Dear friends,

We have an all-church picnic scheduled for tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. As mentioned in the email with the news and notes and bulletin for Sunday, this fellowship gathering will be held rain or shine.  I look forward to seeing many of you as we gather.  As part of our gathering, we will celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Trish Simpson’s work as our office administrator.

Psalm 15 opens with a question, “O Lord, who may abide in your sanctuary?  The sanctuary was the place where a person would encounter God, would experience intimacy with God.  So another way of asking this question is “who can experience God’s presence?” or “who can be in relationship with God?”

For some individuals, the idea of being in a relationship with God is hard to comprehend.  This difficulty might be due to them having been taught that God is omnipotent, omniscient, distant, and transcendent—these definitions of God make God distant, detached from us.  We’re down here and God is up there, looking down on us, but not actively involved with us.  On the other hand, the difficulty may be due to the age-old question of why is there evil in the world if God is all-powerful and is in control of everything.  Still, others might believe we live in a closed universe.

God is not just a God of power, but a God of love.  We believe God’s love is vulnerable to us.  We believe God desires a relationship with God’s people.  Deuteronomy 4:7 asks, “what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him?”  As followers of Jesus, we believe that God came to us in Jesus.  God is a lover.  God is like the shepherd who abandons the 99 sheep and goes to look for the lost one.

This Sunday we’ll explore who may abide in God’s sanctuary based upon Psalm 15, Deuteronomy 4, and Mark 7.

See you on Sunday,

Pastor Dave

David Braneky

Pastor

Grace Baptist Church of Blue Bell