WEST LIBERTY CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP

“I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.” Philippians 3:10

July 14 2024

THE GOD WE WORSHIP

The Revelation of Jesus Christ

Message and Scriptures

Community Fair Service

WLCF VISION STATEMENT – To be a God centered, God loving, Holy Spirit filled, led and empowered Church, having Christ as the Head and we, as His Body, being used to make disciples of Jesus to build His Kingdom.

CHURCH COVENANT:

We covenant together with God and with one another in an ever-increasing relationship with God as follows: Lord God-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we covenant with you and with each That we will seek to be kingdom people living as kingdom individuals in kingdom homes in a kingdom church.

BARUCH ATA YHWH SEBAOTH – Bless You. Praise You. Thank You Beloved LORD GOD. . We are thankful for our youth and their passion for learning about and serving You, Lord.

Weekly Dawn Prayer – Wednesday mornings at 7:00am both in person and via Zoom

Daily Time Alone with God – for a daily devotion please follow “Time Alone With God”, found on the website. Please pray TAG every day.

Prayer Chain – Call or email Lynne Zeman 319-627-4858 or westlibertychristianfellowship@gmail.com

TODAY AT WLCF (On Site and Zoom)

Muscatine County Fair Worship Service
9:00 a.m. Worship Service

THIS WEEK AT WLCF –

Bible Studies/Sunday School/Worship

Monday 6:00 p.m. Getting to Know the Bible

Tuesday 7:00 p.m. Spanish Bible Study – Lucas Holy Spirit

Wednesday 7:00 a.m. Dawn Prayer – Prayer for the World/Nation/Community/WLCF

Saturday 7:30 a.m. Men’s Bible Study - Revelation

Sunday 9:00 a.m Muscatine County Fair Worship Service

Birthday(s)

Monday, July 22 – Hannah Dimond, Hugo Ramos, Kane Lopez

Saturday, July 27 – Makenzie Feldman

Anniversary(ies)

MASKS: Everyone is now welcome to make their own decision regarding wearing masks. There will still be a supply by the entry door, but it is your choice whether you wear a mask.

Zoom –You will need to download the app on your phone or computer. The code for ALL videos is 228 893 6865. The password is 416991. Join us!

UPCOMING EVENTS, SERVICES, AND ACTIVITIES

County Fair Church Service and CYG Mission Trip Commissioning today, July 21 at 9 a.m. at the Grove on the Muscatine County Fairgrounds.

School Supply Drive: Please bring items to church by Sunday, Aug 4 and well get them delivered to the school. Needed items include: backpacks, pencils (Ticonderoga), pens, crayons, colored pencils, watercolors, glue, glue sticks, Play-doh, sandwich, quart, and gallon Ziploc baggies, pencil boxes or pouches, washable markers, dry erase markers, black Sharpies, highlighters, scissors, Post-its, pink erasers, water bottles, headphones or earbuds, pocket folders, single-subject notebooks, composition notebooks, two-pocket folders with brackets, 3 ring binders, calculators (Texas Instrument TI-30Xa and Texas Instrument TI-30XIIS), hand sanitizer, tissues, paper towels, and Clorox wipes.

ONGOING EVENTS, SERVICES, AND ACTIVITIES

Baptism – If you are interested in following Jesus in the Waters of Believer’s Baptism please see Pastor Mario.

West Liberty Food Pantry – Is open at FCU Saturdays 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. and Thursdays 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Thanks to the men who deliver these items to FCU. Julie McKillip is our coordinator.

Church library – You are invited to check out the books from the library downstairs.

Copy of the Message or Bulletin – Visit our website: www.wlcf.org (an audio version is included) or contact Brad Jenkins.

Stephen’s Ministry – is available for anyone needing someone to walk beside them or pray with them. Please contact Kelsey Jenkins 319-936-4891 or Cindy Mays 319-330-4620 for more information.

Child Care: Child care is available in the Nursery during worship service.

Children’s Sunday school – during the sermon at the 10:30 a.m. worship service.

