Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church

Hi everybody! That loud whooshing sound you heard this week was summer passing like a freight train. Isn’t it funny—when you’re a kid, summer seems to be endless; when you’re middle aged, it goes by at supersonic speed. How come? I guess those 3 months of summer are a whole 10% of your life when you’re 8 years old; when you’re 55, that’s just 1% of your life. It’s a smaller piece and it goes by with a whoosh!

So…summer’s ending, kids are back in school and it feels like the warm weather suddenly arrived. Didn’t you feel like all summer the weather was going, ha ha, just kidding? Like it wasn’t really summer. I have a vegetable garden, and everything (tomatoes, zucchini, melons, beans)—they were all faked out by the cooler weather. Weird.

100 degrees today. But the hot weather is taking a nose-dive this weekend—it’s supposed to be in the high-70s. Which is perfect picnic weather! Let’s all rendezvous on Sunday afternoon at 2:00 at the beach at Negro Bar! 20 of our folks have signed up for our river baptisms.

At a Presbyterian church we only baptize you once—but we will re-enact anybody’s baptism. With as much water as you want. Some folks are experiencing a spiritual milestone in their lives, they’ve found a fresh wind of the Spirit or a new deeper commitment to the Lord—and they want to mark it by re-enacting their baptism. Three of our teenagers made commitments to Christ at summer camp up at Hume Lake—they’re going to baptized on Sunday. And some folks, God really spoke to their hearts when I preached last Sunday about “God designed you for impact, to make a splash, to cause ripples” and they want to respond to that message by making ripples this Sunday in the American River. Cool. And it will be cool! The river is maybe three degrees above freezing. Bring your swimsuit and a t-shirt. Let’s all show up and celebrate with these folks. You may even want to join them as a way of expressing your own renewed spiritual commitment.

(By the way, if you don’t want to shell out the $10 to park at Negro Bar, come by the church at 1:00pm. You can park for free in our front parking lot and then car pool together. We should be done by 3 or 3:30—and you can TiVo any preseason football game you had your heart set on seeing. (Not me—the Chargers play on Monday.)

Don’t forget—Sunday worship, we still have three worship options. Our Arise! service at 8:00 in the Chapel, and you’re out by 8:45. Our classic service at 9. And our rock-and-roll worship at 10:39.

The beginning of fall means our choir is back from their summer break! Welcome back, choir! They’re singing Here I Am, Lord this Sunday—as we continue with our series The Ripple Effect: Contagious Faith in a Contentious World. This series is designed to get us thinking about our circle of influence—who are the people God puts into our life on a regular basis and he expects us to have an impact on them for Christ. So… we’re going to learn how to tell our story—how to explain the gospel—how to talk to people about God in creative and engaging ways. Fair Oaks Pres is a mission church—but the mission field nowadays isn’t just on the other side of the world, it’s on the other side of our church driveway. And we’re the missionaries Jesus has commissioned to take his good news “out there.”

In the past year or so I’ve probably asked several dozen of our longtime church people to share how they came to faith in Christ. And many of them struggled to tell that story. Like, maybe they don’t tell that story very often, or maybe they never tell it. That’s not OK. Jesus said to everyone who is serious about being a disciple: “You shall be my witnesses.” (Acts 1:8) We’ve got to know how to tell our own story of faith. And over the next month or so we’re going to learn that. And everybody needs to get on board.

By the way, David Llewellyn is wrapping up his Sunday morning study of the book of Revelation. And Bob Quadro will be back in the teaching saddle. This year he’s going through the Gospel of John—and we’ve asked him to launch that series by preaching an introduction to John in our Sunday service on Sept 12. After that, if you’re not in a Sunday morning teaching class, consider joining Bob’s class—he teaches twice on Sunday (the hour before 9:00 worship and the hour during SML).

That’s all for now–God bless you guys! See you in church on Sunday!

—Pastor Kirk

Hi everyone! Pastor Kirk here.

These last two Sundays I preached on The Glory of God in Creation—focusing first on the divine engineering of the cosmos and then on the amazing design features found in living organisms—a bacteria’s flagellum, the information-storage capabilities of DNA, the complex biomechanisms that make cell reproduction possible. (You can download these messages from our website.)

