Today is a day of fasting and prayer at Bethany. In light of the unfolding military conflict in Iran and the growing uncertainty across the Middle East, we’ve invited our church family to pause, set aside some of our normal routines, and seek the Lord together. To help guide that time, we’ve prepared an hour-by-hour prayer guide with Scripture, prompts, and songs to focus our intercession throughout the day. When events in our world begin to move quickly and beyond…
“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8) It is one of the saddest sentences in the Bible. They heard the Lord God coming and they hid. Why hide? God was not a stranger. He wasn’t their enemy. This was the One who had stooped in the…
“Slaughterhouse Religion.” That’s what my grandmother called the Old Testament sacrificial system. Grandma Matthes came out of mainline Methodism. She loved Jesus and, later in life, came to a fuller assurance of her salvation. But whenever she tried to read through the Bible, she would get bogged down in Leviticus. She’d arrive at the detailed description of the Old Testament sacrificial system— and that was as far as she could go. It was just too upsetting for her. Grandma had…
Last night Pam and I slept downstairs in our finished basement. When the thermometer dips toward the single digits, our heat pump just can’t keep up—especially in our upstairs bedroom that sits above an unheated garage. When I come down in the morning and the thermostat inside the house is reading in the 50s, I don’t need to check the weather app to know it’s cold outside. So once or twice a year, when the mercury really dives, one of…