Blog: January 2022

Last Sunday we commissioned Pastor Pete Manni, Russ Nixon, and Paul Yeung to serve as Elders.  Here are the vows they made: **Do you reaffirm your faith in Jesus Christ as your personal Lord & Savior?  **Do you accept all Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and do you affirm the Goshen Baptist Church Statement of Faith as a fitting summary of Bible doctrine?  **Do you promise to serve in mutual submission alongside your fellow Elders?  **Do you promise to be zealous and faithful in promoting ...

One of the key themes of the Bible is God’s desire to live with the people He created. We see this first in God's creating the garden of Eden, placing Adam and Eve into this paradise, and then presumably coming down regularly to be with them. But when Adam and Eve rebelled against Creator God, one consequence of their sin was expulsion from the garden. No longer would God live with them as He had before. Generations later, God instructed His people to do something curious: build a tent. Why? This tent, the tabernacle, would not be a place ...

In recent weeks there have been a lot of year-in-review stories and reports:  we think back, take stock; we ask what’s happened, and where we stand today?  It’s good to reflect on the past. But when looking back on 2021, it’s easy to get swept up in the pandemic narrative and assume that Covid was the major world issue.  Yes, there were other key happen­ings, such as supply chain problems, inflation, political tensions, Afghanistan, Hurricane Ida, and ongoing polarization.  But Covid cast a large shadow over every­thing.  To be sure, there ...

The start of a new year is a great time for looking back—not with mere nostalgia, but to get our bearings for moving forward. The Bible is full of commands to “remember,” “don’t forget”:  remember God; do not forget God’s promises and warnings.  One classic example is Deuteronomy 8 where Moses challenges the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land to “remember”: “And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your ...

The Israelites had personally experienced God’s faithfulness as He directed them out of Egypt, fought for them as He parted the Red Sea, and then delivered them into the wilderness with the promise of a land of their own. What happened next is retold as a cautionary tale in both the Psalms and Book of Hebrews. The Israelites tasted freedom for the first time in 400 years, but their stomachs still rumbled. Maybe the Israelites had expected to go straight to Canaan. Instead, they were in a dry wilderness without water or food. They began to ...