From A Cottage in the Foothills …

Posted on 2015/05/04 by Shawn Thomas

It’s been a busy few weeks since we hit the ground running at my new pastorate, Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in Morganton, North Carolina. People have asked how Cheryl and Michael especially like it here, and the answer is that they absolutely LOVE it!  It would be difficult to find a prettier place — nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just a few miles off of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And you will find no sweeter, more loving and accepting people anywhere  than those at PRBC.  From our perspective, this was indeed a match made in heaven!

Here’s a picture of some of our church family at  my first-ever Easter sunrise service:


And although I have been too busy to record all of our family “antics” the past couple of whirlwind months, we have had a great time settling in, and have had plenty to chuckle about:

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The Old, Old Story

Posted on 2015/05/04 by Shawn Thomas

Many contemporary Christians are looking for something “new” to share from their pulpits and classes — but they are making a huge mistake. In Romans 1:15 the Apostle Paul writes: “So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.” It should be instructive to us that many (and perhaps most) of the people to whom Paul was writing here were already Christians. But he was still going to “preach the gospel to you.” That reminds us that we never lose our need to hear the gospel. Continue reading →

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“The Discipline of Morning Prayer” (Psalm 5:3 Sermon) 

Posted on 2015/05/03 by Shawn Thomas

(Preached at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, 5-03-15

Not long ago, someone posted on Facebook that they wished they had a 30-hour day, so that they could get everything done. In the comments section, I posted a link to one of the best articles I have read, “The Tyranny of the Urgent” by Charles Hummel.  In it he writes that many people often wish for a 30-hour day. But Hummel asserts that if we had it, we would soon be filling it up with more of the things which are already squandering our present 24-hour day! His solution? Do what Jesus did, and get up early and spend time with His Heavenly Father in prayer to begin the day. Get HIS direction and priorities, and then follow that. But the whole plan hinges on spending time with God before you get into your day.

A couple of weeks ago we started a series of messages which have I entitled: “The Disciplines of Disciples.” Last Sunday we saw the importance of spending time every day in what I Peter 2:2 calls “the pure milk of the word” — just you, your Bible, and the Holy Spirit of God speaking to your heart each day, and you writing down what you learn in that time. I hope you’ve been exercising that discipline this week. Today we are going to look at another discipline, closely related to it, and that is the discipline of morning prayer. Psalm 5:3 will be our text:
“In the morning, O Lord, You will hear my voice. In the morning I will order my prayer to You, and eagerly watch.”

To give this a little context, David is in a difficult spot in this Psalm, reflected in :1, “Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my groaning.” He is “groaning” about something bad which is going on. We may not know exactly what it is, but we get hints of it later in the Psalm, where it says in :5, “the boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity”; and :6 “YHWH abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit”; :9, “there is nothing reliable in what they say”, etc. So evidently some wicked people had arisen who were proud, and who were slandering David. He responds by calling out to God in prayer.  Notice the special commitment of his prayer in :3, and what it teaches us about the discipline of morning prayer:

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Strength From The Almighty

Posted on 2015/05/01 by Shawn Thomas

“The LORD will give strength to His people.” (Psalm 29:11)

The last verse of Psalm 29 is a very encouraging one — but it is even more so when you consider what the Psalm had taught earlier.
Psalm 29 begins with :1 exhorting God’s people to “ascribe to YHWH glory and strength.” Then :3-10 describe how powerful the voice of the Lord is: it “breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon” (:5); it “shakes the wilderness” (:8), and makes a well-known local mountain peak (Sirion) skip like a young animal! (:6)  Verse 10 reminds us that God sits on the throne of the universe, and always will. Continue reading →

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The Model Prayer: Kingdom Praying (Matthew 6:10 message)

Posted on 2015/04/30 by Shawn Thomas

(Preached at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Wed. 4-29-15)

Yesterday, a well-known pastor wrote on his Twitter account something about all of the troubles our world is facing right now: the killings by ISIS, the earthquake in Nepal, the riots in Baltimore, and the Supreme Court hearings on same-sex marriage, and he ended with something like, “Come, Lord Jesus” and then he quoted part of the verse from the Model Prayer, “Let Your Kingdom come.”  Well, I don’t think that’s a WRONG use of those words — we DO want Jesus to come back and set up His Kingdom on earth — but I also think that praying for His Kingdom means more than just that. Tonight we are going to look together at this second major category of prayer request that Jesus gave us in the Model Prayer: “Thy Kingdom Come.”  Continue reading →

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When Wisdom Remains Silent

Posted on 2015/04/30 by Shawn Thomas

Christianity is all about sharing truth — most of the time. But there are times when we should just keep our mouths closed.  Proverbs 23:9 indicates one of those times: “Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words.” Continue reading →

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Son of God and Man

Posted on 2015/04/29 by Shawn Thomas

Was Jesus Christ the Son of God, or man? The answer of traditional orthodox Christianity is: BOTH!  The witness of the scriptures affirms this truth. One of these scriptures is Romans 1:3-4, “Who was born a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” Here we find scriptural affirmation for the the full humanity, as well as the full Deity of Jesus Christ: Continue reading →

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A Crucial Word For Parents

Posted on 2015/04/28 by Shawn Thomas

They don’t include any kind of “instruction manual” for raising your child when they send you home from the hospital with your baby. Thankfully, God’s word gives parents the instructions they need, in places like Proverbs 22:15, which reads: “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” This verse gives us several important lessons about child discipline: Continue reading →

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“The Discipline of the Word” (I Peter 2:1-3 sermon) 

Posted on 2015/04/27 by Shawn Thomas

(Preached 4-26-15, Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Morganton, NC)

For years before his death in 2013, Pat Summerall broadcast NFL games and other sporting events on television. Many of you would recognize his voice to this day. Some of you also know that Summerall’s life had been devastated by many years by alcohol. At one point, later in life, he checked into the Betty Ford clinic, but he said what really turned his life around was that while he was in there, he picked up a copy of the word of God, the Bible. He read it every day. And he said the more he read, the more wanted, and soon his thirst for alcohol was replaced by a thirst for the word of God. When he got out of the clinic, he was baptized as a follower of Jesus Christ, and his life was never the same. The word of God had changed his life.
This kind of hunger for the word is what is described in our passage for this morning, I Peter 2:1-3, where the Bible says:

“Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.”

We are continuing this morning the study, “The Disciplines of Disciples.” We saw last week that God commands us as followers of Jesus Christ to “discipline (ourselves) for the purpose of godliness.” Just as it takes discipline to practice for a good band performance, and discipline to exercise, it takes some discipline to live a successful Christian life. It is not going to just “happen”; you have to learn to exercise some disciplines.

This morning we are going to look at the first, and arguably the most important of those “Disciplines for Disciples” — the discipline of the word. Our focus is going to be on :2, where God commands us through Peter, “Long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.”

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Is There A Lion?

Posted on 2015/04/27 by Shawn Thomas

“The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion outside; I will be killed in the streets.'” (Proverbs 22:13)

The Book of Proverbs contains a number of character studies, which describe different kinds of people we encounter — or perhaps ourselves!  Among these are the fool, the strange woman, the righteous man, and, as in the present verse, the “sluggard.”  Continue reading →

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