Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” Luke 22:31-32 This is the beginning of a story that most of us have heard about, especially the ending when the rooster crowed and Peter denied Jesus three times. I would like to take some time to encourage you and say, Jesus is praying for you as you read this article. He might not be praying what we want him to be praying. We may want him to pray...
Greetings and God’s peace to you all from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Several years ago now a survey was taken about, “Why don’t people get to know their neighbors anymore (in the United States)? It was stated then, that a third of the population knew their neighbor’s names and interacted with them socially at least once a week. The decline in interaction amongst people being neighborly could have resulted in several of these possibilities; urbanization, technology, busy lifestyles, safety concerns, communi...
A favorite pastime of my wife and I is to go thrift shopping and bargain hunting. Whether we are on vacation, or in the city running errands, we try to stop. Why? We enjoy the hunt; we enjoy the anticipation; we enjoy the thrill of walking away with a “treasure” someone else didn’t want! People have left thrift stores with famous works of art, valuable card collections, or even just a missing piece to the dinnerware or golf bag. They’ve left stores with a cartful of items they got 90% off of. Wherever they shop, the goal is...
On behalf of the OCMA I want to thank the entire community of Odessa for all your generous help, donations, prayers and participation throughout the 2019 year. As many of you well know, we are a collection of the churches in Odessa serving to assist the community in emergency situations. Our foremost areas of assistance are the Food Bank (open the third Thursday of each month) and utility assistance. We also host multiple events like Vacation Bible School, sing-alongs, a...
December is the month in which we celebrate not only the birth of the long awaited messiah, but also the foundational fact of Christianity that the second person of the Trinity became fully human while in no way ceasing to be the eternal Son of God. We sing “ Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” and who is this Lord, the babe in a manger? The Son of God come down to us in human form. Jesus, being born a man does not result in his becoming two persons possessing two identities and wills in one body, but one person with two...
Mark, Chapter 14, tells us of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane just before his betrayal by Judas into the hands of the crowd bent on killing him. He had gone, “a stone’s throw away” to pray to the Father, leaving the disciples to watch and pray. When he returns and finds them sleeping, He says “could you not watch one hour?” This quote reminds me of how easy it is to let the desire for recreation, or sleep, intrude on our Sunday worship, especially in the summer. That hour or two in worship can look like a huge hole in o...
By Rev. Jon Hayashi Heritage Church Pray...with Thanksgiving In a sermon at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, Gary Wilburn said: In 1636, amid the darkness of the Thirty Years' War, a German pastor, Martin Rinkart, is said to have buried five thousand of his parishioners in one year, an average of fifteen a day. His parish was ravaged by war, death, and economic disaster. In the heart of that darkness, with the cries of fear outside his window, he sat down and...
