This weekend is Memorial Day Weekend, and we will recognize this important holiday during our Sunday services. Each service will start with a moment of silence and prayer for the families of those who have lost loved ones in the defense of our freedom. Then I will share a message from John 15:13 – No Greater Love. There is no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for another. I hope you will include one of our services as part of your Memorial Day Weekend.

What would cause one person to be willing to sacrifice their lives for another person? It is the ultimate sacrifice. Our text this Sunday points us toward the answer: No Greater Love because Love is the only motivation for that kind of sacrifice. We are created in the image of God and on Sunday we will see we are most like our creator when we love sacrificially other people. Jesus is the ultimate example of that love with his sacrificial death on the cross for our atonement, so that we do not have to live in eternal death, separated from God. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is that, motivated by love, Jesus sacrificially died in our place so we would not have to face the wrath of God for our sins.

Jesus’ death for us is primarily a redemptive act because through his death he accomplished something no one could ever accomplish on their own: the forgiveness of our sins. The death of Jesus is also an example of what it means to be fully human in that we are to live our lives in service to others which often includes sacrifice. Memorial Day reminds us of the thousands of Americans that have done that very thing for the liberty and freedom we enjoy today. Motivated by love of family and country, they died for the freedom of others. While we may not be called to sacrifice our life for others, part of the human experience is to love others sacrificially for their blessing. Currently our society is pushing individualism, causing any of us to weigh the question,  “what will be in it for me if I make this sacrifice?” As Christians, God calls us to put the needs of others before our own by willingly making sacrifices for those who can never repay the sacrifice. The Gospel, and Memorial Day reveal the love of God as fulfilled through His image bearers. There is no greater love than to make a sacrifice for others.

From the Briefing – Dr. Albert Mohler

The Brave Boy in the Pear Tree: How a 12-Year-Old Hero in Ukraine Fought Back Against a Russian Attack

And in this case, I want to talk about a boy in Ukraine. He was at the time this happened just weeks ago, 12 years old. I’m not going to mention his name. I’m simply going to say that on one day, just a matter of a month ago, so we’re not talking about something in the distant past, we’re talking about a 12-year-old boy in Ukraine last month. At that time, he was up in a pear tree, sounds like a parable, but that’s where he was. He was up in a pear tree. He was helping a neighbor by cutting off a damaged branch. So you have a 12-year-old helping a neighbor, he’s up on a tree, able to pair back this particular branch in a pear tree. And then he heard the buzz of a drone. And reporters, Constantine Kudov and Steve Hendricks for the Washington Post tell us the story. He heard the buzz of a drone. “That sound often means death in Ukraine and not just for soldiers on the front lines. Increasingly, civilians are tracked, chased, and attacked by small commercially available drones equipped with cameras rigged with explosives and steered by fingers on joysticks a dozen miles away.” So now you’re talking about a 12-year-old boy up in a pear tree helping out a neighbor when he hears a drone.

Okay, here’s the interesting thing. He realizes the drone is passing under him. Russia now darkly refers to the hunting down civilians as a human safari. Just think about how dark that is. It’s a killing, an intentional killing of civilians in order to spread terror. We are told, “In recent months, it has evolved with new technology and spread to border areas around the country.” This 12-year-old boy knew that this warfare was ongoing and one of the ways it was known is because of the filaments that were the connection miles and miles away of those running the drones and the drone’s lethal attack systems, the drone was trailed by a very thin line and that line was what was controlling the deadly drone.

And so the boy knew that and there had been a drone attack days and weeks before in which the boy and his father had with a neighbor, talking with a soldier, come to understand how the line worked in this control. The boy up in the pear tree, again, 12 years old, he said, “It saw the children and started gaining altitude.” That’s children in the yard, including his own siblings, “That’s when I realized something was about to happen.” The Post then reports, “What the boy did next, something he had rehearsed, something few civilians in Ukraine had been taught might have saved the lives of those children, his mother changing a diaper inside or other neighbors on the block.” “His story [I’m reading here from The Post] and the fact that a 12-year-old in a pear tree knows how to fight back against a Russian drone illustrates how deeply a tactic that the United Nations calls a war crime has dissolved the line between soldier and civilian in the fifth year of Russia’s war.” These drone attacks against civilians, against families, against children and others demonstrate the extremity of this war, and frankly, the extent to which Russia is willing to target civilians in Ukraine. In this case, we’re talking about children and mother changing a diaper, et cetera.

