Introducing Steadfast Love

Sumter FCG will follow the quarantine suggestions of the State of South Carolina. So, we won’t be having services at the building for at least this Sunday and next Sunday (March 29, 2020), possibly longer.

As I receive updates from Pastor Ron, I will post updates on the Pray the Way Facebook page and try to keep you as informed as I am.

In the meantime, the church is going to an online service model in an attempt to maintain fellowship within the body of Christ.

So, we will be utilizing Zoom conferencing for Adult Sunday School sessions. For those of you with children, some of the elementary age teachers are looking into doing the same, I believe, and they should be sending out information. For any who have teenage youth, Phillip has also indicated he will be using Zoom to enable Youth Sunday School and should be sending out info to your youth about that. I happen to have both Elementary age boys and a teenage daughter, so I will post any information I get about their classes on Pray the Way as it develops as well.

We have decided to start the online classes at 9:00 am instead of 9:30 am in order to allow some buffer time for people to get logged in and work out any kinks that may occur.

I am hosting the classes on the free version of Zoom and, like any free version, it has limitations. Specifically, we are limited to 40-minute sessions. So this session will be forced to end at 9:40 am. The workaround to this limitation is that I have set up a second session, with the same ID and password, that begins at 9:41 am. So, when we hit our time-limit, we will just log out of this session, wait for one minute until 9:41 am, and then re-login with the same meeting ID and password and we will have a fresh 40 minutes. This gives us until 10:20 am for our class sessions and plenty of time to be ready to stream Brother Ron’s Sunday service on YouTube.

Sunday Service will be live-streamed on the Sumter FCG YouTube channel at 10:30am. If you are not subscribed to the church’s channel, you can still just go to YouTube and search for “Sumter FCG” and the top result will be the channel. Once you go into the channel, if it is close to 10:30 am, you will see the live-stream video active.

I haven’t heard an official word yet, but it appears Brother Ron will be hosting Wednesday night Bible study via Facebook Live from the church’s Facebook page on Wednesday at 7:00 pm. You can find the Facebook page by searching Facebook for “Sumter First Church of God”.

For our class, when I post next week’s class Event, I will post the link to the Zoom meeting, the meeting ID, Password, and a link to the Handout in the description of the event as well.

In addition, regardless of online classes or not, I am going to start utilizing the Facebook page to regularly post, throughout the week, brief insights into verses we will be touching on during the coming Sunday’s class so that, those of you who wish to, can do a bit of pre-study preparation.

As many of you know, we were originally set to talk about the Holy Trinity next and then continue on through some more of The Gospel According to John. However, God has interrupted our regularly scheduled program! I am thankful, that you all have a heart for God’s message and are willing to let Him interrupt our plans when He wishes. Thus, we are going to instead spend some time understanding God’s love.

God’s Steadfast Love Endures Forever

Psalm 136:1–26 (ESV)

His Steadfast Love Endures Forever

136 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

2 Give thanks to the God of gods,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

3 Give thanks to the Lord of lords,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

4 to him who alone does great wonders,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

5 to him who by understanding made the heavens,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

6 to him who spread out the earth above the waters,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

7 to him who made the great lights,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

8 the sun to rule over the day,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

9 the moon and stars to rule over the night,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

10 to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

11 and brought Israel out from among them,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

12 with a strong hand and an outstretched arm,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

13 to him who divided the Red Sea in two,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

14 and made Israel pass through the midst of it,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

15 but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

16 to him who led his people through the wilderness,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

17 to him who struck down great kings,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

18 and killed mighty kings,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

19 Sihon, king of the Amorites,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

20 and Og, king of Bashan,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

21 and gave their land as a heritage,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

22 a heritage to Israel his servant,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

23 It is he who remembered us in our low estate,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

24 and rescued us from our foes,

for his steadfast love endures forever;

25 he who gives food to all flesh,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

