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Pastor's Point - October 2024

Dear Church Family,

This month I want to remind us of a wonderful opportunity that is coming up, I want to celebrate what God is doing in the life of our church, and I want to encourage you to praise God for all that He is doing.

First, we have a fantastic opportunity for outreach to our friends, families, and neighbors in October! On October 5th we are going to gather at our North Campus for our Fall fellowship event. This is a great “bridge” event to where you can invite people you know that are not connected to a church so they can experience a great night of fall fun with your church family. I have met so many people through the years at events like this and had opportunity to let them know that we would love for them to visit us on a Sunday morning to worship together. We are going to have hayrides, food, bounce houses, and fire pits for a great fall fellowship. Make sure to come and bring others with you as we enjoy this outdoor event on our North Campus! It is going to be a great night together!!

Second, I want to praise the Lord for what He has been doing in the life of our church over the last several months. God has blessed us with multiple baptisms over the last several Sunday mornings! Sometimes churches have an “emphasis” or “push” to try to baptize more people, but that is not why we are baptizing more people. It is simply God working in the lives of people, and it is the culmination of Gospel work that has been done by our individual families as well as in the ministries of our church. God has just been bringing in the harvest and it is so exciting to see!

Recently we also offered one of our “Discover Oakhill” nights for people to find out more what it means to be a member of Oakhill. We had twenty one people sign up to hear more about what it means to be a member of Oakhill. Once again this is God bringing people to our church to consider membership here at Oakhill. And, during these last few months, our worship attendance has been strong with some of our Sundays being over 600 in attendance! Like I said this is not us trying to generate some high attendance Sunday, it is simply God moving on the hearts of people to come and worship Him here at Oakhill. Of course, with all of this comes concerns about parking and space issues. But thankfully these are in the process of getting addressed as we will soon be breaking ground down at North Campus to continue to develop North Campus so we can alleviate our parking and space issues. Soon you will be hearing more exciting details about the new work beginning at North Campus.

Finally, I want to encourage us to make sure that we are praising our great God for all of this!! He is the one doing these things. He does not have to, but He is choosing to move in these ways, and we should be humbled and thankful for it and make sure to offer Him praise in the middle of it all!

He is so good to us! Remember, as God moves, we move!

I love you and I love being your pastor!

Pastor's Point - September 2024

Dear Church Family,

As you receive this article, we will have just begun a new series of messages based on the topic of prayer. I have entitled this series of messages, “Let’s Pray”. This title is an invitation for us to pray. In that invitation is an encouragement for each one of us to pray. You see prayer is not something that just the pastor does. All of God’s people are encouraged to pray to Him

Andrew Murray once said… “Faith in a prayer-hearing God will make a prayer-loving Christian.” That quote made an impact on me. You see I have never met a Christian who did not believe in the importance of prayer. But I have met a lot of Christians who struggle with the daily practice of prayer. Maybe it is the lack of faith that God hears our prayers. Now most would never say that, but why else would we see such a lack of a love to pray to God? If we truly have faith that God hears our prayers it should encourage us to love to pray because we would be convinced that God was going to be working in our prayer concerns. But we live in such an anti-supernatural world where we are encouraged to function in our own intellect. We are encouraged to find the answer ourselves instead of crying out to God asking Him to guide us and doing things that only He can do. My prayer is that we will grow in our faith that God does hear our prayers. What a privilege it is for us to pray to the one true and living God of this universe

We will spend five weeks considering prayer. Four of those weeks will be in the psalms considering one psalm each week from the prayer life of King David. David is a good example to look at when it comes to prayer because we find in his prayers, themes of his failures, successes, vulnerabilities, and need. We will see him offering to God,  Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Those four words represent the acronym of A.C.T.S. which can be used to help bring some order and focus to our prayer lives.

As we think about this acronym it will remind us that we have so much to converse with God about. But as we have this conversation, we must remember the importance of listening to God as well. I love what Andrew Murray says about this kind of communication with God. He states… “Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue; God’s voice is its most essential part. Listening to God’s voice is the secret of the assurance that he will listen to mine.”

There is so much for us to pray to God about. We need to extol His greatness, we need to confess our sin, we need to thank Him for all He is doing and what He has done, and we need to lift others and ourselves before Him and ask Him to do things that only He can do!!

He is such a good God to us! Let’s pray in faith with the assurance that He hears our prayer and that He will listen to our voice.

I love you and I love being your pastor!