Sunday – May 30, 2021
Thom Rachford and Timothy Johnson talk about the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.
Sunday – May 30, 2021
Thom Rachford and Timothy Johnson talk about the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.
Sunday – June 16, 2019
Malachi 4:4-6
Remember the law of Moses My servant, even the statutes and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.
It is not news that American families are fracturing at an alarming rate. Only 34 percent of all children born in America will live with both biological parents through age eighteen. Seventy percent of African-American babies and 19 percent of white babies in the United States are born out of wedlock. Most will never know their fathers, let alone experience their love. Sadly, evangelical Christians don’t fare much better than the world when it comes to fractured families. That’s tragic, in light of the fact that the second great commandment is to love one another! What good is our faith if it doesn’t result in daily loving relationships in our families?
Sin always results in alienation, both toward God and toward one another. When Adam and Eve sinned, they hid from God and they suffered distance in their own relationship. Adam began to blame Eve (and God) for his problems (Gen. 3:12). Sin leads to guilt; guilt not properly dealt with leads to blame; blame leads to anger and alienation. Pride causes us to justify ourselves and to attack the other person. This is a basic pattern that applies to all relationships.
What is the solution? God says (4:4), “Remember the law of Moses My servant, even the statues and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel.” God didn’t give Moses some helpful hints for happy living. He commanded Moses statutes and ordinances for all Israel. God’s moral and relational commandments are not just for the Old Testament era. Living under grace does not mean living without commandments. Believers under grace are given all sorts of commandments, including the oft-repeated command to love one another. If you are not acting in love toward your family members, including your church family, you are sinning! Obedience to God’s commands should stem from the heart because of His grace and love toward us. But the point is, loving one another is not just a nice thing to do when you feel like doing it. It is God’s commandment.
When you begin to obey God by judging your anger, by demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit towards your family, and by setting an example of walking with God, He will bring healing into your home. It won’t happen all at once, but it will begin. If you have been sinning against your wife and children by not loving them, first ask God’s forgiveness. Then ask your family’s forgiveness, and begin to obey God by walking in love, just as Christ loved you and gave Himself up on the cross.
Sunday – January 7, 2018 – Read the Word on Worship
Sunday – January 7, 2018 Gospel of Luke – “The Day Jesus Went AWOL” Luke 2:32-53 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.
Luke 2:49-51
“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart.”
In Luke 2:39-52, we have the only reference in Scripture to the years between Jesus’ birth and the beginning of His ministry when His age was about 30. Some of the apocryphal gospels that circulated in the early centuries of the church contain fanciful and miraculous legends from the childhood of Jesus. He touches some clay birds and they come to life and fly away. He touches a plow that Joseph had botched up and it is instantly made right. Some other legends are more disturbing: The young Jesus curses some bothersome children who immediately wither up or drop dead. After such fanciful tales, the account in Luke of Jesus getting left behind at the temple sounds pretty tame!
The Old Testament (Deut. 16:16) prescribed that every Jewish man should appear before the Lord for three feasts each year: Unleavened Bread (Passover), Weeks (Pentecost), and Booths (Tabernacles). By the time of Jesus, it was customary for those some distance from Jerusalem to attend only one feast. Joseph and Mary’s custom was to make the 80-mile journey from Nazareth each year for the Passover. This incident happened when Jesus was 12. It must have been the most exciting time of the year, to leave the small town and go to the capital for this celebration that drew thousands of worshipers.
If you have ever had a child get lost, you can identify with the panic that gripped these conscientious parents. You always think worst case scenario — such as Jesus was kidnapped and we’ll never see Him again. Joseph and Mary had a lot more time, three days in fact, to think the worst. Given the amount of time, one can appreciate Mary’s emotional words, “Son, why have you treated us this way? Behold, your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.” Jesus responded, “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?”
The parents of our Lord struggled as to how to put together the facets of our Lord’s nature, His humanity and His deity. In our text, the humanity of Jesus had so dominated their thoughts that they forgot to reckon with His deity, which was the basis for his actions and response to them. You and I have the same struggle in recognizing both the divine and the human elements in our Christian lives. This is the tension between the element of divine work in our lives and human responsibility. You see, the struggle of Mary and Joseph is not so unique as it might first appear. There is a kind of incarnation which is going on in the life of every Christian – the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and our personal response to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Let us not deny the divine nor the human in what God is doing in our lives.
Sunday – June 19, 2016 – Read the Word on Worship
Sunday – June 19, 2016 Fathers Day Malachi 1:6-14 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.
1 John 2:13-14
“I write to you, fathers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I write to you, dear children, because you have known the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one.”
Happy Father’s Day men! The problem with Father’s Day is that many of us wonder if we really should be celebrated. We know all that has transpired over the last 12 months as we come to this day and we wonder what Father’s Day is really about? When we have a good job and provide for a good home and a few nice things, we are told that men only focus on our jobs and do not provide that illusive term which magazines and television shows throw around as the new, yet undefined standard of quality time to their families. And then when we spend time with our families and build relationships with our children we are told that we have not provided for the financial needs of our family in the ways they have been accustomed too. Sometimes you just can’t win.
