Happy 250th Birthday!

The picture of our church campus captures my emotions on this special day. 

• I am filled with patriotic pride and excitement for our nation.
• I am filled with thankfulness for the beauty and bounty of the land in which we live.

But if you look at that picture, there is something "off." Not a weed to be seen. The pavement a perfect "recently-sealed-black." 

That's not the way our campus actually looks. I used ChatGPT to remove the imperfections. 

If only we could airbrush away all our nation's imperfections. We can't do that, but we do have a powerful response. It begins with prayer. 

A Fourth of July Prayer

Lord God Almighty, on this 250th birthday of our nation, we pause to give you thanks for every good gift you have given our nation. Place your powerful hand of protection over us. Send your Holy Spirit and give each of us "a broken and contrite heart" (Psalm 51) that humbly confesses our part in our nation's imperfections. May your Holy Spirit daily turn our hearts back to our Savior. Empower each of us to be patriots who serve our nation and our neighbors in love. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen. 



It is fitting that we begin reading 1 Corinthians on the Fourth of July. There are many similarities between the Corinthian culture and that of our nation. As we learn from Paul, we can be a blessing to our nation as we share the hope that we have in Christ.

Paul stayed in Corinth for 18 months on his second missionary journey. He wrote 1 Corinthians a couple of years later while he is in Ephesus (modern Turkey) on his third missionary journey. 
 
Paul begins this letter by celebrating how blessed this congregation is. "You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed."

Sadly, it is a divided congregation. The only solution is to focus on Christ crucified. Read 1 Corinthians 1:1-25. 
 
Our nation, like the congregation in Corinth, is richly blessed. Yet we are also divided in so many ways... politically, racially, economically. How can we as a nation overcome these divisions?

After prayer, let our next response be as Christians to be the salt and light, to live in love as the Savior has called us. As Christians, we can disagree politically, but still remain united if, together, we keep our focus on Christ crucified.

United in Christ
 
Let us be united in Christ, seeking to look like and act like our God. Psalm 111 & 112 are companion psalms. Psalm 111 describes our God. Psalm 112 shows how a believer “looks” like our God. See the attached comparison I made on these psalms.

Psalms 113-118 invite us to unite in praise to the LORD as the one who sees our troubles and rescues his people. It closes with Messianic Psalm 118 that invites us to join in singing "Hosanna! Save us!" (118:25)