Russia had the innovation of equipping drones of fiber optic filament is defined as “a hair thin tether that unspools in flight like a spiderweb for 12 miles” and they’re using payloads that are very deadly and in order to overcome Ukraine’s efforts at jamming the controls, they’re using these filaments in order to maintain control to deadly effect. This boy and his father had noticed these “glinting gossamer threads” in their neighborhood and they were trying to figure out what to do about them. They came across a soldier and the soldier who was an explosive specialist explained “how the fiber optic material like a fishing line was almost impossible to pull apart without slicing the skin. Then he demonstrated three techniques the soldiers had found to break it. A combination of loops and pinches best to count to 15 after a drone passes before trying it. This specialist said, so you’re out of the drone’s view and don’t become the target.” 

Okay, so the boy and his father heard this. The boy received it with what we are told was curiosity. The drones kept coming and on this day the boy is up in a pear tree and the drone passes by underneath and it passes by with obvious lethal intent. Listen to what happened. “As the drone moved towards his family, the 12-year-old boy dropped to the ground. He ran 20 yards and got his fingers around a hairlike umbilical running all the way to Russia. He made a loop, pulled it slightly and remembered the soldier’s instruction, count to 15. He said, ‘I didn’t have time so I counted to 10 and I broke it.’”

The Post then reports, “The line snapped. The drone abruptly veered upward, banked away from the children and the houses and spiraled into a section of wild ground next to the neighborhood.” The boy said, “I waited for an explosion, but there was nothing. It turned out that crashing into the swamp meant that basically the swamp just absorbed the drone and its deadly effect.” The very weapon specialist who had explained the technology to the boy, including how to break the line sometime back, he was one of the first persons to respond to the boy’s action asking the question, “How can a civilian person, especially a child, do something like that?”

He went on to say not every soldier would have been able to react in a split second like that. This is one of those stories of heroism in which we are reminded that God created us as moral creatures. He put us in a moral universe. He put us in a universe in which we right now, even as I speak, are drawing attention to the heroism of a 12-year-old boy who without really thinking much about it, armed with knowledge he’d received in a conversation with his father, jumped out of the tree to save his brothers and sisters, his mother and the baby and others simply by grabbing the line. He said he didn’t have time to count to 15, so he counted to 10 and he broke it. And in all likelihood, as the Washington Post makes clear, he saved their lives.

I’m not mentioning the boy’s name. It is mentioned at least a name is provided in the news sources, but it is also said that the Russians are now determined to kill him and his family. So the Ukrainian authorities have moved them many miles away. I just find this one of the developments, one of the things that could pass under our radar, that should be very much on our moral screen as Christians. We need to be the kind of people, by the way, who would produce 12 year olds to do something like this in a second.

This week we will look at the first “sermon” which resulted in the beginnings of the church. Recorded in Acts 2 after Peter shared the truth of the Gospel. Peter spoke boldly about exactly what happened the day Jesus was crucified. He spoke directly to the point of who Jesus was and how He wound up on the cross. He said, “Jesus, the Son of God, whom you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men”. It is recorded in the text the people who heard were “pierced to the heart” with the truth Peter shared. That day 3,000 people joined the group of believers. WOW, 3,000 asked, “Brothers what shall we do”? This is a great testimony of the resurrection of Christ since those Peter was speaking to would have seen or heard of the crucifixion and would have also seen or heard of Jesus’ appearances after being certified as dead and buried in the tomb.

So, what was so impactful about the words of Peter? What caused 3,000 people to search for a way to be cleared of what they knew they had done? How did this seemingly impossible task of coordinating any type of movement with 3,000 people from different homelands in the known world ever become what we know as the church today?

