Another Jacksonville News Article on Hope Community Church

The Jacksonville News ran an article this week featuring three Jacksonville churches. Hope Community Church was one of the three churches. If you would like to read this article, please follow this link:

Repairs and renovations being made at local churches

Hearing God's Voice

A couple of years ago I was taken back a bit by the words of John Piper in one of his "Taste and See" articles. The article was entitled "The Morning I Heard the Voice of God." Those were words that I would have never expected to hear from a pastor like John Piper. He explains what just what he meant by the provocative title through the course of the article. It is a tremendous article and I want to recommend it to you for reading. You can check it out by the link here.

Who Builds the Church? - Life Action Revival Ministries

Who Builds the Church? - Life Action Revival Ministries

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New Website Is Now Operational

Our new website is up and going. I am sure that we will make some changes to it in the future. You can visit it by clicking on the link below:

www.hopecommunitypca.com

Column on Baptism by R.C. Sproul

What is the significance of baptism?

Just as an aside, the word significance has as its root the word sign. A sign is something that points to something beyond itself. We all recognize that whatever baptism signifies, Jesus obviously thought it was very important because he gives a command to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Whatever else it is, baptism is the sign of the new covenant that God makes with his people. We do have the clear mandate in the New Testament that Christians are to be baptized.

I personally do not believe that baptism is essential for salvation. If I believed that, I would think that the thief on the cross who was promised paradise with Jesus would have been disqualified because he obviously didn’t have an opportunity to get baptized. But I do believe that baptism is essential for obedience because Christ commands it. It’s just the same thing as when people say, “Do you have to go to church to go to heaven?” I would say, “Obviously not.” But do you have to go to church to obey Christ? Yes, you do. And if you are not inclined to obey Christ and have no inclination to follow his mandates, that may be a sign that you are not headed for heaven. So church involvement becomes a very serious matter of obedience.

I would say the same about the sacrament of baptism. It’s a sign of the new covenant. It’s a sign of our participation in Jesus, of being partakers in his death and resurrection, which are at the heart of the gospel. It’s also a sign of our cleansing from sin and guilt by the work of Jesus and the washing of regeneration. What we do outwardly with water, the Spirit does inwardly with his grace. So it’s a sign of our cleansing. It’s also a sign of our sanctification. It’s a sign of our baptism of the Holy Spirit. It’s a sign of our being set apart from the world and given the holy task to fulfill the commission that Christ gives to his church.

So there are several things that baptism signifies. I think one of our tendencies is to reduce those to one—making it merely a cleansing rite or merely a sign of empowering by the Holy Spirit—when in fact it is a sacrament that is rich and complex with meaning and significance.

©1996 by R.C. Sproul. Used by permission of Tyndale.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. ©1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Updated Sign in Place

We received our updated sign last week and installed it on Saturday. Above is a picture of it with the current message on display. We have just a little "cleaning up" to do for the sign to be completed. When the temperature cools off a bit some new flowers will be planted in the flower bed at the base of the sign.

Pray that the Lord will continue to use this sign to highlight the church plant to residents of Jacksonville.

In Appreciation for Lakecrest Presbyterian Church and the Children of VBS 2009

We have been blessed by the children of Lakecrest Presbyterian Church in Hoover, Alabama. Lakecrest had its annual Vacation Bible School earlier in June. Each year the children bring a missions offering for a designated mission work during VBS. The children's ministry of Hope Community Church was chosen as the beneficiary of this year's VBS missions offering.

My family and I were blessed to be invited to attend the Family Night celebration on Friday, June 12th. We enjoyed the children's festival and the fellowship with the members of Lakecrest. During the Family Night program, pastor Thomas Joseph presented us with a check for $874.36. This was certainly a tremendous boost for our children's ministry and a great blessing for our church family. We want to express our apprecation to pastor Thomas Joseph and to the church family at Lakecrest for this great gift and investment in the work in Jacksonville.

Church Growth

As I was studying this afternoon and preparing for the first worship services for Hope, I was looking through some messages I had preached before. One particular message concerned the growth of the church. I ran across a quote which is attributed to Edward Abbey (an environmentalist from the last century - the quotation of whom is not an endorsement of his views by the way). Abbey wrote, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Cancer is basically runaway cell growth which displaces other cells and, when unchecked, eventually results in death.

