Pastor Fellure will be with us Wednesday through Friday evening at 7:15 pm. I hope that all of you that attend Vision Baptist Church will make a real effort to be with us every night.
If you are a pastor, missionary, member of another church, friend or someone we want to meet I hope you will come and be with us. I have heard great things about his preaching and truly think that you will enjoy the meeting.
If you are unable to be with us please be in prayer that God will meet with us.
If you are a pastor or missionary I would sure like to meet you when you come and get to know you.
I really am looking forward to a great time together.
We glorify God in a high degree when we suffer for God, and seal the gospel with our blood. ‘When thou shalt be old, another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not: this spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God’ (John 21:18). God’s glory shines in the ashes of his martyrs. ‘Wherefore glorify the Lord in the fires’ (Is. 24:15). Micaiah was in the prison, Isaiah was sawn asunder, Paul beheaded, Luke hanged on an olive tree; thus did they, by their death, glorify God. The sufferings of the primitive saints did honour to God, and made the gospel famous in the world. What would others say? See what a good master they serve, and how they love him, that they will venture the loss of all in his service. The glory of Christ’s kingdom does not stand in worldly pomp and grandeur, as other kings’; but it is seen in the cheerful sufferings of his people. The saints of old ‘loved not their lives to the death’ (Rev. 12:11). They embraced torments as so many crowns. God grant we may thus glorify him, if he calls us to it. Many pray, ‘Let this cup pass away,’ but few, ‘Thy will be done.’
Though we do not support them simply because of a lack of funds, I love the Maggard family! They are great examples of God consumed men and women. They just celebrated 32 years of marriage. I wanted you to see what Ron wrote about his wife and their ministry. Oh, for God to give us a 1000 like them! I am pretty sure that Betty and I share the same anniversary as the Maggards.
Tribute To My Wife On The Occasion Our 32nd Anniversary
This past month on August 18th, 2008 my wife Frances and I celebrated 32 years of marriage.
As I think back on that Wednesday 32 years ago I remember how we left the Faith Baptist Church in Hopewell, VA, following our wedding and reception to drive to Baltimore, MD where I had a long standing appointment to preach at Rosedale Baptist Church. I know what you are thinking. What was I thinking?
Well thirty two years later when people hear that I preached on my wedding night it still raises eyebrows. I told Frances that I was a preacher before I met her and that preaching was going to be our life. And it has been! Frances became a pastor’s wife while still a teenager. That was interesting! But she pulled it off – with style.
And so she has continued in this role faithfully beside her husband all these years. This past August the 18th was no different. We were up by 4 AM and headed to the Fort Lauderdale airport to catch an American Airlines flight for Port Au Prince, Haiti.
We arrived in the very hot Haitian city about 11 AM. Met by Haitian pastors we packed into an old four wheel drive vehicle without air conditioning for a two hour drive to Gressier. We had no idea what was in store for us. We thought we were staying in a type of guesthouse so we didn’t bring sheets or towels.
When we arrived we found ourselves in a Haitian camp / Bible Institute setting, a place that would test the metal of the most hardy of travelers. They showed us to our room that had a small bed and adjoining bathroom. We were blessed. We didn’t have to share. It had a fan (blessed again) but no air to help with the 90 degree plus heat. After killing several spiders and cleaning a bit and getting the fan to run it was ready for the new inhabitants. Frances taught the pastor’s wives all week.
Each morning she would get ready to meet her class of eager woman and children. After fighting off the bugs that came forth from the shower head and drain, drying on one of my tee shirts and making sure no tarantulas had gotten into her clothes during the night she was ready to face her tasks.
After a breakfast (Haitian style) she climbed the stairs and worked for hours through a Creole translator to get her lessons to their hearts. They were thrilled, blessed and helped with her lessons. Frances has always shown this type of “strength and honor” toward any task she has taken on.
