Our mid-week service this week is moved to Thursday, Dec. 10th when pastor Todd Nibert will be preaching for us. Next Sunday, Dec. 13th we will have a church dinner to celebrate Alexis Baldwin’s 10th birthday.
THE PREACHER’S GOAL
My goal in preaching is to impress ONE THING upon your heart. That one thing is the Lord Jesus Christ. The one thing every sinner needs is Christ. We need salvation. Christ is our salvation (II Tim. 2:10). We need life. Christ is our life (Col. 3:4). We need wisdom. Christ is our wisdom. We need righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. We need sanctification. Christ is our sanctification. We need redemption. Christ is our redemption (I Cor. 1:30). We need forgiveness. Forgiveness of sin is in Christ (Eph. 1:7). May God be pleased to impress upon our hearts our great need of Christ so that our only desire is to “win Christ,
and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Phil. 3:8-9).
I am so thankful for the men I have known who faithfully stood to preach the gospel for many years. These men are giants in the faith to me. So when I heard that our Lord had called home pastor Maurice Montgomery, I wanted to write an article to honor his memory and thank God for Maurice and men like him. But our friend, pastor David Eddmenson, who sat under Maurice’s ministry and eventually succeeded him as pastor, said it far better than I ever could have. The article below is one of the best compliments any servant of God could receive.
How Beautiful His Feet Were To Me
Romans 10:15
How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!
Maurice Montgomery, my pastor, brother and friend often joked about the “big toe” that he lost in a lawnmower accident years ago. I found it so endearing that he could laugh about something that must have been so painful and would have been devastating to most. This week as he lay in that hospital bed, struggling for every breath, his foot was uncovered and I couldn’t help but to smile as I thought about some of his comical comments concerning that “absent toe.”
Friends, I tell you as sincerely as I know how, Maurice Montgomery had the most beautiful feet that I ever saw, for they were the feet that for years faithfully brought me “the gospel of peace and the glad tidings of good things!”
Pastor David Eddmenson
TWO KINDS OF FAITH
The faith of the natural man, the unregenerate man, may be reasonable, logical, and very influential in his life (Matthew 7:21-23), but the faith of the Christian is a gift of God, a miracle, and always produces a radical change in those who possess it (II Corinthians 5:14-17). A man cannot possibly possess saving faith whose thinking and attitude has not radically changed concerning God and righteousness, man and sin, and Christ and grace. The difference between the two kinds of faith is the difference between shadows and substance, words and reality: natural faith believes but saving faith knows! Natural faith merely acknowledges what saving faith experiences!
Pastor Maurice Montgomery