Many prayers answered...

Thank you for your many prayers this week as we served in El Cotorro. We had our challenges, but God provided in every situation! Pastor William and his family send their warmest regards and thanks for sharing us with them for the week.

Below I have included some pictures from our week illustrating the project and will be posting more on Facebook later. It is amazing however how things work out. One of the things that Pastor William has been praying about for over a year now has been for the ability to purchase a home near the church so that they would have more space for materials and worship. This was an almost impossible dream, but thanks to friends from Colorado the funds were provided, and this week while we were there Pastor was finally able to secure a home two houses down from the church. This is an incredible blessing because for the last 4 years William and his family have lived at the church while it has been under construction. This blessing will change their lives and hopefully allow the project to speed up.

Please continue to pray for Pastor William and his family! Also, be praying if you would like to be involved in this project, we have another team heading down in October. October 6-13, 2017

Good Morning from Las Brisas

Good morning everyone, as most of you read this post our team will be hard at work about the Lord's work in El Cotorro. We appreciate your prayers while we are here!

This year has proven to be especially challenging. We struggled to find people to participate this year, and even then, we lost several participants before the deadline to go right up to just this past week. We’ve had missing passports and found passports, we’ve had sickness, even death attack our team member’s families. But we know without a doubt that this is where God desires for us to be. We know that God has a plan for each of those on the team and that we will be a blessing to Pastor William and his family at Las Brisas Iglesia Baptista.  

Our team this year consists of myself, Pastor Alex, Chrissy Bullard, Edie Nicholson, Pavel Bacallao, Pavel’s son Jaccell, and Tom Red from our sister church in Big Pine.

I look forward to our return next week and sharing with you the incredible blessings we received and gave on your behalf! Thank you for your prayers for safety and traveling mercies. Pray also that the Gospel message would be proclaimed!

Pastor Jonathan

The Ultimate Sacrifice

Looking at our passage this week in Hosea I can’t help but be reminded God’s redemptive work in his Son. Hosea chapters 4-5 we see this picture of a courtroom in which the judge is reading off the charges against his people. At the end of chapter 5, the sentence is pronounced, the Lord proclaimed in 5:15 “I will depart and return to My place until they recognize their guilt and seek My face; they will search for Me in their distress.” He was going to leave the people of Israel to their own devices until they were ready to repent.

Israel and Judah were weak and sick, and instead of turning to the Lord they turned to the King of Assyria and the only thing the Lord could do was to step back and wait for them to realize their predicament.

In chapter 6 we hear a plea of repentance from the people. However, it isn’t unusual for an individual when accused in a trial to express regret and remorse over what they have done and ask for a second chance. Which is what in this case we see Israel doing, except God in is sovereignty wasn’t fooled. God recognized their feigned repentance and proceeded to expose their hypocrisy.

The Lord calls their loyalty out like a “morning mist” vanishing like the “early dew.” Meaning that they are claiming loyalty now when it benefits them but as soon as the circumstances change they are gone.

To provide some substance to their faith, God sends His prophets with the Word of God, but over and over the people turned a deaf ear.  God doesn’t desire our relationship with him to be shallow, filled with empty words and emotions. He doesn’t want our hearts to be excited one day and frigid the next. Hosea 6:6 is a common theme throughout scripture “For I desire loyalty and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”  

God recognized the superficial nature of their sacrifices and rejected them. There is but one sacrifice which while it pained Him, He couldn’t refuse. The sacrifice of His Son on the cross.

Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t for himself, it was made for us. It was made that we might be reunited much as Gomer to Hosea with our Lord.

The power of Christ’s sacrifice, however, wasn’t found in his death. It was found in His Resurrection. What a glorious event that defeated death, hell, and the grave once and for all who believe. But just saying oh I believe in God is far from sufficient, we need to demonstrate true repentance.  

Happy Resurrection Day! 

Are You Cheating?

Last week we finished our study of Amos, a guy called by God from the Judean countryside to serve as a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel. This week we start a four-week mini-series on the Prophet Hosea. Hosea even though he is preaching around the same time as Amos, has a slightly different approach. Now, to be fair, there are times in scripture we see prophets taking some unusual methods to get the attention of the people. For instance, Isaiah for three years embarrassed the people by walking the streets dressed like a prisoner of war. The prophet Jeremiah carried a yoke on his shoulders for several months. The prophet Ezekiel even used a haircut at one point as an object lesson to get his point across.

