Dear Saints of God,
Summertime….and the living is easy…but faith can be challenging or even difficult at the best of times. On the Second Sunday in Pentecost we celebrated two wonderful baptisms when Keira and Mason Ramirez were baptized. Our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures was the story of God testing Abraham’s faith by asking Abraham to take his only son to the region of Moriah in order to offer his son as a sacrifice.
Abraham follows God’s instructions and when he and Isaac get close to the place for the sacrifice, Isaac asks his father; “Where is the burnt offering for the sacrifice?” Abraham answers, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” I have little idea what was going on in Abraham’s mind, but somehow Abraham knew enough about God that he knew God would provide. Sure enough the story has a happy ending for Abraham and Isaac (if not for the lamb.) Abraham experienced God’s provision and named that place “The LORD will provide.” I believe God will provide for us this summer, this year and for the rest of our lives.
God is the kind of God that offered His one and only Son for us. Only God Himself could die in our place and pay the penalty for our sin. Perhaps this Abraham and Isaac story is a foreshadowing of how God will indeed provide for Abraham and for all of us. If God had not become the sin offering for us, we would still be dead in our sins and trespasses.
The apostle Paul puts it like this; “Before you became Christians and/or before you were baptized you were slaves to sin. But through our new life in Christ we have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God.” (Romans 6) The bottom line is that we will either serve God or we will serve ourselves and sin. No matter how far we try to run from God, we cannot be independent beings. We were created to be in a relationship with a loving, holy and self sacrificing God. Before her baptism young Keira put it this way; “I want to be baptized because I love God and God died for us; so who wouldn’t want to be baptized since He did this for us?”
I am thankful for new life in Christ, for Keira and Mason’s baptisms, for the privilege of gathering with God’s people each Sunday, for God’s unlimited faithfulness, and for God’s provision for health and abundant life in Him.
May you too be thankful this summer even when the summer living isn’t all that easy.
With love in Christ,
Pastor Barbara Elizabeth+