As a church planter and pastor, it almost goes without saying that church growth is vital to the life and existence of the church plant. We must reach out to our community and hopefully bring new people into the church. We want and desire to see the church grow spiritually, numerically, and in many other ways. Our purpose as a church is to know Christ and make Him known for the glory of God. We will labor for the sake of the Gospel in our community so that Christ may be known and worshiped and that the fame of our God may be spread. That is the reason why we desire growth - not growth for the sake of growth or for our own fame.

This is why we will rely on the grace and power of God through the ordinary means of grace: the preaching and teaching of the Word of God, the observance of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and prayer. We will not utilize gimmicks or fads in an attempt to draw a crowd as if we need somehow to give God a hand. We desire growth, but we will trust in God to produce a church that honors and glorifies Him. This is not growth for the sake of growth, but growth for the glory of God.

Piper on Preaching

My attention was called to these words by Ligon Duncan, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS. The words are an explanation of expository preaching and are given by John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN. I don't know if a better explanation of expository preaching is available. None that I have seen express the urgency of preaching as Piper's does. The following is Piper's quote from a sermon on May 10 at his church:

"Many people are new to Bethlehem. Some simply stop by to see what’s going on. Some have little or no experience with what we mean by preaching. I think it will help you listen to this message (and others) if I say a word about preaching.

What we mean by preaching is expository exultation.

Preaching As Expository Exultation

Expository means that preaching aims to exposit, or explain and apply, the meaning of the Bible. Every sermon explains and applies the Bible. The reason for this is that the Bible is God’s word, inspired, infallible, profitable—all sixty-six books of it. The preacher’s job is to minimize his own opinions and deliver the truth of God. Therefore, it is mainly Bible exposition—explanation and application.

And the preacher’s job is to do that in a way that enables us to see that the points he is making actually come from the Bible. If they come from the Bible and you can’t see that they come from the Bible, your faith will rest on man and not God.

The aim of this exposition is to help you eat and digest some biblical truth that will make your spiritual bones more like steel, and double the capacity of your spiritual lungs, and make the eyes of your heart dazzled with God’s greatness, and awaken the capability of your soul for kinds of spiritual enjoyment you didn’t even know existed.

Preaching is also exultation—expository exultation. This means that the preacher does not just explain what’s in the Bible, and the people do not simply understand what he explains, but the preacher and the people exult over what is in the Bible as it is being explained and applied.

Preaching As Worship

Preaching does not come after worship in the order of the service. Preaching is worship. My job is not done if I only see truth and show it to you. The devil could do that—for his own devious reasons. My job is to see the glory of the truth and to savor it and exult over it as I explain it to you and apply it for you. That’s one of the differences between a lecture and a sermon.

Preaching is not the totality of the church. And if all you have is preaching, you don’t have the church. A church is a body of people who minister to each other. Part of what preaching does is equip us for that. God has created the church, so that she flourishes through preaching. That’s why Paul gave young pastor Timothy one of the most serious, exalted charges in all the Bible in 2 Timothy 4:1-2: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word.”

If you are used to a twenty-minute, immediately practical, relaxed talk, the understanding of preaching that I just described doesn’t lead there. I won’t preach twenty minutes but twice that long; I do not aim to be immediately practical but eternally helpful; and the condition of my soul is not relaxed but standing vigilantly on the precipice of eternity speaking to people any of whom this week could go over the edge."

Newspaper Article in Jacksonville News

Our local weekly newspaper, the Jacksonville News, recently published an article about the church plant and the help we received in April when painting the church. You can check out the article by clicking on the link below:

Jacksonville News Article

New Phone Number

The phone for Hope Community Church was connected on Thursday of last week. The number is: 256-435-5005. My typical office hours are 7:30 to 4:30 on weekdays.

Painting - Saturday, April 25th

A couple of days after the repairs made by the men from Briarwood, we had another work day at the church - this time to paint both the exterior of the church and the sanctuary's interior. We are grateful again to Briarwood Presbyterian Church for a group of about 20 men and women who came to provide help. We are also grateful to Faith Presbyterian Church in Anniston for about ten men and women who helped with painting and serving lunch.

Below are some pictures from the 25th:

Repairs Made to Buildings - Thursday, April 23rd

We are so grateful to the men from Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham for the repairs that they made to our buildings a couple of weeks ago. Repairs were made to some walls and floors. New outlets were added to the office area. Some larger doors were installed in our fellowship hall to make them more easily accessible for people in wheelchairs.

Some pictures are included below (please forgive the mismatched sizes):

Some Dates to Mark on your Calendars

As I mentioned in our Bible Study time on Sunday night, below are some upcoming dates related to the church plant.

