Emmanuel Church, Rio Rico

09/06/2026

My Dear Friends and Family,

This week has gotten away from me yet again. We moved to a new house last Saturday and while we had a company come to move all the furniture I neglected to take into account how much time unpacking, figuring out where stuff went, and getting the old house ready to put on the market would take! This is a rerun, I’m afraid, but since it is about Faith in the Workplace it seems appropriate for this Labor Day weekend. I’m afraid there is a bit of an editing glitch towards the beginning, but I figure it’s get it out as-is NOW or maybe not until who knows when! This comes from Ephesians 6:5-9. I mention it during the prayer, but there are true crises going on around the globe and right here in our own country right now. Please spend time praying for God’s grace to those in need and THROUGH us, God’s people.

Message Only: https://youtu.be/HtKiis4_Yzk
Worship Playlist, Including Music: https://ggl.link/9626ECRR

Joy,
Larry

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08/30/2026

My apologies, folks. I have been totally swamped this week and did NOT have a chance to get a service out. I'll be back next week, I promise!!

08/23/2026

My Dear Friends and Family,

Paul gives advice to Timothy about how to relate to the members of the body, but gives special attention to the widows of the church. It is apparently an issue that is especially important in this group as Paul pays more attention to it here than he does anywhere else in the scripture. Sadly, it is a poor reflection on the modern church that too often it does not pay that same attention to those in need. May we learn along with Timothy.

Message Only: https://youtu.be/sldlDS1S8_c
Worship Playlist, Including Music: https://ggl.link/82326ECRR

Joy,
Larry

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08/20/2026

This is from a devotional by Matt Laney:

[Jesus said,] “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” - Luke 7:34 (NRSV)

I love dogs until they start acting like dogs: the barking, the licking, the crotch sniffing, the bad boundaries, the poor personal hygiene. In other words, I love my ideas about dogs without all their uncouth doggieness.

However, the dog with no boundaries is the same dog who loves unconditionally. Devotion comes with a side of drool.

I can view God the same way. I love God until God starts acting like God: the unruly welcome, the untamed love, the refusal to be constrained by lofty ideas and creeds. In other words, I love my spiritualized ideas about God without all the messy godliness.

Actual God is the one who shows up at the wrong dinner parties, with the wrong people, saying the wrong things. Jesus touched lepers, ate with tax collectors, and let a woman of poor repute crash the table to weep on his feet. He never once checked anyone’s theology first. Grace, it turns out, is unhousebroken.

Even as I like my God mystical, ethereal, and safely unknowable, actual God bounds in uninvited, muddy paws on my lap, rank breath in my face, celebrating me before I’ve had a chance to compose myself.

I can control an idea about God. The living God I cannot. Only one of them can change me.

08/16/2026

My dear friends and family,

Earthquakes, fires, floods, storms, disease, contaminated food, violence, warfare…has there ever been a time in which we find how desperately we need the presence of God more? Paul tells Timothy how he can continue to grow and mature in the faith and keep himself “Spiritually Fit.”

Message only: https://youtu.be/iOOHcQ06fcI
Worship Playlist Including Music: https://ggl.link/81626ECRR

Joy,
Larry

If you wish to give your tithe or offerings via PayPal, please click the link below:

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08/11/2026

Powerful devotional from Mary Luti:
"August 11, 2026
Needle's Eye

Mary Luti
Jesus said, “Go, sell everything you have, give to the poor, then follow me.” At this he went away sad, because he had great wealth. Jesus said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” - Mark 10:21-25, abridged (NIV)

A rich man asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life. He’s sincere, but “inherit” is a telling word. It means getting a share, a portion. He hopes to add another portion to his already disproportionate share of material wealth and moral achievement. He’s so accustomed to accumulating that he can only think of eternal life as an acquisition.

But eternal life is a person, not a portion. And that person loves him and welcomes him to intimacy. With a precondition: he’ll have to make the same first move toward Jesus that God once made toward us in Christ: he must empty himself.

He can’t do it. Jesus names the obstacle. It’s wealth, and not just our attachment to it. Dispossession is indeed an inner attitude, a spiritual posture, but that’s not all it is. To follow Jesus really means living life in the red.

They were all doing just that, but Jesus’s disciples are still shocked by his severity. He doubles down, “It’s easier for a camel...” To save the wealthy, God would have to do the impossible.

