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Bible Challenge #2

Becky Pliego on September 8, 2017

Dear sisters,

Ready to start the Bible Reading Challenge? I am! What a great opportunity to be doing this together so that we can encourage one another to persevere in the Word.

We are Christian women, we believe in the Word of God, we believe in Jesus—the Word of God made flesh—and yet many times we fail to be women of the Word. We barely open our Bibles and soon we find that our faith fails. But God, in His kindness, leads us to Himself again and again. And again we open the Word and find that the Word of Life is there, ready for us to eat, to savour, to comfort us, and even to admonish us. So, let’s do that. No matter if you have been a faithful reader of the Bible for many years, or if you have neglected it for the longest time, come! Come take the Book and read it, He will never let you go away hungry.

This first week we will start our challenge by reading Psalm 119. Why this particular Psalm? Because here we find one of the greatest goals of our time in the Word: To love the Word. Yes, we say we love Jesus, but do we love His Word? As you read this Psalm meditate on it and ask God to give you more love for His Word, ask him to incline your heart to His commandments, ask Him to bless you with an obedient heart.

We will be also reading Genesis 1-11. But be careful how you read. Slow down. Many of these stories will most likely be very familiar to you (the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel), but I want to encourage you to read them as if it were the first time you were reading them. Let the stories become real in your imagination, let them capture you. These are powerful stories indeed!

The Gospel of Matthew is the first book we will be reading from the New Testament. This week, we will be reading chapters 1-7. Again, read these stories as if you had never heard of them. Be amazed at what you are reading… I mean, how can you not? You will be reading about God becoming a baby to dwell among us to save us! You will read about how the Wise Men followed a star to find the Christ. Yes. Think about that. Pretty amazing, right? And the two verses that tell us about Herod killing children trying to kill Jesus of Nazareth. Very sobering to think about this. We’ll then read about John the Baptist and his ministry; we will hear him call: “Repent and believe!” Then, we will encounter Jesus and the Tempter in the wilderness, and right after that Jesus on the Mount delivering a sermon that is life-changing.

Friends, may this be our prayer this week as we open the Word, “Open my eyes, Lord, that I may see wondrous things out of your law.” Psalm 119:18

This next Monday, September 11 at 10:00AM Pacific Time, we will start our Webinars! I am so ready! The Webinar will be hosted at https://www.christkirk.com/biblechallenge/ and the recording will be available at the same page immediately after the live webinar.

Grace upon grace,

Becky Pliego and the Team of Christ Church Ladies Fellowship

Bible Reading Challenge (for Dudes)

Ben Zornes on September 7, 2017

Ladies Fellowship has launched a Bible Reading Challenge geared specifically at building fellowship and encouragement for women to read God’s Word. Now, this obviously does not mean that at Christ Church we don’t care about men reading the Bible. As so many ladies have eagerly joined the Ladies Fellowship Bible Reading Challenge, some dudes have begun clamoring, “Hey, we’d like to join in the Bible reading fun, too!” So, for the guys hoping to piggyback on this reading challenge, here’s a version of the plan without all the floral arrangements.

Happy reading, gents!

READING PLAN FOR GUYS

BOOKMARKS FOR GUYS

LADIES BIBLE READING CHALLENGE

Bible Challenge #1

Becky Pliego on September 1, 2017

Dear sisters,

We are now in September and eager to start our Bible reading plan on the 13th. We are loving seeing all the excitement that is building up. We are grateful to see all the women from all over the world joining us. God is at work and He is already doing an amazing thing among us: He is drawing us to Himself and we draws His people to Himself good things happen.

We will be sending out weekly emails to encourage you to persevere and remind you of the weekly readings and Webinars that we will have. Our desire is to see every single woman who does the first reading on September 13 to finish strong on May 31. We are in this together!

More information about how to login to watch the Webinars live (or the recordings) will be sent out soon, meanwhile we want to encourage you to download and print your Bible Reading Plan (or get the App on your phone) and invite other friends to join us. Maybe you can print extra plans and bring them to your friends at church, your neighbours, other moms at the homeschool co-op or those that you see every week at the kids soccer and ballet practice. This is good thing and like Rachel Jankovic has said, “What can go wrong when you have a plan to encourage more women to be in the Word?”

As you prepare yourself to start this challenge, I want to exhort you to consider that this challenge we are starting on September 13 is a life-giving, faith-builder one. It is a challenge about living against the grain and exposing the lies of the devil.