OUR GIVING TO THE LORD’S WORK: Offering Box – back table

Giving in July: $1493,$630. We are behind budget $1163.13. We need a monthly offering of $8968.02 and a weekly offering of $2069.54 to match our budget. BARUCH ATA YHWH SEBAOTH for the giving of YOUR people through the years. God loves a cheerful giver. Checks can be mailed to the church or dropped off at the church, in the mailbox at the end of the lane. You are also invited to sign up for Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF). Please see Lynne for details.

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WLCF YOUTH MINISTRY

WLCF Youth Group for young people in 6^th – 12^th grades

Ministries

Worship Service: Sundays at 10:30 a.m.

Youth Night: Not meeting in the summer. – Luke (Please bring your Bibles).

Activities and Events

COMMUNITY YOUTH GROUP (CYG)

If you are interested in serving this ministry in any way, let Pastor Mario know. They need one board member and several cube leaders. The group meets at First Church United (FCU) on Sunday evenings.

July 21 Mission Trip Commissioning @ County Fair Service 9:00 am

July 28-Aug 2 Mission trip to Nashville, TN

TIME ALONE WITH GOD (TAG)

Sunday, July 21, 2024

The “inaugurated eschatology” of Jesus’ ministry. Yet, with the exception of Jesus, death still reigns over humanity. All whom Jesus resuscitated eventually died once again. This observation leads to the final point that needs to be made concerning Jesus’ miracles over nature. While Jesus proclaimed by word and deed that the kingdom had come with his arrival, and while the New Testament unequivocally proclaims that Jesus was victorious over the enemy in his ministry, death and resurrection (Col 2:14-15), both Jesus and other New Testament authors see the ultimate realization of this kingdom victory to be in the future. This constituted the well-known “inaugurated eschatology,” or the “already-but-not-yet” paradoxical dynamism of New Testament thought. The kingdom has already come but it has not yet been fully manifested in world history.

What this means is this: Jesus’ miracles over nature, as well as his healings, exorcisms and especially his resurrection, were definite acts of war that accomplished and demonstrated his victory over Satan. These acts outed demonic forces and thereby established the kingdom of God in people’s lives and in nature. But their primary significance was eschatological. People are still obviously being demonized; all people still get sick and die; storms still rage and destroy lives; famines are yet prevalent and starve thousands daily. But Jesus’ ministry, and especially his death and resurrection in principle tied up “the strong man” and established the kingdom of God and the restoration of a new humanity in the midst of this war zone. In doing this, Jesus set in motion forces that will eventually overthrow the whole of this already fatally damaged Satanic assault upon God’s earth and upon humanity.

Gustaf Wingren expresses this “already/not yet” dynamic well when he argues that with Christ’s resurrection

The war of the Lord is finished and the great blow is struck. Never again can Satan tempt Christ, as in the desert. Jesus is now Lord, Conqueror. But a war is not finished, a conflict does not cease with the striking of the decisive blow. The enemy remains with the scattered remnants of his army, and in pockets here and there a strong resistance may continue. That is the position of the church.

Jesus’ miraculous ministry, therefore, was not simply symbolic of the eschaton-in principle it achieved the eschaton. He in principle won the war, struck the decisive deathblow, vanquished Satan, restored humanity, established the kingdom; yet some battles must still be fought before this ultimate victory is fully manifested. Hence Jesus did not just carry out his warfare ministry; he commissioned, equipped, and empowered his disciples, and the whole of the later church, to do the same. He set in motion the creation of a new humanity, one that again exercises dominion over the earth, by giving us his power and authority to proclaim and demonstrate the kingdom just as he did (e.g., 2 Cor 5:17-21; Mt 16:15-19; Lk 19:17-20; cf. Jn 14:12; 20:21).

Jesus thus gives to all who will in faith receive it his authority to break down the gates of hell and take back for the Father what the enemy has stolen, just as he himself has done. (Mt 16:18). Now that the strong man has been bound, it is a task we can and must successfully carry out. In doing all this, we the church are further expanding the kingdom of God against the kingdom of Satan and laying the basis for the Lord’s return, when the full manifestation of Christ’s victory, and of Satan’s defeat, will occur.