We always think someone else is wealthy, not us. Maybe examining that assumption should be our first response to this hard word. But that’s not for me to say. No one can tell you what it means for you in practice to accept Jesus’s invitation to life eternal.

Only you know what it would take to hope not in goodness and its satisfactions, much less in wealth and its acquisition, but only in what God may yet make possible in you by grace.

Prayer
I keep going away sad, Jesus. But keep inviting me. Grace may yet push me through the needle’s eye.
Mary Luti

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Luti is a long time seminary educator and pastor, author of Teresa of Avila’s Way and numerous articles, and founding member of The Daughters of Abraham, a national network of interfaith women’s book groups.

08/08/2026

My Dear Friends and Family;

We are enjoying the lush greenery from our monsoons (and the slightly cooler temps thanks to the rains) but those same rains have caused flooding in places and some damage and dangerous circumstances for others. Also we still hear of war, shootings, the spread of diseases across the country and world that we had once thought conquered and evil being called good while good is being ridiculed and derided. This is nothing new - Paul warns Timothy about it in this letter nearly 2,000 years ago as we see in this section of Paul’s letter.

Message Only: https://youtu.be/IQBBp0ObK9w
Worship Playlist, Including Music: https://ggl.link/8926ECRR

Joy,
Larry

If you wish to give your tithe or offerings via PayPal, please click the link below:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FY9CB7AEMH6AC&source=url

08/01/2026

My Dear Friends and Family,

I can’t even list everything that’s going on this week - crises everywhere and it would be easy to think that things look hopeless. But we have hope that goes beyond what we see around us or what we ourselves can do. Paul reminds us that our faith is in one far more powerful than we are.

Message Only: https://youtu.be/lfuXMb25mrI
Worship Playlist, Including Music: https://ggl.link/8226ECRR

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07/27/2026

I’m sharing this devotional with you by the insightful Rev. Kaji Douša because I found it so powerful this morning. May it bless you as well.

Baggage Claim
Kaji Douša

[They asked him,] “In the resurrection, then, for which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.” Jesus answered them, “You all are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God… God is God not of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astounded at his teaching. - Matthew 22:28-29, 32-33 (as translated by Wilda C. Gafney)

Many Christians spend a lot of time thinking about how to get to heaven. My guess is: fewer think about what we need when we get there.

Still, in this life, we carry much that’s unhelpful. Why?

That tension frames this exchange between Jesus and some Sadducees. Their question reveals the hidden premise they’d already packed for heaven: if we need it here, surely we’d need it there.

They ask Jesus about resurrection, but their question treats a grieving woman—a woman who’s had to bury seven husbands—like a problem to solve. They don’t care about the hardship she faced. Instead, they shove her personhood into someone else’s claim.

Mercifully, Jesus will have nothing to do with erasure. Ever. He won’t let anyone flatten the resurrection into some continuation of earthly possession. It’s just not possible to drag ownership, control, anxiety, or erasure into Godly living.

Let’s be honest. We all have things we keep dragging along that we don’t need. Leave all that at the altar. Here’s how I sort things: whatever can be taken away isn’t yours to carry into eternity.

See, your ticket to heaven has no baggage allowance. There’s no baggage claim past the pearly gates! So if God doesn’t need it, why do you?

The life God intends for you is infinitely bigger. Freer. Holier. Than whatever has tried to claim you.

Lay down what you can. Let Jesus free you from what you can’t. And let God astonish you.

Prayer
Holy One, help me release what I don’t need. Free me from every heavy load I keep dragging along. Loosen every claim I have made, and every claim that has been made on me, that doesn’t belong in life with you. Make room in me for your freedom. I’m ready to be astonished, God. Amen.

07/25/2026

My Dear Friends and Family,

Wildfires, tainted produce and eggs, warfare, floods and devastating storms - and on top of that it’s HOT! Easy to think that God is absent and that he doesn’t care. Sometimes we try to see where God is acting and can’t see what he’s doing - but maybe we’re forgetting that God uses US to do His work. We are called to serve - but God wants people who are READY to serve. How do we know? Paul tells Timothy in Chapter 3.

Message Only: https://youtu.be/BzzJxOug7h0
Worship Playlist, Including Music: https://ggl.link/72626ECRR

Joy,
Larry

If you wish to give your tithe or offerings via PayPal, please click the link below:

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