Since her teenage days as the pastor’s wife of a new church to church planting mission work in various and diverse cultures and settings she has always shown herself faithful. Even in her daily tasks as she manages Carelink International Clinic, a ministry of our Iglesia Bautista Faro de Luz, she certainly “stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.” Managing all the duties of scores of volunteer doctors and medical personnel and navigating thousands of patients takes a lot of grace. And she has it!
So as her husband of 32 years spending our anniversary in Haiti once again showed me that she is truly a woman who “should be praised.” I love you Frances. Looking forward to many more with you – Ron.
We glorify God by labouring to draw others to God; by seeking to convert others, and so make them instruments of glorifying God. We should be both diamonds and loadstones; diamonds for the lustre of grace, and loadstones for attractive virtue in drawing others to Christ. ‘My little children, of whom I travail, &c.’ (Gal. 4:19). It is a great way of glorifying God, when we break open the devil’s prison, and turn men from the power of Satan to God.
Who will you witness to this week? How many people do you invite to church?
After my class today I was just thinking of how blessed that I am as the pastor of Vision Baptist Church. I think of all that God has done in our church. I think of the staff both volunteer and paid that we have as a church. Very few churches have ever had so many, so early in the ministry.
I think of the faithful attenders and servers that we have at our church, I think of those that clean behind the scenes, those that stand at the door and greet people with such a friendly smile, those that keep the nursery and lead and direct our children’s ministry, our teen ministry, and all of the different Sunday School Classes.
I think of those that make sure the sound and all the audio visual things work. I think of those that sing and play. I think of all that attend, pray and give.
I was just thinking at lunch and this afternoon how we are blessed beyond measure. Thank you to all of you.
God has greatly blessed our church in our short 30 or so months.
I just praise the God of Heaven for all His blessings!
We glorify God, when we have an eye to God in our natural and in our civil actions. In our natural actions; in eating and drinking. ‘Whether therefore ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God’ (1 Cor. 10:31). A gracious person holds the golden bridle of temperance; he takes his meat as a medicine to heal the decays of nature, that he may be the fitter, by the strength he receives, for the service of God; he makes his food, not fuel for lust, but help to duty. In buying and selling, we do all to the glory of God. The wicked live upon unjust gain, by falsifying the balances, as in Hosea 12:7: ‘The balances of deceit are in his hands;’ and thus while men make their weights lighter, they make their sins heavier, when by exacting more than the commodity is worth, they do not for fourscore write down fifty, but for fifty, four-score; when they exact double the price that a thing is worth. We buy and sell to the glory of God, when we observe that golden maxim, ‘To do to others as we would have them do to us;’ so that when we sell our commodities, we do not sell our consciences also. ‘Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence towards God, and towards men’ (Acts 24:16). We glorify God, when we have an eye to God in all our civil and natural actions, and do nothing that may reflect any blemish on religion.
This one sure hits home! Every little thing we do is to honor and glorify God. Even the way we eat and shop!
by Rev Jacob D. Eppinga
I am dying. Of cancer. This past Christmas was my last. Spring always has been my favorite season. At this writing, I hope to see the spring of 2008. Since childhood, I have loved baseball. Today my marvelous palliative-care physician told me there is a chance that I will watch my dear Detroit Tigers on television on opening day. But that I will not see the World Series.
To paraphrase a great English observer of human nature, Samuel Johnson, the prospect of dying focuses one’s thinking. What follows are some of my thoughts about death.
Primary among them is this: I don’t want to die. Even though I have lived 90 years, two decades beyond the biblical three score and ten, I want to live. There are things yet that I want to do. People to see. Sermons to preach.
Also, I’m scared. Does it surprise you that a minister of the Christian Reformed Church is scared of dying? As a Christian, I do not fear death; still, I fear dying. How much will dying hurt? On a chart of 1 to 10, my pain threshold is a -100.
And I’m scared of something else—the money running out before life runs out.
Most of all, I’m scared about what will become of Anne, my beloved wife, who can’t hear or walk or remember. For years I’ve asked God to let me outlive her, so I can take care of her until her home-going. Then, I have told him, I could go to my grave in peace.