Men have been the butt of jokes in sitcoms, news stories, and time around the office water cooler. Many men come to Father’s Day and think that it is only a holiday invented by the greeting card and tie companies for getting excess merchandise out of their warehouse and into your house. The jokes which the world trumpets are not funny to men who take God’s call for their families seriously. Each joke is another jab against men who want to do what is right as they try to enrich the lives of their families and to encourage their children in the way they should go. Can we, who are in the Body of Christ, realize that the job of Father is more than just a title or an act of biology? That men, despite what the world tells them, know in their hearts that they have a duty to care for their household, and make sacrifices of what they could do in order to do what they should do?
I am not an apologist for men, for there are many that have refused to do what they should, failing to care for their wives in a way that is godly and their children in a way that encourages them to grow in the wisdom and the knowledge of the Lord. It is time for sincere thanks and appreciation for all that husbands, fathers and men in general do? Today is a day to say thank you, to appreciate all that our earthly fathers have done for us and given to us. Let us honor fathers for their sacrifice, and encourage them to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ so that the love they have shown us this year will abound more and more so we will have new things to praise God for next year. Let us thank them for their desire to follow the Lord and contribute to the needs of their families, and to pray that they will continue to grow and be conformed to the image of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who only did what He saw the Father doing.
Sunday – March 6, 2016 – Read the Word on Worship
Sunday – March 6, 2016 Rev. 18:1-24 “Babylon the Great Has Fallen” from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.
Revelation 18:9-10
And the kings of the earth, who committed acts of immorality and lived sensuously with her, will weep and lament over her when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance because of the fear of her torment, saying, “Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour your judgment has come.”
In 1962, philosopher-scientist Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” to signal a massive change in the way a community thinks about a particular topic. Examples of paradigm shifts include Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Each changed the world of thought (some for better, some for worse) in a fundamental way. From a political perspective, Constantine’s Edict of Milan, issued in AD 313, was the beginning of a major paradigm shift that signaled the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval period. That edict legitimated Christianity and impressed upon it the Empire’s stamp of approval.
From a theological perspective – specifically an eschatological one – the Edict of Milan also signaled a monumental paradigm shift from the well-grounded premillennialism of the ancient church fathers to the amillennialism or postmillennialism. In the two centuries that led up to the edict, two crucial interpretive errors found their way into the church that made conditions ripe for the paradigm shift incident to the Edict of Milan. The second century fathers failed to keep clear the biblical distinction between Israel and the church. Then, the third century fathers abandoned a literal method of interpreting the Bible in favor of spiritualized allegory. Once the distinction between Israel and the church became blurred and a literal hermeneutic was lost, the societal changes occasioned by the Edict of Milan caused fourth century fathers to reject premillennialism in favor of Augustinian amillennialism.
A simple concordance search of the word “Israel” in the New Testament will lead to the conclusion that the New Testament writers never equated the church with the nation of Israel. However, what the New Testament writers did not do, the post-apostolic fathers quickly did. As the church began to be dominated by people without Jewish roots, the hardening of the Jews’ hearts and the waning hope for Israel’s conversion made it easier for the increasingly Gentile church to rally against Judaism and to seek a replacement theology. The basic premise of the early fathers was that God had permanently cut the nation of Israel off as his people as a result of their disobedience and idolatry in the Old Testament and their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus in the New.
The bottom line, of course, is that we must continually go back to the Scriptures as our only source for “doing theology.” As much as we may respect and admire the early church fathers, or, for that matter, the reformers, the puritans, or a particular modern spiritual leader, we must always remember to be Bereans, checking their conclusions and reasoning against the plumb line of God’s Word.
Sunday – June 21, 2015 – Read the Word on Worship
Sunday – June 21, 2015 Elder Ken McAuley “The Father’s Great Love Must Be Given Away” from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.
John 14: 2-3
2: In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. 3: If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.
When we think of our Father God, it is usually in a rather distant, obscure way that is full of wonderment and awe. I think it can be more wonderful than that. In this passage, Jesus talks about His Father’s house in a way in which we can relate, as if He were going home. Isn’t that how we want to picture Heaven? He is going to prepare a place for us in our Father’s home where we can expect to stay eternally. The Father wants the Family to be together where we can fellowship with Him in a loving, peaceful relationship, full of trust and worship.
Worship may sound kind of strange to us, but our fathers are fallible and insecure and learning as they go along, hoping we will learn from them and remember the good and the wise things they try to pass along to us. We are not expected to worship them even though they would seem to desire it from time to time. So, worship should be natural to us when it is our Father God we are looking to.
He is our Creator, Healer, Comforter, Provider, Protector in Whom we can place our complete trust because He knows all, sees all, hears all; nothing can sneak up on Him or surprise Him. He knows the BEST answer, the BEST way and we don’t have to wonder if He made the right decision. I wonder sometimes if we maybe compare Him to our fathers rather than comparing our fathers to Him. Perhaps it’s because we don’t put enough effort into finding out a little more about Him. The Scriptures are full of references to and about Him from which we can gather a lot of information and insights.
He’s not a big comfortable teddy bear that only provides comfort and cuddle. He’s more like a lion. In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the question was asked of Mr. Beaver, is he (the lion, Aslan) safe? “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” He’s good and kind and loving, but also just, merciful, forgiving, righteous, holy; there’s nothing wrong with Him. But we tend not to trust him because we compare Him to our own fathers. Let’s make a conscious decision today to make Him our pattern of Fatherhood and encourage our own fathers to be more like Him as we love and obey Him.