Friday At Five is our weekly prayer meeting. This is what you can expect when you arrive on Friday evenings. Someone will be at NCCF at 5PM and stay until at least 6PM. Often, the doors will be open before 5 and folks will stay beyond 6.
Usually, we will pray freely. Sometimes, we will pray in a certain direction or for specific occasions and purposes. We will see how the Lord leads.
This will be a great time to bring your prayers of thanksgiving to the Lord. We will want to ask for the resources, strength and empowering of the Spirit to carry out our mission to the Brunswick and beyond. Intercession will play a major part as we pray that people will come to Christ in faith, that others will be healed and that all will grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus.
We could go on, but I think you get the picture. We are coming together at the end of each week to meet the Lord and enjoy His presence.
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Hebrews 4:16
This Tuesday we will begin reading and discussing Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God. It’s a nice change-up from the more technical books we’ve been reading at Java John’s and I think it will be helpful to a wider audience. Please feel free to join us in reading and dialogue online or in our gatherings. Don’t panic if you haven’t gotten a copy yet… we will begin slowly and let everyone catch up. This week, we’ll warm up with the Introduction and The Parable.
From D.A. Carson:
There is more than one way to run away from God and defy him. But there is only one way back: God is so prodigal in his grace that he reaches out to humble and restore and receive both. Few books unpack this theme with greater force than this slim volume from Tim Keller.
This is a book that fits nicely with our Mission and reaching out with the Gospel
Continue reading about The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Denise, Emma and I are vacationing in Maine, so that means we get to relax and do what we want to do for a week. For me, that means I can finish a book that’s been on my nightstand for over a year: The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God by Greg Beale.
It’s not light reading as the author takes the reader through a highly detailed description of the temple, it’s significance as the dwelling place of God’s presence and all that means to us, His people. Dr. Beale has served as a pastor and college professor most of his life, so his books never scale the ivory tower of intellectualism or tumble down the cliff of abstraction. While always challenging and deeply Biblical, particularly in his sweeping command of the Old Testament, he brings it right down to where you and I live. We are witnesses to the saving power of Jesus and the dwelling place of God’s presence in this fallen world.
I thought Dr. Beale’s purpose in writing The Temple and the Church’s Mission is appropriate for NCCF at this moment in our church’s life: He writes:
The main point of this book is that our task as the covenant community, the church, is to be God’s temple [Ephesians 2:19-22 & 1 Peter 2:4&5], so filled with his glorious presence that we expand and fill the earth with that presence until God finally accomplishes the goal completely at the end of time! This is our common mission.
In order to reach that goal:
We as individual Christians, as members of a local church and as part of Christ’s church throughout the world must not merely share our lives and God’s word with one another, but we need to get out of our little fishbowls and manifest the presence of Christ through our words and lives, so that the boundaries of the temple, the church, will grow until the whole earth is encompassed with and manifests the presence of God. Through us, God will fulfill his promise in Habakkuk 2:14, ‘For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’
But, what does that look like and how can we experience the indwelling presence of God more fully? Dr. Beale puts it simply:
God’s presence grows among his priestly people by their knowing his word, believing it and by obeying it, and then they spread that presence to others by living their lives faithfully and prayerfully in the world… a persevering and joyous faith in the midst of trial is an amazingly priestly witness to the unbelieving world. It gets the world’s attention. Such a witness either sparks more persecution or it influences some who persecute to join the church. This is what ‘missions’ is all about.
So, let’s recap: God’s presence grows in us when we know His Word, we believe it and then we live faithfully and prayerfully. And, we need to remember that each one of us is on mission and want to be “so filled with his glorious presence that we expand and fill the earth with that presence until God finally accomplishes the goal completely at the end of time!”
We had our first church-wide time of fasting and prayer for the Brunswick, Nevada County Christian Fellowship and the Mission, ending with a prayer meeting and feast on Tuesday May 5. We prayed that this would be the first of many such times, when we would go to Jesus as a community of believers, seeking His mercy, grace and provision in moving us forward in our Mission to our neighborhood, our county and the nations.
Please join us in daily prayer and watch for future announcements, praise reports and prayer requests.
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.
Colossians 4:2
Has that question ever popped into your head? D.A. Carson takes a few minutes to answer that conundrum and gives some wise insights into prayer.
Continue reading about Why Should I Pray If God Know’s Everything?
