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In our current sermon series, we are learning to pray the psalms through the lens of the Lord's Prayer. The first petition of the Lord's Prayer is "hallowed be Thy name." Psalm 147 is a great psalm for helping us to pray this petition to God. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, when we pray for the hallowing of God's name we are saying: "Help us to truly know you, to h...

In teaching his followers to pray, Jesus instructed us to approach God as "our Father who art in heaven." This shows us that, as we come to God through Christ, we are to approach God in two ways. First, we are to approach God with a sense of confidence. We address God not at our Master, our King, our Ruler, or our Employer. He is our Father. In other words, since we have ...

In the six weeks between Easter Sunday and Pentecost we will be looking at the prayer Jesus taught his disciples often called the "Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father." The Lord's Prayer is generally seen as a template to use to shape our daily praying. It is seen as a template because, though most Christian traditions recite this prayer in worship, there is never any recor...

At the ACC after-school tutoring program a few weeks ago Pastor David casually mentioned to me that he and Sobeyda were going to be hosting a refugee family from El Salvador. My heart jumped with excitement...what an opportunity for ACC to show the love of God! I also was encouraged by their willingness to share their living space with strangers, knowing they give so much ...

Ushered in by Palm Sunday this past Sunday, we are in the middle of what Christians call Holy Week, the week in which we celebrate Christ's Last Supper and final words to his disciples, his humiliation, crucifixion and death, and finally his resurrection on Easter Sunday. We are quickly approaching the Triduum Sacrum, the three days in which all eternity hangs in the bal...

The service this week is shaped around Palm Sunday, as well as looking forward into Holy Week and Christ's passion. In the celebration of Palm Sunday, we see two truths about Jesus' ministry--that the hosannas exclaimed by the crowds were indeed true acclamations of his kingship and redemption of his people--were they to remain silent, even the stones would have cried out;...

The book of Malachi contains a message from a God who loves his people (Mal. 1:2) even though they have strayed from him, and who is calling them to return (Mal. 3:7). When we reach the end of Malachi, we discover that some of the people who originally received this message responded to it by repenting. Mal. 3:16a says, "Then those who feared the LORD talked with each othe...

Ask any waiter in Manhattan, and they'll tell you when they see a table full of European tourists, they get nervous. Why? Because in many European countries there is no custom of tipping the table-server when you go out to eat. (In those countries, waiters receive a fair wage in their hourly pay.) Foreign tourists visiting New York have probably been told that they are ex...

Is it ever permissible to question God? Is it wrong for Christians to struggle with doubt? Is there a difference between innocent uncertainty and obstinate unbelief? If so, how do we know when we've crossed the line? The third message in our Malachi series looks at some people who were wrestling with questions about God. Described in Malachi 2:17-18, we find them asking, ...

This service is built around the theme of what it means to doubt God's promises to us, and the importance of hearing God's promises to us and trusting in them. The lectionary readings focus around Israel doubting God in the desert, after he had freed them from Egypt and God's anger at their faithlessness and mistrust of him....