News for the week of March 7 - 13, 2024

Message from the Pastor - Ken Radant

I hope you’re having a great week! It’s fun to have some sunshine today, though apparently, we’re heading back into rain for a little while. Such is spring in North Vancouver, I guess.

On the subject of sunshine, this is a “good news – bad news” week. You are all aware, I’m sure, that this is the weekend we shift into daylight savings time. That’s good news for all sunshine lovers because it means we’ll get an extra hour of daylight every afternoon/evening starting on Sunday. Yay!  (I’m a sunshine lover, and I look forward to getting outside more as a result.) 

But it’s also bad news because it’s the weekend we lose an hour of sleep between Saturday and Sunday. That, of course, is especially bad news for all preachers, since it means all the folks in churches are likely to be 1 hour sleepier.  

It is what it is, and we’ll live through it.  But you can take this as a friendly encouragement to remember to change your clocks, to try to get to bed early on Saturday, and to give yourself time for that extra coffee or tea in the morning before church.  And for the few who forget the time change, it’s no problem—we’ll see you in time for a closing song and coffee together in the foyer!

This Sunday we’re going to continue our 4-week series leading up to Easter. Last week we began at the beginning, in Genesis 3, thinking about the very first sacrifice for covering Adam and Eve’s sin. This Sunday we’ll jump a little further through Genesis to chapter 22, where we hear the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. It’s not an easy passage. It’s a painful chapter, and it makes me uncomfortable every time I read it. But then, there’s no easy way to talk about sin, substitution, and ultimately about the death of Christ. These are hard things, and we need to grit our teeth and work our way through Good Friday on the way to the joys of Easter morning.

Now, of course, we can look back on Good Friday and remember it as a day to celebrate, a demonstration of how deep the Father’s love is for us. We see the cross through the lens of the resurrection, and we sing praise. Still, it’s a good exercise for us to walk with God’s people down the long OT path that led up to that first Good Friday, learning how sin is a problem that requires covering, substitution, and some other things besides. (More on those in the weeks to come.)

May the exercise be a source of renewed humility, of conviction where needed, and of heightened wonder at God’s amazing grace!