Hello Ren family and friends!
What a beautiful service last week featuring about a dozen Ren people who each made home videos as a way to minister to us. I was so refreshed by it. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the many amazing people who are part of the Ren church family. If you missed the online service you can still access it on the homepage of our website. We leave the services up for a week before removing them but even after that they live on the Ren Church YouTube page.
I just finished recording my message for this Sunday on Ephesians 2:4-9 on the grace of God. This message was born of much prayer, tears and anguish. I’m not being dramatic—though I admit I can be overly dramatic at times. But I believe this message will help you rise above the present troubles all around you.
Between Sundays are you finding ways to grow spiritually? It takes work and creativity to feed yourself spiritually when attending church is not an option. I have mentioned Gospel Coalition several times and highly recommend going to their website and subscribing to the daily email articles they send. They are so good! Another great resource for learning the Bible is called the Bible Project. The videos are so well done and Tim Mackie is an excellent teacher (used to be a pastor at Door of Hope in Portland which is a great church). Another great resource is Spurgeon.org. Oh my gosh this alone is a wealth of encouragement with thousands of sermons from the great “Prince of Preachers” Charles Spurgeon. Or how about Tim Keller sermons and blog writings. So good! If you are up for reading a book I recommend CS Lewis. Always. Philip Yancey is also a great author. If you want some theological nourishment check out RC Sproul. Thousands of his teachings are online. Another guy I love—if you don’t mind the formal British old school style of preaching—is Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Or Leonard Ravenhill if you can handle a 90 minute prophetic lashing. And what about John Piper and Desiring God. There are thousands of articles and sermons. I could keep going. There’s also a lot of unbiblical shallow stuff out there so stick with what is solid. Oh I almost forgot to mention Francis Chan! If Francis doesn’t stir you then nothing will.
For those of you who have more time than you know what to do with—go deep! Spend some time listening to messages, take notes, read some books. Beware of feeding on “junk food”. Too much Netflix and social media and shallow net surfing and pop culture articles, and so on, will dull you spiritually. I’m not saying to abstain from all of that legalistically but you have to make sure you feed your mind much more with nourishing spiritual food. It’s kind of like real food. It’s not terrible to have a piece of chocolate or cake or chips but the junk should make up maybe 5% of our diet right? We should mostly eat fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and other things that have nutritional value.
For those of you who are crazy busy and cannot even imagine sitting down and reading a book, well, you probably aren’t even reading this newsletter. So, maybe some of you who are less busy can call up your busy friends and tell them this: be creative. Listen to a sermon while you do the dishes. Go to bed early, before you are actually tired, and pray under the covers. Put on loud worship music in the morning during breakfast. Take advantage of the 20 minutes you spend on the toilet and read a Spurgeon sermon. Get creative in weaving spiritual practices into the busyness of your day. Redeem the time! Steal 5 minutes here and 8 minutes there. Yes, it’s a fight, you definitely have to fight for it. But God will bless your hunger and thirst and reward your efforts!
Okay that’s all for now, hope some of this helps. Love and miss you all.
Scott