“Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you”(1 Pet. 5:7).

Cares are that which causes anxiety. What a host of cares we have! My sins, fear of the future, fear of that over which I have no control (which is everything!), unresolved conflict, the fear of how I will be provided for or the fear of being unable to provide… all my cares I am called upon to cast upon Him. If I do that, I no longer bare the burden of them. If I continue to bear the burden, I have not cast them upon Him. Why am I to do this? We are given this one glorious reason…. “For He careth for you.” If He cares for me, I have no reason to be anxious about anything. “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

Pastor Todd Nibert

The Believer’s Hope

Somewhere between proud presumption and dead despair is the believer’s hope. Somewhere between fleshly familiarity with deity and slavish fear there is the believer’s hope. Somewhere between modern, easy-believism and medieval fatalism there is the believer’s hope.

Someone once said, “God has hedged us about on one side with His promises of mercy lest we despair, and he has hedged us about on the other side with warnings of apostasy lest we presume.”

I have read in the Scriptures of those who laid down their lives for Him, but I have also read of those who, “walked no more with Him.” In thirty-one years of preaching I have seen some who continued in the faith until God called them home; but, I have seen others who have lost interest in the gospel and ended up with a life of nothing but tradition, doctrine, and an old experience.

Jeremiah sounds a clear note on the believer’s hope in Lamentations 3:22-24. “It is the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith the soul, therefore will I HOPE IN HIM.”

The Lord is my inheritance, my joy and my delight, not just His pardon but His PRESENCE; not just His blessings but His BEING; not just His heavenly place but His HOLY PERSON.

Pastor Henry T. Mahan (bulletin 1985)

Is Your God Able?

I ask you the same question that king Darius asked Daniel, “Is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions” (Daniel 6:20)? Is the God you worship able to do as He pleases, when He pleases, with whom He pleases? The true and living God is. (Psalm 115:3, Daniel 4:35). Is the God you worship able to save sinners by Himself without any input from the sinner whatsoever? The true and living God is. (Hebrews 7:25, Hebrews 10:14). Is your God able to give a dead sinner spiritual life in the new birth? The true and living God is. (Ephesians 2:1, James 1:18). Is the God you worship able to comfort your heart in the worst of trials? The true and living God is. (Hebrews 2:18) Is the God you worship able to keep you from falling away from Him and losing your salvation? The true and living God is (Jude 24).

Is your God able? He is if He is truly God. “And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified” (Acts 20:32). Pastor Frank Tate

Four things comfort the child of God in trials and afflictions:

1. We can trust the God who appoints them (1 Thessalonians 3:3).

2. We can trust that He knows our frame (Psalm 103:14).

3. We can trust that good will always be waiting at the end of the trial (Romans 8:28).

4. We can trust that one day soon He will; “Stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints” (1 Thessalonians 3:13).