Three verses summarize the “silent sermon” creation is preaching:

• “The whole earth is full of God’s glory!” (Isaiah 6:3)
• “How marvelous are your works, O God! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” (Ps 104:24)
• “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made-and my soul knows that very well.” (Ps 139:14)

I can’t remember hearing so many positive responses to a sermon—especially from men. Men love this kind of engineering and science stuff. They come to truth empirically. A woman said to me, “I appreciate how you treat us like we’re intelligent.” All that was reassuring. Many asked how they could study more on this subject. Let me suggest some resources:

• The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel. A journalist’s quest for the many evidences of intelligent design, an excellent layperson’s introduction, very accessible, chapters on physics, cosmology, astronomy, biochemistry, neuroscience (human consciousness).
• The hour-long lecture by Dr. Francis Collins at Harvard (the Veritas Forum) includes how he became a Christian. It’s a youtube video at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJAWuzno9Y
• The Language of God, Francis Collins. Director of the human genome project, and now the National Institute of Health, describes evidences for faith and his story of faith in this challenging book.
• Unlocking the Mystery of Life, produced by Focus on the Family, VHS version in our church library. This video features Philipp Johnson, the UC Berkeley law professor, argues against Darwinian evolution, and includes the segments on the bacteria flagellum and the animated “tour” of the cell.
• God of Wonders, a marvelous 85-minute exploration of the wonders of creation—the universe, the animal kingdom, water and electricity, DNA—great interviews with various believing scientists—produced by Eternal Productions and available in our church library.
• Rare Earth, Peter Ward/Donald Brownlee. A very comprehensive secular-science argument for planet Earth’s uniqueness.
• Genesis and the Big Bang, Gerald Schroeder. A thoughtful harmonization of modern astrophysics and Genesis 1.

I am often asked to tackle the creation vs. evolution debate. Three of the brightest minds in our church—a physician, an attorney, a research engineer—strenuously reject the theory of evolution as unbiblical and unscientific. Philipp Johnson, the UC Berkeley law school prof who wrote Darwin on Trial, challenging the logic and science of Darwinism, was a friend of mine when I lived in Berkeley. On the other hand, Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian who is convinced the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly convincing. And his credentials as a geneticist and biochemist are extremely impressive. John Barrow is another close friend; he’s the Cambridge cosmologist responsible for “the anthropic principle” (the theory that the universe is uniquely “rigged” for human life); John is a lifelong believer (and Bible teacher) who can demonstrate using mathematics and physics that the universe is 14 billion years old and that evolution is the divinely-superintended mechanism God used to produce the world with its present complexity. Barrow and Collins would be called theistic evolutionists: God created, God superintended, evolution was his principle mechanism. It’s very hard to find Christians who have studied this subject who do not argue passionately on one side or the other. I respect all of these people, appreciate that their intelligence in this field is greater than mine. Here’s what we must all agree on: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The real battle is against scientific naturalists who exclude God and insist that the universe is the result of impersonal, purely physical forces.

In Sunday Morning Live (our 10:39 worship), we invited folks to text comments and questions during the sermon time. What is something you experience in creation that reveals God’s glory? Many texted their answers, such as:

• Grand Canyon
• My three children laughing and playing.
• The power and vastness of the ocean.
• My cat’s purr!
• The variety of trees and flowers, their shapes and colors.
• The ability of the human body to heal itself.
• Pink clouds at sunset reminding me of God’s beauty and power.

And by sermon’s end we also got some great questions:

• How do I reconcile evolution with biblical faith?
• What purpose did dinosaurs play in earth’s creation?
• OK, you’ve convinced me that there is a Creator-God. What is the connection with Jesus?
• Why is there such resistance to teaching intelligent design in schools?

Great questions, huh? Tim collected these and emceed the Q&A time.

On the dinosaur question, we often evaluate creation as though we’re what it’s all about. We’re not, God is. He is intrigued and delighted by things that we wouldn’t have bothered creating—dinosaurs, sharks, spiders, hailstorms. Those are examples of God at play, I said. Afterwards, someone shared a smarter answer—we need the dinosaurs because they literally became the “fossil fuels” that are powering today’s engines and power plants. Brilliant.

On the connection between God the Creator and Jesus the Redeemer, I go to John 1:1-14. “In the beginning was the Logos.” Logos is the explanation for everything, how everything is related and fits together. Scripture says the whole cosmos was made by this Logos. And then at some point in history, “the Logos became a human being and lived right in the midst of us.” God the Creator becomes a human Savior to restore the world’s original meaning and purpose. That’s how Jesus is connected to creation and Creator. Whenever I am out hiking or exploring the outdoors, I can imagine Jesus hiking alongside me, enjoying his Father’s world with the same delight—a delight in “the earth is full of God’s glory” and a delight in what a wonderful home this world is.

This Sunday we begin a series called The Ripple Effect: Contagious Faith for a Contentious World. For nearly seven weeks we’re going to:

• Look at global Christianity (how Christendom has exploded in the two-thirds world and declined in Europe and North America),
• Discover how our own culture and community have become the new “mission field,” and
• Become equipped to plunge into our “contentious world” and express our faith in creative, culturally-sensitive ways that send out huge “ripples.”

Ways we shared the gospel a generation ago may not be effective today. What does work? How do we tell our story and the gospel story so that our nonChristian friends (do we even have any of those?) “catch faith.” Surprisingly, many veteran Christians feel panic-stricken and unprepared when it comes to talking about Christ. This series is going to change that.

That’s all for now. See you on Sunday!