26 Give thanks to the God of heaven,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

Psalm 136:1–26 ESV

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who alone does great wonders, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who by understanding made the heavens, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who spread out the earth above the waters, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who made the great lights, for his steadfast love endures forever; the sun to rule over the day, for his steadfast love endures forever; the moon and stars to rule over the night, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt, for his steadfast love endures forever; and brought Israel out from among them, for his steadfast love endures forever; with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who divided the Red Sea in two, for his steadfast love endures forever; and made Israel pass through the midst of it, for his steadfast love endures forever; but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who led his people through the wilderness, for his steadfast love endures forever; to him who struck down great kings, for his steadfast love endures forever; and killed mighty kings, for his steadfast love endures forever; Sihon, king of the Amorites, for his steadfast love endures forever; and Og, king of Bashan, for his steadfast love endures forever; and gave their land as a heritage, for his steadfast love endures forever; a heritage to Israel his servant, for his steadfast love endures forever. It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures forever; and rescued us from our foes, for his steadfast love endures forever; he who gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever.

God is Love

In light of the recent global COVID-19 crisis, many of you are facing doubters of God’s goodness or perhaps even having doubts yourself.

Equally challenging, many Christians are being bombarded with others trying to prove or disprove to them that this crisis is an act of God.

We are having to think through various questions about how God is a loving God in the face of widespread panic and finger-pointing.

Acts 8:1-8

I would like you to consider Acts 8:1-8:

Acts 8:1–8 ESV

And Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. So there was much joy in that city.

The Apostles were having some success in Jerusalem, it was growing and gaining a good reputation among the people. You get the sense that they were somewhat satisfied with their progress.

But then, these Christians faced severe hardship and persecution, yet God had a plan for greater things. Because of His love, He was not satisfied with growth in Jerusalem alone, His plan was for the spreading of the church to ALL nations (Matthew 28:18-20); and so there came about where the church was forced to spread, I believe this was through God’s divine providence.

The point is that, in order to see how God’s love operates in every facet of our lives, including troubled times, we must shift our perspective from a human one to a divine one. I’m not suggesting that we can obtain a full understanding of God’s ways, but that rather, we will be able to obtain a confidence to have peace in God’s goodness and love in the midst of difficult situations that raise tough questions.

In this 12-part series, God is Love, we will attempt to grapple with some of those tough questions about God’s love, but not until we’ve laid a solid foundation of understanding what Scripture means when it says, “God is love” in 1 John 4:8.

1 John 4:8

We will take note that several of the worst corruptions of Christian truth are based on the view that God can be understood solely in terms of His love.

Many who hold such a perspective refuse to acknowledge God’s wrath against sin because they wish to hold to a belief that He cannot be both loving and angry with sinners.

Others, I believe intend to dissociate God from the tragedies and terrors of human life by reasoning that, if God is truly loving, He can’t possibly be all-powerful; otherwise, He would put a stop to all suffering.

On the other hand, many Christians over-correct in their fear of overemphasizing or misrepresenting God’s love that they simply don’t speak about it at all.

The world today, after all, is “in love” with sin, self-love, self-exaltation, and is completely dull to the wrath of God against sin. Many take a stance that it is counter-productive to speak about the love of God in the midst of such an ungodly society.

Those who reason like this tend to see every bad thing that happens as a direct judgment from the hand of a severe God.

However, both these extremes paint a distorted picture of God and only serve to further confuse the issue of understanding God’s love.

Our aim in this series is going to be to avoid both of these errors by staying within the bounds of Scripture’s truth about God’s love.

As we examine what the Bible says about the subject, we will begin to see how wonderfully God’s love can be presented to sinners and how perfectly it fits with His hatred of sin; and many things that are difficult to understand will be made easier.

However, in our pursuit of this understanding, each us of must be willing to shed a lot of popular, sentimental notions about God’s love.

Many of our favorite assumptions about God will need to be corrected. It is essential that God’s love and His holiness are carefully understood in light of His wrath against sin.

Likewise, We must correct our perspective and see love from the divine perspective before we can begin to grasp the magnitude of God’s great love for us.

As always, I believe the remedy to error is an open-hearted embracing of all that Scripture has to say. As such, it is my design in this series to try to highlight a broad, balanced view of what Scripture has to say about God’s love.

My prayer for us as we go through this series is the same as Paul’s for the Ephesians in Ephesians 3:17-19:

Ephesians 3:17-19

Ephesians 3:17–19 ESV

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.