Are you too exhausted to read? The Word will revive you! (Psalm 19)

Are you too busy and with many cares? Come, read and hear Jesus inviting you to leave all your daily worries and anxieties at His feet. (Mt.11: 25-30)

Is your to-do list too long? Come and read the good news: When you seek the Kingdom of God first, all things will be added unto you! (Mt. 6:25-34)

Are you in the midst of a situation that seems hopeless? Read the Word, all of it!, Paul tells us that through the encouragement of the Scriptures we can have hope (Rom.15:4).

His Word is sure and His promises are all yes and amen in Jesus Christ! I love the way David said it, “IF your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.” (PS.119:92).

Are you struggling with sin in your life? Come to the Word and learn how by the Word and the power of the Spirit working in us we can mortify it (Rom.8:13 and Eph.6:17)

Open the Word and let it bring life to you! Let it be sweet to you. Let it be your joy. Let it be the grounds for your hope!

Today is a good day to take The Book and open and read it.

Under His sun and by His grace,

Becky and the Team of Christ Church Ladies Fellowship.

Grace & Peace: Revelation 68

Douglas Wilson on August 15, 2017

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:11)

“And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts” (Rev. 9:20–21).

We sometimes like to imagine that the damned in Hell would gladly repent, if only given the ghost of a chance. But yet here we have a harbinger of Hell, a hell-on-earth, and though you might think that would be an inducement to repentance, it turns out that repentance is a gift of the sovereign God. There really is a mystery to lawlessness, rebellion that makes no sense whatever.

The survivors of the previous plagues should have taken the fierce reality of those plagues into account—but did not. Notice that it says that they refused to repent of the works of their own hands. They crafted their own sinfulness; it was handmade idolatry. This is another place in the New Testament where idolatry and devil worship go together. “But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils” (1 Cor. 10:20). Sacrificing to idols is sacrificing to demons, and sacrificing to demons is having koinonia-fellowship with demons.

The material that is used to fashion the idols can vary—gold, silver, brass, stone, or wood—but the immaterial substance being invoked is always the same, which is devilish and demonic. John tells us that those these idols are made from many different materials, but it does not matter. None of them are alive. They cannot see, hear, or walk. And because those who make them have become like unto them (Ps. 115:4-8), it follows that these idolaters cannot see, hear, or walk either.

The sinners will not let the sin go, and the sins will not let the sinners go.In what sense? They cannot see righteousness, they cannot hear righteous commands, and they cannot walk in righteousness. There is the idol in the material world, gold, silver, and so on. Then there is the spiritual idol behind the matter, which is the demon. And there is also the invisible idol in the idolaters’ hearts—the things they would have to surrender were they to repent. And these sins include murder, sorcery, fornication, and thievery. These heart sins are their “precious,” and they will not let them go. The sinners will not let the sin go, and the sins will not let the sinners go.

Remember that the bloodguilt of murder would include the bloodguilt of abortion, a sin common in the first century as it is in ours. The word for sorcery is pharmakia, from which we get the word pharmacy. The occultism here is related to drug use, and when drug use becomes rampant, occultism is never far behind. Fornication would include the same kind of corrupt desires that we celebrate on the Internet. And they governed their lives with thievery in their hearts, just as we do. And Scripture teaches that having your world collapse around you will not by itself bring repentance. In order for that to happen, the gift of God must be given (Acts 5:31; 2 Tim. 2:25).

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Grace & Peace: Revelation 67

Douglas Wilson on August 8, 2017

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:11)

“And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt” (Rev. 9:16–19).

As mentioned earlier, the invading army consisted of “myriads of myriads,” symbolizing a staggering number. As happened earlier with the 144,000, John first heard the number and then he turned and saw. This is not simply a marching army of incredible size, but is a cavalry of mounted warriors. If taken literally, the number would be 200 million.

The cavalrymen were decked out colorfully—breastplates of fiery red, sapphire blue, and sulfur yellow. The horses were like nothing on earth, horses with lion heads. They breathed out fire, and smoke, and sulfur, a breath that had the power to kill a third part of all the men. The destructive breath of the horses appears to match the colors of their riders—fire red, blue smoke, and sulfur yellow. The horses had lion heads that breathed calamity, and their tails were headed serpents, with a venomous bite.

This is all connected to the sixth trumpet, the middle of the last three trumpets. We are not yet at the horrifying end of the Battle of Jerusalem. We are still in the build up to that climax.

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