Sims Corner Church

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

05/10/2026

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!

05/06/2026

This week the headlines all carried the same shape, and it is worth naming the shape before we work through them.

A president launched an operation to push ships through a closed strait, then paused it within forty-eight hours after Iranian drones, missiles, and small boats forced the question of whether the war was truly over.

A Gaza ceasefire that began last October entered another week of demolitions, drone strikes, and the slow westward movement of a line. Eight hundred and twenty-eight Palestinians have now been killed under that ceasefire.

Inside Iran a three-month internet blackout continued to crush ordinary work, family life, and the quiet witness of underground believers.

A federal department that had been shut down for seventy-six days, the longest agency shutdown in our history, was finally funded again on Thursday, May 1.

A bill advanced in the Senate that would require an American adult to upload a government identification or submit a face scan before talking to a chatbot.

A federal trade regulator banned a major data broker from selling our location data, a rare piece of restraint in the surveillance economy.

A drought map quietly grew until more than half of the United States was in it.

A chain of moderate earthquakes circled the western Pacific.

The President of the United States renewed his public attacks on the pope.

The answer to a week like this is not a louder voice. The answer is a longer memory.

The same Lord who told us that there will be wars and rumors of wars also told us not to be alarmed, because the end is not yet. The men of Issachar knew what Israel ought to do because they first understood the times. The throne is occupied by the Lord Jesus Christ, who is not running for anything. He has not lost the throne. And He is coming back.

Full newsletter, Scripture references, and sources at the link in the comments below.

04/29/2026

Beloved, this was a week of monuments and cages.

On Saturday night, gunshots were fired near the Correspondents' Dinner, the third time in under two years a sitting President has been evacuated under armed es**rt. By Tuesday, a fifteen-foot gold statue of that same man stood over a Florida golf course. In the same period, federal regulators moved closer to a 2027 rule that will require driver-monitoring cameras and a disabling system in every new American car. Iran's internet blackout entered its third month. Gaza's ceasefire kept burying its dead.

A culture cannot sit through the attempted assassination of its President on Saturday, raise gold images of him on Tuesday, and finalize a kill switch in its citizens' vehicles on Wednesday without saying something about itself out loud.
This week's reflection sits with that something. It is not panic, and it is not prophecy charts. It is the slow work of asking what the people of God ought to do when the same hour produces both the idol and the restraint, and when neither the throne being gilded nor the dashboard being wired belongs to the One who actually searches the heart.

Full reflection in the comments below.
Please come and join us on Wednesday nights. Dinner at 615, service at 7.