April 4 - Work Day at the church. We will be cleaning in the Fellowship Hall and making preparations for the painting of the exterior of the church.

April 12 - Easter Sunday. We will not be having Bible Study at our facilities on this date. We have been invited to join in worship with Grace Fellowship Community Church on this night. I have been invited to preach. This will also give us an opportunity to thank Grace Fellowship for the gift of the buildings to us and for their financial support of the church.

April 19 - Faith Presbyterian Church, Anniston. I will be preaching in the morning service.

April 25 - Work Day at the church. We have invited other individuals and churches to join us in painting the church. May 2 is set as an alternate date in case of bad weather on the the 25th.

May 3 - Knollwood Presbyterian Church, Sylacauga. I have been invited by Pastor Harris Bond to preach and introduce our church plant to the church in Sylacauga in their evening worship service.

May 17 - Faith Presbyterian Church, Anniston. I will be preaching in the morning service.

A Glimpse of What Hope Community Church Has to Offer

In one of the churches I served as pastor, I had the privilege of leading the church through the construction of a new sanctuary. Before the new carpet was placed in the sanctuary, we invited the members of the church to bring permanent markers to write some of their favorite Bible verses on the floor. Many of the members took advantage of this opportunity and wrote numerous verses throughout the sanctuary. We did this at the suggestion of a friend who indicated that when we gathered for worship we would be "standing on the promises."

I chose to write several verses in different locations. I cannot remember most of the verses I wrote or where I wrote them. But I do remember one verse in particular. I wrote this verse on the floor underneath the spot where I would be standing when I was preaching. The verse is 1 Corinthians 2:2: For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified (ESV). I thought of this verse often as I stood preaching.

As we prepare and plan for the planting of Hope Community Church, we must also determine what our worship services will be like. The verse above is a tremendous reminder of what we are to be about as a church and what our focus should be in worship. We are to be a Christ centered, Gospel focused church. The good news of the Son of God who was crucified, dead, and raised from the dead is to be the message of the church as we worship and glorify our Lord.

I listened last month to a pastor speak about the philosophy of ministry for the church. He told about a conversation he had experienced with a lady who called to ask what his church had to offer her and her family. His answer was very clear and to the point. He replied that he would preach the Gospel, administer the sacraments, and offer the discipline of the church to her and her family.

As we plant the church in Jacksonville, this will be our focus. We will not seek to build the church around programs, a particular style of music, the latest fad of the church growth movement, or any gimmicks which promise to draw a crowd. Our focus will be to teach and preach and sing and declare the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is in keeping with our purpose statement:

The purpose of the Hope Community Church is
to know Christ and make Him known
through the planting of a PCA church in Jacksonville, Alabama.

Upcoming Bible Study Opportunity

Our next Bible study will be beginning soon. This Sunday, January 11th, we will have a covered dish supper in our new fellowship hall. This will be a great opportunity for those who are interested in attending our next Bible study to be introduced to those who are already participating - not to mention some great food and fellowship. The covered dish supper will begin at 5:00 p.m.

The Bible study itself will begin the following Sunday night, January 18th, at 5:00 p.m. The adults will be meeting in the sanctuary of our new facilities. We will be studying the Life of Joseph as we see how God worked in Joseph's life through the difficulties and even persecutions which Joseph suffered.

The children will be also be meeting at the same time in our Sunday School rooms. Children will be learning the catechisms as they are introduced to the great truths of Scripture and the Reformed faith which will build a foundation for their spiritual growth. We are also offering a class for teenage girls which will focus on the book of Esther.

Our facilities are located at 101 Lockette Drive, which is located just off of Highway 21 south of the Jacksonville city limits. The sign at the highway still reads "Grace Fellowship Community Church." You can see a map of our location through the following link to a Google map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=101+Lockette+Drive,+Jacksonville,+AL++36265&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=38.092988,67.851563&ie=UTF8&ll=33.774581,-85.768976&spn=0.039097,0.066261&z=14

One of Steve's Sermons Available On-line

Steve was recently given the opportunity to fill in for Rev. Rick Searle at Faith Presbyterian Church in Anniston, Alabama - the mother church for our plant. The sermon comes from Psalm 130 and is entitled, "Forgiven That We May Fear." How does God's forgiveness of our sins lead us to a deeper fear and reverence of Him? You can listen to Steve's sermon on-line at the following link:

http://www.fpchome.org/Audio/12-28-2008.wma