Blog: July 2023

It’s been a while since I mentioned our Matthew Bible Memory challenge.  So here’s a reminder:  alongside the Matthew sermon series, we’re focusing on one verse per chapter—currently 18:3, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (All 28 memory verses are given on the 11-22-2022 blog post at goshenbaptist.org.) So, Jesus says it’s necessary for us to become like children if we are to enter God’s kingdom—that is, if we are to become subjects of King Jesus and live under his ...

Two weeks ago I wrote about the enormous 280-year-old Red Oak tree by our church office (7-7-2023 blog post).  In recent years it had shown signs of disease, and this past week it was taken down. Nothing like a cross section of the trunk to reveal the health of a tree—or, in this case, the severity of its sickness.  Evidently this majestic oak guardian of our grounds had been deteriorating for a long time: Over half of its diameter had rotted away (e.g., at a point where the trunk was 60 inches wide, a hollow core more than 30 inches across ...

Last Sunday I gave an overview of J. Gresham Machen’s 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism, in our adult Sunday School (and he means theological, not political, liberalism).  Machen says: “If a condition could be conceived in which all the preaching of the Church should be controlled by the liberalism which in many quarters has already become preponderant, then, we believe, Christianity would at last have perished from the earth and the gospel would have sounded forth for the last time” (p. 7). “Here is found the most fundamental ...

The largest tree on our property, a Red Oak in the driveway circle by the church office, is diseased and must come down. This massive tree has a trunk diameter of about 70 inches (at a point 5 feet above the ground).  Multiple sources indicate a growth factor of 4 for the Red Oak, so we do the math:  70 x 4 = 280:  the senior member of our office team is 280 years old. And so, this tree had super­vised our grounds for long ages before Goshen Baptist Church arrived here in the late 1960s.  In fact, it was already an octogenarian in 1827 ...