Gregory A. Boyd, God At War, pp. 218f (1997.

Discovering desire within you that nothing in this world can satisfy is a good thing. Refusing to ask this life to give you what you can’t stop wanting, but life can never provide, makes sense.

But when Nietzsche tells us to make the best of this world because there is no other, Jesus takes sharp exception. Followers of Jesus believe that the inexpressible longing for beauty, awe, meaning, and love that cannot be found in this world is itself at least suggestive evidence that another world exists, and this inexplicable longing offers both reason and opportunity to look for that world.

Christians believe that the other world is not a comforting hope born of cowardly wish fulfillment. Nor is it merely a world “out there,” a better place without thorns and thistles that will one day be our home.

The other world that followers of Jesus are confidently wanting is a community, a world of interdependent relating, where individuals connect without losing their individuality, where they discover their personhood in relating, where the joy of eternal connecting is theirs.

This other world is God’s country. The center of that world is the Trinity, three distinct Persons who live together in full, unchallenged equality, glad submission to each other, joyful intimacy with each other, and mutual deference in the pursuit of always agreed-upon objectives.

By its very nature, this happy community is effusively welcoming, always outgoing, perfectly other-centered, defined by the energy of passionate, sacrificial love. This love is the eternal movement of God. C.S. Lewis put it this way:

All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that “God is love”. But they seem not to notice that the words “God is Love” have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before this world was made, He was not love. [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

Larry Crabb, “A Trinitarian Understanding of Sin,” Conversations, p. 7, Vol. 3.2, Fall 2005

I therefore encourage that church to recover its voice in speaking about palpable supernaturalism. We should discard our preoccupation with “making life better through Christianity” and move all the trappings of that preoccupation-counseling centers on every corner, recovery groups in every church, self-help books on every nightstand-to the periphery of Christian culture. The center must be filled with the God of unshared glory, the transcendent God who, among other things, makes us alive with authentic supernaturalism, a supernaturalism that reveals itself in changed hearts, that belies in angelic protection not from pain but from whatever gets in the way of our serving God’s purposes, that sharpens our vision to see beyond the temporal to the unseen eternal.

The modern church would do well to study Elisha’s prayer that his servant be empowered to see the army of angels that could easily handle the hostile forces of mere men. Perhaps that prayer should become paradigmatic in shaping our response to a spiritually aroused culture: “Lord people need to see spiritual reality. Some are eager to see it. Give them more than they bargained for. Show them whatever it takes to deepen their appetite until they can be satisfied with nothing less than Christ.

Larry Crab. “Searchable Riches,” Marc Hill Review, p. 25, May 1995.

Jesus said that conversion means a conversion to receptivity: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3 KJV). The child is open, receptive, eager, responsive. Two Indian children were offered a mango by a Catholic priest as our bus stopped. One girl became self-conscious and wouldn’t take it. The younger child, with no self-consciousness, came up with a smile and took it. She entered the kingdom of fruit by receptivity. When we become self-conscious, the kingdom of God is closed to us. When we look at Him and take what He offers, the kingdom of God and its powers belong to us.

Conversion is conversion to receptivity. Prayer is receptivity. Its attitude is this: “Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears” (I Sam. 3:9). Many think of prayer as “Listen, Lord, for they servant speaks.” This attitude is like that of the man who sees the President, with ten minutes for an interview. The man talks glibly for nine minutes and then says: “Mr. President, if you have anything to say to me, please say it.” We do that with God. Our first attitude should be to listen, then request.

E Stanley Jones, Christian Maturity, p. 322 (1957).

Notes, Thoughts, Prayers:

VOLUNTEER ASIGNMENTS

Church Cleaning Schedule

July 28 & Aug 4 Mike & Lynne Zeman

Aug 11 & 18 Hugo Ramos

Aug 25 & Sept 1 Sandy Green Geri Owen