The church is needed as much today as it was in Acts 2. What makes a church impactful today in our communities? We know it isn’t our programs or our building. The original 3,000 had none of these. Furthermore, what does it mean to be “part of the church”? I hope you will join us as we look at answering these questions through the lens of the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2.

A primary teaching in the Lord’s Prayer is that prayer is us connecting and communing with God. Its pretty amazing when you stop to think about it . . . we get to talk with and share life with the creator God of the Universe. The Old Testament, beginning with the fall of man in Genesis 3, reveals God’s plan of how sinful humans can have relationship with a Holy God. Humans could not come to God on our own, and because of His Holiness, God would not come to man as He did before sin entered humanity. During the life of Moses God provided a temporary way for this to happen through the temple. The temple is an earthly representation of what heaven is like, most notably as the place where God dwells. In a very tangible way, the temple was a place on earth where heavenly things were done, which centered around communion with the God of heaven.

In the Lord’s Prayer when Jesus said, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” we hear language that draws our attention to what was temporarily accomplished in the Old Testament Temple: Sinful humans could have communion with the Holy God of the Universe. To pray for God’s will to be on earth as it is in heaven is to fully engage in communion with God so that His kingdom will be seen here on earth. Ultimately, the Kingdom of God will be fulfilled in the age to come. However, scripture is clear that we can experience elements of that Kingdom while we are here on earth. So, When You Pray, Seek Heaven on Earth. 

Praying Over the News

During this church wide series on prayer, I have come to realize that most of us struggle with how to process and respond to troubling world events. Watching the news only makes the anxiety level grow. Have you ever thought about praying over the news? Let me introduce you to a great tool that helps us look at the news from a Biblical, Godly worldview, then to pray over those events for God’s glory through them. It’s called the Pour Over. It’s free, it comes out 3 times a week and you can either read it or listen to the podcast. There are versions to do with kids as well as other resources. If the news is troubling for you, give the Pour Over a try . . .

Announcement – We will never send you a request through a text message asking you to donate to the church. This week people from our church have received text messages that look like they are from Pastor Andrew, asking for gift cards. We will never do that.

Sunday, we continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and Luke 11. Our Community Groups are doing studies in conjunction with my message from “The Prayer Course”. You can watch those videos through our Right Now Media account – you can access that through the button in our church newsletter / bulletin.

This week we will look at “Give us each day our daily bread” – Petition. In our community groups this week we learned that our prayers need to be relational not transactional. Prayer primarily needs to be coming to God in relationship for the purpose of strengthening that relationship. But, just as in a parent child relationship, our relationship with the Father includes asking him to do things for us. We call that “petition.” It is clear from the Lord’s prayer that God wants us to come to him with any and all needs we have. 

After the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:5-13 Jesus tells a parable about an impertinent man who shamelessly wakes his neighbor up in the middle of the night to ask for some bread. He doesn’t just ask once, he asks repeatedly until he gets what he needs. On Sunday we will look at that parable as an illustration of how he should think of coming to God with our petitions. Included in Jesus teaching with the parable is the famous admonition for us to ask, seek and knock as part of an effective prayer life. The tense of those verbs is present tense which makes them a continuous practice. Petitioning is something we are to do continuously as part of a healthy prayer life. Join me this Sunday as we continue through the Lord’s Prayer.

This Sunday we start a 4-week church wide emphasis on prayer based on the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew 6:5-13. We are breaking the Lord’s Prayer into eight small sections where I will preach on one section on Sunday, followed by our Community Group Studies that week. We will repeat that pattern for 4 weeks. In our Community Groups we will use the Video based material “The Prayer Course” on Right Now Media. If you don’t have Right Now Media, you create an account for free through a link in our church newsletter every week. If you are not in a Community Group this is a good time to join one, even if it’s just for these 4 weeks.
Jesus begins his teaching in the Lord’s Prayer with the phrase, “When you pray . . .” Jesus assumes all people will pray at some time and in some way. But do they pray as God intended for them to pray? Join us for this important series on prayer as we discover what it means to pray the way God intended us to pray.