But God has not answered my prayer in the fashion I have requested. My son says that God has, really, because so much of Anne already has been taken (although not her sweet disposition). I am not convinced by this line of reasoning and find but small comfort in it.
Those are the big things. There also are smaller things.
For example, I struggle with disappointment and embarrassment. Always having taken care of my family and myself, now others have to take care of me. My body is failing. My mind, too, is not as sharp as it used to be—particularly because of the medications for pain. (Still, even in this, I am forced to admit that I have reason for giving thanks. Our attentive children love their mother and father. And daughter Sue, upon ending her teaching career, has devoted herself to the care of her parents. And there is a special caregiver named Mary Ellen.)
Over my 63 years of ministry, I’ve been a pastor as well as a preacher. I’ve counseled parishioners, tried to comfort them, and conducted hundreds of funeral services. (I’ve always welcomed funeral services because, unlike at weddings, those in attendance actually listen to the Christian message, focused as they are for the moment upon their own mortality.) Now, however, it’s my minister who counsels me, comforts me, and plans with me the details of my own funeral service.
And I ask myself, why do bad things happen to good people? Why me? Why now? There’s so much for me yet to do.
Early in my ministry I attempted to answer that question, as it was posed to me by a grieving parent, a dying mother, a devastated family, a stunned congregation. But soon I came to recognize that my answers were unconvincing and maybe even misdirected.
Now I am older, I hope wiser, and facing my own death. I try to answer that question—Why do bad things happen to good people?—with three points. (Are you surprised?)
First is a simple admission: I do not know. “There you have it, plain and flat,” as poet John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote.
Second is a story that gives me just a tiny glimpse into an answer. I will be edified if it does the same for you. Here it is:
When I was a boy, I feared going to the dentist. My father took me there anyway. When I was sitting in the chair, my father near me, I begged my father to rescue me from what lay ahead. My father did not do so. Instead he told me that he loved me and that I would be all right. After that, all I could do was trust my father. My father knew what was above and beyond my understanding at the time—that I needed to go to the dentist.
In a similar fashion, tragedy and death are above and beyond my understanding. I pray for God to take them away. For some reason, God doesn’t answer my prayers in the ways I want.
But here’s the point: Above my understanding. But not God’s. He loves me, this I know, so all I can do is trust him, my only comfort in life and death. My father knew, and my heavenly Father knows, things that were and are beyond my comprehension.
Third is my main point: As important as is the question about why God allows bad things to happen to good people, it is not the most important question in life. The most important question in life—in all the world and in all the universe, for that matter—is, rather, “Why does God allow a good thing to happen to bad people?”
I am a sinner—a bad person. Yet my Father gave his only Son for me—a very good thing indeed.
During a lifetime of ministry, I have heard the last words of many of my parishioners. One does not forget such things. The person whose last words I’ve been reflecting upon the most these past weeks is William Harry Jellema, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College and arguably the greatest mind in the history of the Christian Reformed Church. His last words—simple but not simplistic—were, “It’s grace, Jake; it’s all grace.”
Think of it! The enormous intellect that was William Harry Jellema condensed the entire Bible, all of theology, and every last Reformed creed and confession into just one word: grace.
Thus the title of my last Banner article, my last “Of Cabbages and Kings” in a series stretching 40 years, is not “Of Death,” but “Of Death and Grace.” Of all the words I have shared with you over all the decades in these pages, dear readers, the ones I would leave with you are . . .
“May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
We glorify God, by being zealous for his name. ‘Phinehas hath turned my wrath away, while he was zealous for my sake’ (Nu. 25:11). Zeal is a mixed affection, a compound of love and anger; it carries forth our love to God, and our anger against sin in an intense degree. Zeal is impatient of God’s dishonour; a Christian fired with zeal, takes a dishonour done to God worse than an injury done to himself. ‘Thou canst not bear them that are evil’ (Rev. 2:2). Our Saviour Christ thus glorified his Father; he, being baptized with a spirit of zeal, drove the money-changers out of the temple. ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up (John 2:14-17).
