Means Of Grace Lutheran Church

05/15/2026

05/03/2026

Sister church had a baptism and new members today. Excited to serve God to call people to Him and soon have our own new members and baptisms

1 like. "5th Sunday of Easter"

09/23/2025

09/04/2025

Christianity is both relational and religious. This truth can not be escaped

09/02/2025

05/21/2025

Have you noticed how God’s works generally begin by looking like they’ll be embarrassing failures?

Just consider:

1. In the beginning, the earth was tohu vavohu, that is, “welter and waste” (Robert Alter’s translation). How could anything good come from this? That’s like expecting a pile of mud to become the Mona Lisa.

2. Whom does God choose to bear a promised son? A husband and wife old enough to get mail from AARP and collect Social Security. Ninety-year-old women don’t buy maternity dresses.

3. The guy the Lord sends to redeem Israel from Egypt has been on the lam for forty years and marshals an impressive array of excuses as to why God should send somebody else—anybody else!—but him. Moses sounds like a setup for failure.

4. And Jonah? Really? Sending the man who despises Assyria to preach to Assyria is the recipe for a textbook ministry implosion.

To us, all of these look like inevitable failures.

But:
•Where we see an impossibility, God sees a sure thing.
•Where we see midnight, the Lord sees the whisper of dawning light.
•Where we see a cross, the Spirit sees a throne.

The Lord has always done his best work with nothing. The nothing of tohu vavohu. The nothing of barren wombs. The nothing of deeply flawed sinners. The nothing of a blood-splattered, mangled body of flesh hanging dead from a cross.

He who created the world from nothing continues to work in the same way. So show me a person who is supposedly a lost cause, and I will show you a person who is prime material for divine workmanship.

Remember, once, long ago, the disciples of a rabbi from Nazareth, once they saw him publicly executed, thought that all their hopes were dashed.

They were soon to learn that, no, hope was only just beginning.

God’s works generally begin by looking like embarrassing failures, but always end crowned with the glory that comes from the Lord who refuses to work according to our expectations.

04/30/2025

09/10/2024

Dr. Matt Richard, author "Will the Real Church Please Stand Up?" Will the Church Please Stand Up?

05/19/2024

We are on our way towards planting a church. We are going out and walking and talking with people and building towards the next steps in bringing Christ to the people of u-town and surrounding areas

01/11/2023

Today the Church remembers Basil the Great of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, Pastors and Confessors. These three men were known as the Cappadocian Fathers and were leaders of Christian orthodoxy in what is now modern Turkey, then known as Asia Minor. They lived and worked in the later part of the fourth century AD. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa were brothers, and Gregory of Nazianzus was their friend. They influenced and shaped the theology which was ratified by the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, which gave us the Nicene Creed. They defended the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity. All three men also contributed greatly to the liturgy of the Eastern Church. These contributions make them some of the most influential Christian teachers of their time.

Let us Pray: “Almighty God, You revealed to Your Church Your eternal being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in a Trinity of persons. May Your Church, with bishops like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, receive grace to continue steadfast in the confession of the true faith and constant in our worship of You, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who live and reign, one God, now and forever.” Amen.

Description adapted and prayer quoted from “Treasury of Daily Prayer,” p. 1105.

Picture: Icon of the Cappadocian Fathers. Public Domain.