Update from the Trues

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• Update from Eric & Alicia True, Nov-Dec 2008

Quick Updates

1. No word yet on the facility at the community college.
2. We should receive our new church invitation cards today! We’ll have a GOnight this Sunday, and we are excited about getting back out in the community to share the gospel and invite people to church.
3. Only one more Sunday before Christian Life Conference begins. My father will be speaking seven times (and my mom twice to the ladies), and we’re praying that God will really use His Word in our church family.
4. We are officially house-hunting now, and would definitely appreciate your prayers that our hearts will stay focused on God, His will, and His priorities; instead of getting caught up in our desires or making a house an idol. We’re also a little nervous about the exact timing and financial details, so you could also join us in praying for those things.

A church meeting room?

How would this work as a church meeting room? In the next couple of days we should learn from the local community college if they will make this available for us to rent. It has strengths and weaknesses, but is probably an upgrade on our current situation if the Lord chooses to allow it. Obviously we would work on making it feel less classroom-ish and more church-ish.

The Pastor’s Home

A pastor’s family lives in what is often described as a “fishbowl”: he and his family live under an unusual degree of public scrutiny, and their home is often grand central station. Mark 2 records the instance in Jesus’ ministry when four men removed the roof and lowered a paralytic down to Jesus. Not until this afternoon did I pay close attention to verse 1: this happened at Jesus’ home! Talk about life in a fishbowl: I’ve never had anyone come through my roof before!  : – )

With appropriate boundaries in place, we embrace and enjoy the fishbowl. That opportunity to be a living example of Christlikeness is a critical part of our ministry. I’m not complaining about the fishbowl effect – simply noting something I never noticed before: they came through Jesus’ roof!

Prayer Requests

You can join us in praying for:

• Facility search: we’re pursuing a good contact right now with the local community college.
• Decisions about Sunday night: we’re struggling to determine the best next step for our Sunday night groups
• Through the diligence of a man in our church, I had the opportunity to share the gospel last week with a Jehovah’s Witness man who may only have a few weeks to live, and another older man who has never been to church or read the Bible. On Sunday we also had a visiting man who is almost certainly unsaved.
• My parents are coming February 8-15 to do a Christian Life conference for us. We are praying that God will really work through His Word.

Read It Again and Again

John Owen is one of those authors worth reading over and over again. In preparation for the final session of Bible Doctrine I, I got to skim my copy of Overcoming Sin & Temptation again this afternoon (that’s three of Owen’s works in one volume from Crossway, ISBN 1581346492). Here’s a snippet:

Sin aims always at the utmost; every time it rises up to tempt or entice, might it have its own course, it would go out to the utmost sin in that kind…. It proceeds toward its height by degrees, making good the ground it has got by hardness [through] deceitfulness…. Do not say ‘Thus far it shall go, and no farther.’ If it has allowance for one step, it will take another…. It is from the deceitfulness of indwelling sin that men persuade themselves that by this or that particular sin they shall so satisfy their lusts as that they shall need to sin no more. Every sin … fortifies the habit of sinning…. You cannot bargain with the fire to take [only] so much of your houses…. Put a violent stop unto its beginnings, its first motions and actions… die rather than yield one step unto it…. You had never had [i.e., would never have had] the experience of the fury of sin, if you had not been content with some of its dalliances.