Greetings!  Thanks for visiting our website,  take a tour of our website and learn more about us. We are a congregation of the Presbyterian Church USA, a denomination that has been in America for as long as we have been America and has historic roots in the churches formed out of the protestant reformation. We are a church that is centered on Jesus Christ, his teachings and his mission in the world.

Normally we meet on Sundays to worship as an entire community. We typically have two worship services, a contemporary service at 8:15 am and a traditional service at 11am, with Christian education classes for all ages starting at 9:50am. We also have ministries that serve the church membership, the community and the wider world in the name of Jesus Christ. We hope that if you are looking for a place to explore the Christian faith, to grow deeper in your Christian discipleship and serve others in the name of Christ, you will come to get to know us better and join in the journey of following Christ as savior and Lord.

In Christ,

Craig Sanders

Pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church

Like Paul, you and I are slaves of Christ. It’s hard for us to hear this language in the way it was once intended, given the shameful history of slavery in the United States. Nevertheless, we mustn’t ignore the fact that we are not servants hired by an employer, but slaves who belong to a master. He purchased us, not with money, but with his own blood. Thus we belong to one who has given everything for us, who loves us and wants the very best for us. Our slavery is not bondage so much as “a better freedom,” to use Michael Card’s apt phrase.

As we look ahead to the end of Summer and the beginning of a new school year, perhaps we should pause to ask ourselves who will be our master through this coming fall and next year. Will we be slaves to reputation? To money? To security? To work? To family? To alcohol? Or will we live as slaves of Christ, serving him in all things, and discovering what it means to live in the freedom of his grace? I hope as you pause and contemplate this Question and the following ones you will begin each day in the “better freedom” of their Lordship of Jesus Christ.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: Who is your master in life, really? Or, perhaps it would be better to say, who are your masters? Have you experienced the “better freedom” that comes with being a slave of Christ? How might you live differently this year if you were to acknowledge Jesus as your sole master?

I hope that as you ponder this ‘Better Freedom” you can pray these words with me,
“Lord Jesus Christ, my Master, I’m reminded by Paul that I am not just your servant, but your slave. You purchased me with your own blood, offering your life for mine. So I belong to you because of this gracious gift. I must confess there is something in me that resists seeing myself as your slave. I want to run my own life, to be the master. Thus it’s hard for me to submit to you, even though I know you want the very best for me. Forgive me, Lord, when I become the master of my own life. Forgive me for being afraid to submit my life to you. As I begin this new year, may I do so as your slave. May I offer myself fully to you each day, living with you as my master. In so doing, may I discover the “better freedom” that you offer to me.
To you be all the glory, my Master! Amen.

See you Sunday!,
Pastor Craig Sanders

In 1937, German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer published a book called Nachfolge. When this book was translated into English in 1948, it had a longer title, one that revealed the book’s central message: The Cost of Discipleship. Though God’s grace is offered to us freely in Christ, when we decide to follow him, there is for us the cost of putting aside our old life (the old man) and putting on our new life in Christ. According to Bonhoeffer, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time — death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call” (Simon & Schuster, 1959, pp. 89-90).
Luke 14 consistently emphasizes the cost of discipleship. If we’re going to follow Jesus, if we’re going to be citizens of the kingdom of God, then we are to humble ourselves (14:11), “hate” our family (14:26), and carry our cross (14:27). To make matters even more uncomfortable, Jesus says, “So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own” (14:33). As Bonhoeffer recognizes, the first disciples had to do this literally in the sense that they left home, work, and family in order to follow Jesus. While they hung on to a few possessions, like their clothing, the original disciples paid a high price to follow Jesus.
Throughout the centuries, Christians have wrestled with how Luke 14:33 is to be interpreted and obeyed by those who are not called to follow Jesus literally. Should we sell everything we own or give it all away? Is this what Jesus wants from us? Given the broader teachings and actions of Jesus, it does not seem that he requires literal abandonment of all possessions. Once again, we see that Jesus is speaking hyperbolically in Luke 14:33. But, in a sense, when we decide to follow Jesus, we do give up everything to him: our lives, our ambitions, our relationships, our talents, and our “stuff.” We recognize that God is the true owner of all that we consider to be ours, and we commit it all to him and his purposes.
Practically speaking, this means we will make tangible sacrifices in our lives, sometimes very costly ones. We will give a considerable amount of “our money” to God’s work in the world. Similarly, we will give a considerable amount of “our time” to the mission of the church, even as we seek to devote every moment to living missionally (in Jesus name) in our part of the world. As we do, we will discover the freedom and joy that comes from dying to ourselves and living to Christ.  Through God’s grace our salvation is free. We don’t earn it. We don’t have to try. Yet, as we receive that salvation, we recognize that our lives will change, that there will be a cost in our discipleship. It’s not the cost of earning God’s love, which has already been given to us. But it is the cost of putting aside our old self so that we might be fully devoted to God.  Our response to our gracious Lord is to offer ourselves to God. We must ask God to help us to give up those things to which we cling. We need God’s help to renounce our sin and turn from it and to help us to let go of the possessions and securities that keep us from following God with abandon.
Lord, may we be more and more your disciples each day, by your grace and for your glory.
In your name I pray. Amen.
Pastor Craig

“Ask,” said Jesus.

“Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left when you come into your glory.” When you are crowned King, made Messiah, as we know you will surely be, let us sit on your Cabinet, sharing in your glory.

Their request must have discouraged Jesus. Here were those who had witnessed his servant leadership, who had shared in his trials, still thinking about power and glory.

“You don’t know what you are asking,” replied Jesus, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” He was of course talking about his imminent death.

“We can!” they answered. The folly of Jesus’ dearest friends is almost boundless.

Then Jesus responds, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant.” Surely he spoke with irony. In the end, when he was lifted up high on a cross his disciples were nowhere in sight. On his right and his left were two common criminals.

Hearing about the attempt at one-ups-manship by James and John, the other disciples are indignant. Jesus gives them a lesson in leadership, Jesus style, telling them that they were behaving no better than a bunch of pagans, which must have deeply stung these Jews.

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant; whoever wants to be first must be slave of all,” he told them. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus died on a cross, not to appease the anger and blood lust of God the Father but rather because of the anger and blood lust that the Father’s love received from a humanity who wanted nothing so much as to be gods unto ourselves. The cross which the world erected to silence another uppity Jew became, in the hands of God, the means whereby God loved us to the full extent.

Everything about Jesus is cruciform. The cross is not just an unfortunate event on a Friday afternoon at the garbage dump outside Jerusalem; it’s the way the world welcomed Jesus from day one. Herod tried to kill him when he was yet a wee one in swaddling.[ii] From his very first sermon at Nazareth the world was attempting to summon up the courage to render its final verdict upon Jesus’ loving embrace, “Crucify him!”

Gethsemane and Calvary bring to a head just about everything said about Jesus. It was not just that Jesus was born in peasant’s home, had compassion on many hurting people, told some unforgettable stories, and taught noble ideals. Rather the significant thing is that Jesus willingly accepted the destiny toward which his actions drove him, willingly enduring the world’s response to the salvation he offered. Arrested as enemy of Caesar, tortured to death as a criminal, Jesus was more than just one more victim of government injustice. He is not just an example that sometimes good can come from bad. Rather, as Paul puts it, on the cross Jesus was Victor: Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross.”[iii] And he did it for Love: the cross is not simply what God demands of Jesus for our sin but also what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us. This is all validated by God’s raising this crucified victim from the dead, not dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor just affirming that Jesus had at last paid the divine price for our dishonoring God, but also showing forth to the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.

What’s amazing is that the providence of God took this cross, this horrible sign of Roman cruelty and the world’s rejection and wove even that into God’s good purposes for humanity. Very early on, the church preached, “Jesus died for our sins.”[iv] That which the world saw as sign of Jesus’ miserable failure, of the government’s need to use violence in order to keep law and order, of the fickleness of the crowd, or the sinister betrayal of his followers, Jesus’ people came to see as a sign of God finally doing something about the problem of us. “At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly,” said Paul.[v] “Jesus Christ, you crucified, but God raised from the dead,” preached Peter.[vi] Paul says that when he preached among the Corinthians, “I preached nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”[vii] God’s love is infinitely persuasive, patient, and willing to suffer in order to love us. God acts just like Jesus.

And so must we. Jesus promised rewards, but not always the rewards we wanted. When, after the rich man turned away from discipleship and Peter exclaimed, “We’ve left everything and followed you!” Jesus replied that he would receive everything back ten times more – houses, family, friends — and suffering too. Suffering too? That’s a “reward”?[viii]

As Jesus trudged up Calvary, exhausted from his brutal torture, a man in the crowd of onlookers, Simon of Cyrene, was enlisted to carry Jesus’ cross.[ix] Simon is beloved by many of us; in a sense many of us have been picked out of the crowd of curious onlookers and made cross bearers. Every Christian helps Jesus carry the cross for Jesus chooses not to carry the cross by himself. Jesus never promised his people perpetual good health, freedom from all aches and pains, or bypassing of death. Jesus got little of the “good life,” nor did he promise us that we, by following him, would do so. Rather, he assured us that he would never allow anything worse to happen to us than happened to him. He promised that the world would also nail us to some “cross,” if we followed him. As Martin Luther King said it, paraphrasing Jesus, “the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.” In our Jesus-induced times of pain, he gives even us innate cowards the courage to take up our cross and follow.

The writings of Paul show that from a very early date (probably as early as the first blow that was struck against the head of Jesus by the soldiers) the followers of Jesus began to make sense out of the senseless death of Jesus. There was complete agreement that, on the cross, God was taking the horrible act that we perpetrated and utilizing that to do something about the problems between us and God. Paul had an unlimited, extravagant, sweeping view of Christ’s cruciform rescue operation for weak, ungodly, sinners:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us…we have been justified by his blood,…saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.[x]

Weak, sinful, ungodly people are the recipients of the determined love of God that is made manifest on the cross, work that we could not do for ourselves.

Pastor Craig Sanders

references:

[i] we ask. Mark 10:35-45.
[ii] in swaddling. Matthew 2.
[iii] on the cross.” Colossians 2:15.
[iv] our sins. 1 Corinthians 15:3.
[v] the ungodly. Romans 5:6.
[vi] preached Peter. Acts 2:36 ff.
[vii] him crucified. 1 Corinthians 1:23.
[viii] insert
[ix] cross of Jesus. Luke 23:26-32.
[x] saved by his life. Romans 5:6-10.