Sims Corner Church

09/02/2026

Four areas moved this week that Scripture tells us to watch. Rosh Hashanah is nine days away and nothing changed on the Temple Mount except who is asking the questions. In Gaza the plan moved, in the envoy's words, to the engineering table, Israel seized Hamas's security chief in a daylight raid, and no weapons changed hands; on Israel's other border, Syria's Kurdish army dissolved into the state, the United Nations confirmed the existence of the nuclear reactor Assad hid for nineteen years, and Israeli shells fell in the Damascus countryside days after peace talks. The lull in the war with Iran broke on Saturday, two sailors died on a tanker off Oman, and by this morning Iranian missiles were flying at American bases in four countries. And the church abroad had a painful week in five places, from a Russian court's order to burn New Testaments to a pastor murdered on a Nigerian road within sight of two army checkpoints. We will keep this short. There is teaching to get to.

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

08/30/2026

08/28/2026

Eclipse at Simsberry Chapel🌘

08/26/2026

Crude fell about three and a half percent this week and the price of a gallon went up four cents, which is worth understanding instead of merely resenting. Washington opened what the Treasury Secretary called an economic D-Day against Iran, and Tehran responded by threatening to seize ships. A tanker was struck and disabled nine miles off Oman on Monday night and nobody claimed the attack. The United States took Syria off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, eight days after Israel bombed a Syrian airbase to limit Turkey and Washington objected in public. Gunmen killed at least forty-seven people above Port-au-Prince, and the United Nations reports that twenty-two of them were executed inside a church compound where they had gone for shelter. The president of the International Criminal Court said her credit cards had been cancelled. A federal judge told the Secretary of State he had exceeded the authority Congress gave him. Rain in Panama ran a third below normal and the canal began rationing the water that lifts ships. On the Temple Mount, nothing further was permitted, and Rosh Hashanah is sixteen days away.

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

08/26/2026

Tomorrow night is our end of times study! Dinner is usually at 6:15. Due to floor prep in the kitchen, we are forgoing dinner and will proceed with study at 7 o’clock. See you tomorrow night!

08/19/2026

Four plans failed this week. On Sunday Israeli police allowed Jewish men to carry full prayer books onto the Temple Mount and pray openly, the first time this has been permitted. The autumn feast that twenty Arab and Islamic foreign ministers warned about is now three weeks away. In Cairo an American envoy met Hamas, a rare event. The next day in Jerusalem he and the Israeli prime minister agreed an American general should oversee the handover of weapons. Israel's position remained unchanged. The sixty day memorandum between Washington and Tehran expired Monday with no deal and no extension sought. In the same seven days the war pushed into Lebanon, the Emirates, and Syria. The United States sanctioned the ICC president and half its judges. The plans of the peoples failed. The counsel of the LORD stands.

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

08/12/2026

The ground moved under Colombia on Monday morning. More than two hundred fifty people are dead. Most died in cities a hundred miles from where the fault broke. A peace plan collapsed in Jerusalem and Washington over the meaning of one word: disarmament. Israel demands every weapon be surrendered before it withdraws. Hamas refuses to surrender any until it does. Leaders from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact in Mecca. The agreement declares that an attack on one is an attack on all. This quietly extends a nuclear umbrella and ties a NATO member to a bloc outside NATO. Foreign ministers met in Amman over Al-Aqsa and issued their declaration. They claim the whole compound as an exclusive Muslim place of worship. They warn that the next test will come during the autumn feasts. The Strait of Hormuz is closed now for over five months. Iran and Oman have nearly agreed how to run the water. Each government demands the other pay reparations first. The strategic reserve that has cushioned the cost of that closure fell below three hundred million barrels for the first time since 1983. The President was smuggled off Air Force One in a catering cart to dodge an Iranian missile threat. He golfed on Sunday beside a Stinger battery. His own guards read that as a real threat, even though the podium calls it spent. An Ebola outbreak in Congo passed two thousand dead. It is now the fastest growing ever recorded. A federal judge blocked the mail-ballot order nationwide. America has just lived through the hottest month it has ever measured. None of this proves a date. All of it teaches us to number our days and make use of the time allotted to us.

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

08/05/2026

This was a week of deals almost made and systems quietly giving way. The Strait of Hormuz passed its hundred and fifty-seventh day closed, two ships going through where seventy-three would pass on an ordinary day, while mediators carried proposals and the President said an agreement might come any day. Follow one thread all the way and you see what a war actually costs: defending against Iran has consumed roughly eighty percent of our THAAD interceptors, two-thirds of our Patriots, and virtually all of the Army's surface-to-surface missiles. Patriots are the only thing Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile. This week Russia fired twenty-four of them at Kyiv and not one was shot down, and seventeen people died. Iran, meanwhile, is firing its cheap missiles first and holding back the good ones, because every fifteen-million-dollar interceptor we launch is a trade it wins even when it loses. At a border fence in North Africa more than seventy people drowned or were crushed as tens of thousands crossed into a Spanish enclave in two days. Gunmen went house to house in a Nigerian village and killed thirty-one Christians, eleven of them children, the youngest three years old.

Closer to home, Arizona's supreme court ruled that churches, not judges, decide what counts as a confession, in a case where a father told his bishops three times that he was abusing his daughter and nobody called the police. We say plainly where we stand: a legal right is not a moral permission, and when a child is being harmed, we call the police. A hundred billion dollars in struck-down tariffs is being refunded, though only to the companies whose names were on the paperwork. And across three continents the heat is breaking infrastructure, from Romanian reactors starved of river water to Japanese earthquake shelters where people are still dying weeks after the shaking stopped. Here is one useful thing to carry out of that: the number that kills is not the thermometer but the wet-bulb temperature, and a muggy ninety-five degree afternoon is deadlier than a dry hundred and ten. So check on somebody old who lives alone, and do it on the muggy days, not just the hot ones. None of this proves a date. All of it answers the proverb: do not boast about tomorrow.

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

07/30/2026

Church tonight!

07/22/2026

This was the week the war stopped being an abstraction and became a ledger. Eleven straight nights of American strikes on Iran; eighteen American service members dead since February and hundreds wounded, two of them killed by ballistic missiles at a base in Jordan; Iranian missiles now slipping past our defenses and knocking out radar we cannot easily replace. The bill hit thirty-seven billion dollars with an eighty-seven billion dollar request on top, and while the Houthis choked a second strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, the President promised to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant for every ship fired on. Iran, meanwhile, kept hanging its own young people for the crime of protesting. In Gaza a miles-long earthen wall rose along the ceasefire line; in Lebanon, for the first time, Israeli troops actually withdrew and the Lebanese army raised its flag over a returned village. Hold every announcement loosely, and pray for the peace nobody's missiles can deliver.

Closer to home, the tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February came back through statutes of 1930 and 1974, civics worth watching, not prophecy. France barred children under fifteen from social media, joining Australia, Britain, Florida, and a growing list, and every age gate runs on the same machinery: proving who you are before you may speak. And as this issue goes out, the Jewish world sits down on the floor for Tisha B'Av, the day of mourning for two destroyed temples, reading the book that hides hope in its exact middle: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies are new every morning. None of this proves a date. All of it calls the church to watch, to lament honestly, and to hope stubbornly in the One who was Himself the true temple, destroyed and raised in three days.

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