President spent the week openly contradicting each other over whether Iran gets a three hundred billion dollar fund. One day after both sides swore off operations on all fronts, Israeli drones killed four people in southern Lebanon, two of them in a second strike on the rescuers who ran to help, and even President Trump rebuked Israel for it. Give thanks for every pause in the killing, and hold every agreement loosely, because the arm of flesh has promised peace before and rarely keeps its story straight.

Closer to the ground, the Senate again refused to claim a say in the war, and a sweeping foreign-surveillance renewal was quietly lashed to a bill about who may vote. In China, police emptied a Sunday service and hauled off thirty-three believers; in Nigeria, more than forty kidnapped schoolchildren are still missing. The earth shook hard at Palu and across western China. And in the Galilee a red heifer conceived by artificial insemination was named Unblemished, though a state-required ear tag may have already disqualified it, a reminder that you cannot engineer your way into God's timetable or manufacture redemption in a laboratory. None of this proves a date. All of it calls the church to watch, to pray, and to keep its hope on the King whose counsel stands forever.

Join us Wednesday evenings at 6 PM for supper and Service at 7.

06/14/2026

06/10/2026

At home this week, the President signed the seventy billion dollar Secure America Act, funding ICE and Border Patrol through the end of his term, while the Supreme Court entered its final stretch with birthright citizenship and protected-status rulings expected within days. A national security memorandum ordered the military and intelligence agencies to adopt artificial intelligence on a 120-day clock, and a Treasury advisory asked banks to watch their customers for eighteen immigration-related red flags. Japan's three megabanks announced a joint stablecoin. None of this is the mark of the beast. It is also not nothing. Money, identity, enforcement, and AI keep braiding into one fabric, and the wise household keeps a paper Bible on the table and its conscience out of hock to any party.

Overseas, the ceasefires showed their seams. Hezbollah rejected the truce Israel and Lebanon had just announced, and Israel answered rocket fire by striking Beirut's Dahiyeh district. After an Army Apache went down off Oman, the United States and Iran traded direct strikes even as both sides insisted talks were alive. In Cairo, mediators opened second-phase Gaza negotiations while a United Nations report documented Hamas-affiliated forces executing and maiming hundreds of their own people. And off Mindanao, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed at least 45; pray for General Santos and for the army-freed 360 Boko Haram captives in Nigeria, a rare piece of good news worth giving thanks for. Stay awake, pray for restraint, and remember whose hand turns the king's heart.

Join us Wednesday evenings at 6 PM for supper and Service at 7.

05/31/2026

Why does the Bible tell us that Adonijah was handsome before it tells us he tried to steal the throne?

Why does it tell us his father never disciplined him?

Why does it name the stone he sacrificed beside "the Serpent's Stone," and why does it sit at the gate of what would later be called Gehenna?

And why, half a mile away, was another son of David anointed king at a spring that began in Eden?

Nothing in 1 Kings chapter 1 is decoration. Every detail matters.

This Sunday at 5:30 PM we open it together. Sims Corner Church. Bring a Bible. Bring a friend.

05/27/2026

The past week was busy across every front the watchful Christian tracks while still lacking concrete movement in most areas. Trump moved to widen the Abraham Accords as a condition of any new Iran agreement, while U.S. forces struck targets inside Iran in the middle of fresh talks. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, an unusual and substantive Catholic statement on artificial intelligence. The federal government took another equity stake in a major private company, continuing a shift that has now produced eleven such deals since mid-2025. Elon Musk publicly described Neuralink's roadmap as "Jesus-level miracles." Two separate armed incidents at the White House landed in the same news cycle as the President's $250-million ballroom construction. The WHO confirmed an Ebola outbreak in the DRC that has crossed into Uganda. Congress held another UAP transparency hearing. And global strategic fuel reserves continued to thin while Cuba ran out of diesel and the lights went out across Havana. None of this proves a calendar. All of it needs careful discernment, but our focus needs to remain on Jesus.

Join us Wednesday evenings at 6 PM for supper and Service at 7.

05/13/2026

This past week, the Israeli military demolished a Catholic monastery and a nuns' school in a southern Lebanese border village. Strikes the same day killed twelve people in Lebanon, including two children, hours before U.S.-mediated peace talks were scheduled to resume.

In Pakistan, a thirty-three-year-old Christian sanitation worker named Shabbir Masih died after his supervisors forced him into a sewer where he inhaled toxic gases. In Russia, four Christians were fined for "illegal missionary work." In eastern Congo, the Allied Democratic Forces resumed attacks on villages where Christian families had only recently resettled after earlier displacement.

The Open Doors World Watch List recorded three hundred eighty-eight million Christians facing high persecution worldwide this year, an increase of eight million over the prior reporting period.

While these brothers and sisters bled, the sun gave off two solar flares strong enough to disturb radio signals, and the earth shook from California to Tehran. The headlines were full of war and politics and AI and surveillance. They always are. But the Lord Jesus did not invite His church to set dates from earthquakes or solar storms. He invited us to lift our heads.

We are commanded to remember those in prison as though we were in prison with them. That remembering is not sentimental. It is prayer. It is advocacy. It is financial support where possible. It is a refusal to let our comfortable distance dull our love.

The church in Lebanon, Pakistan, Russia, and Congo is not a footnote. They are our family. When their buildings come down and their sons die in sewers, the same Spirit grieves who grieves with us.

Pray with us this week. The full Sons of Issachar issue (Iran, Beijing, Gaza, Israel's coalition, the surveillance state, signs in the heavens) is linked in the first comment.

Maranatha. Sims Corner Church

05/09/2026

Join us tomorrow morning at 9am for our Mother’s Day breakfast! We will be serving French toast, eggs, and ham! Can’t wait to see you!