The question is why did they need to do these things? I mean the prophet Jonah preached a super simple message repent or die, and here these guys are putting on a show….

To be fair these peculiar things as Wiersbe puts in were in fact “acts of mercy.”[1] The people were suffering from selective hearing, and they were allowing the sound of God’s voice to be drowned out and were no longer heeding the Covenant. The Lord called Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others to these strange things with the goal of shocking the people, waking them up to listen to what God had to say.

Hosea was no different from the rest of the prophets, he was called to live out a painful object lesson to wake up God’s people. Hosea was instructed to marry a prostitute by the name of Gomer who would then bear three children, two of which likely were not even Hosea’s. Then just when things didn’t seem like they could get worse Gomer left him for another man, leaving Hosea to buy back his own wife.

So why did God instruct this man of God (some think Hosea was a priest) to endure these challenges?

Well, it paints a vivid picture of what the children of Israel had done to God by chasing idols and prostituting themselves, committing spiritual adultery. We face the same challenges and temptations today. Look at what James the half-brother of Jesus said in James 4:4: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (ESV)

Church, lest we face God’s wrath we need to heed what Hosea wrote. Each of the individuals in this story—Hosea, Gomer, and the three children—teach us critical spiritual lessons about the relationship between God and his people.

Israel had played the harlot, but God would take her back, just as he does for us when we cheat on Him.

The question we need to ask ourselves are we being faithful and true to our betrothal? When we allow other things, important things such as family, work, school, friends, to come between us and our relationship with God, we are cheating on Him. We must guard against this! Do these things matter? Yes, without a doubt and God cares just as much as you do if not more for these areas of your life but the thing you have to remember is that while God cares for your family he also cares for you. I love the illustration, when you get on an airplane they instruct you to put on your own oxygen mask first when faced with an emergency. If we don't focus on our own walk we can't hope to help anyone else!

May the words of Hosea encourage us to remain faithful to our first love!

See ya Sunday!

[1]Warren Wiersbe, Bible Exposition Commentary – Be Amazed (Hosea, Joel), (Colorado Springs, CO: Victor, 2003), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 316

Don't Starve...

Amos has so many lessons upon which we can meditate. The sermons he preached in chapters 3-6  compelling. Calling on the people to “Hear this word…” Urging them to see the error in their ways, to see that their pride and complacent behavior was the source of their fall.

The prophet’s record ends with five distinctive visions of judgment which God gave to His servant: a vision of a plague of locusts (7:1-3), a vision of a devouring fire (vv. 4-6), a image of a plumb line (vv. 7-9), a vision of a basket of ripe fruit (8:1-14), and finally a vision of the ruined temple (9:1-10). Amos then closes his message on a positive note as he describes the future glorious kingdom that God has promised to His people (vv. 11-15).

In chapter 8, our blue-collar prophet shares of a day of bitter mourning. A day we often refer to as “the Day of the Lord.” We see many vivid pictures in which we are told of what will happen “on that day” on the day of bitter judgment.

The Lord through His prophet proclaims that this coming judgment would, in fact, be like a famine (vv. 11-14), not only of literal food but also of spiritual nourishment. Amos knew as do we that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Deut. 8:3 ESV) echoed by Christ in Matthew 4:4. Thus, these days would be days in which people would cry out for help, but they would indeed find no sustenance.  What a tragedy it is that all around we have plenty of "religion" but no Word from the Lord!  People stagger like drunks from place to place, always searching to find food and drink for their bodies as much as spiritual sustenance for their souls.

Today we experience this all too often in one of two ways. We are either famished, not receiving any nourishment spiritually or we are feasting on the wrong things, much as a diet of junk food and Coca Cola will surely destroy us from the inside out eventually causing our bodies to fail.

We are in a sense starving ourselves, consuming the Word one day a week and feasting on junk the other seven.

Think about it…. If you only ate once a week how healthy do you think you would be?