I like mysteries. Not the kind you read. I just don’t have time to read mysteries. But I watch them. Everything — from the British mysteries to Monk to Psyche — I like a mystery.

I remember one mystery where the villain killed the victim by placing poison on the spoon the victim would eat with. The toxin on the spoon entered the food and soon brought death to the victim.

The spoon looked good. The meal looked great. The end was death.

That’s a little of what Jesus was speaking about in our passage today. Once more he is addressing the reality that while we may look good on the outside, it’s the inside that matters. And the inside can be toxic.

This podcast speaks about how we can clean the inside of our lives.

Becoming a Woman of Simplicity

The Becoming a Woman of Simplicity will begin on Wednesday, September 8 at 6:00 pm. Be sure to get your book from Laurel and come with chapter one completed. Thanks!

Missions Festival

This year’s Missions Festival will be September 26-October 3. Our missionaries will be Cynthia Cook of Mail, West Africa and Steve Westergren of Cambodia. If you can help by hosting Steve for the seven days of the Festival, please speak to Barry Neff or Pastor Steve. Thanks!

Board of Ministries

The Board of Ministries will be meeting on September 8 at 5:45 pm in Room 103.

Alliance Outdoors

Alliance Outdoors will meet September 8 at 8:10 pm in Room 103. If you can help with the BBQ CookOff, please speak to Dave Clark.

Church Luncheon

Please join us for a church luncheon on September 12 after the morning service. Bring a dish to pass and a salad or dessert. There will be no evening service when we have a luncheon in the afternoon.

Disciplemaking Ministries Meeting

The Disciplemaking Ministries Committee will be meeting on September 12 at 1 pm in the Library.

Outreach Committee

The Outreach Committee will be meeting September 19 at 7:10 pm in Room 103. Thanks!

BBQ CookOff

On September 25, Alliance Outdoors is planning an outdoor BBQ CookOff as an outreach to benefit the needy of our community. See Dave Clark.

Helpers for Selah Concert

If you can help The Family Life Network with the Selah concert in Clearfield on September 18, please contact debbiefero@fln.org at the FLN. Volunteers must be on site at 5 p.m. and will be given free admission.

Road Rally

The Outreach Committee invites you to The Curwensville Alliance Road Rally on October 9, 2010 from 2:45 pm until ???. Register on the bulletin board in the lobby by October 3. You will need the following: A car, gasoline, a Bible, a pen, a friend, a tooth-pick, money for dinner (approx $10-25 per person), and a sense of humor. Questions, see Eric Rowles. This is an OUTREACH — Bring a friend!

Upcoming Mahaffey Camp Ministries

Information on some other ministries of Mahaffey Camp are available here:

• Men’s Link Retreat, September 24-25, 2010
• Tozer Golf Tournament, September 25, 2010
  
• Mahaffey Camp Prayer Retreat, September 26-28, 2010
• Wielding the Sword, May 2011 — Wield (v.) to hold and use a weapon or tool. Pastor Ed Jeliff will be assembling a group of young men and women to train them to become skilled at defending the validity of the Word and effectively dispensing the Word into the lives of people. This abbreviated camp will be for young adults, ages 18-25, tentatively meeting from a Thursday evening through a Sunday noon in May 2011 at Mahaffey Camp and Conference Center
  

Pastor’s Prayer Blog

Because we believe prayer is a primary way that God desires to accomplish His purpose in and through individuals and the Church as a body, Pastor Steve has created a Prayer Blog where he places a journal of things we can be praying about. Please take a moment to look at it and stop by from time to time or subscribe to the blog. You can find it here. Thank you for praying!

Attention Ministry Leaders

Gale Peters has organized the data from the Ministry Survey. If you would like a copy, please speak to her or to Pastor Steve. Thank you.

Food Pantry

Please remember to bring in canned goods, pasta, etc for the local food bank. Boxes are in the foyer to help with those in need in the community. Thanks!

Music Ministry

If you would like to present special music, please give Margaret McCulley your e-mail address so she can send you a schedule via the Internet.

Deacons’ Ministry

If you would like to give to the Deacons’ fund please mark your offering “Deacons Fund”.

Announcements

Announcements for the bulletin should be given to Pastor Steve or Karen by Thursday. Thank you!

Activity Center Use Reminder

If you would like to schedule an event in the Activity Center please speak to Judy Kephart. She will make sure there are no schedule conflicts and mark it on the calendar.

Prayer Requests

If you would like to send and receive prayer requests to and from your church family via email, please place your email address on a Welcome Card and indicate you would like to be on the email prayer line. Questions? Please speak to Pastor Steve.

Hospitalized?

If you are going into the hospital, please inform Pastor Steve so he can be praying for you and possibly visit with you. Thank you!

Baby Dedication

If you are interested in dedicating your baby or child please speak to Pastor Steve.

Children’s Worship

If you can help with Children’s Worship please sign up on the

Children’s Ministries’ bulletin board in the lobby.

Greeters Needed

Please pick a Sunday and sign up on the bulletin board in the lobby if you can share your smile and a warm handshake as a greeter Sunday mornings. Thank you for your ministry at Curwensville Alliance.

curwensvillealliance.org

From time to time, pictures of church activities are featured on our web site. If you are concerned about having your photo online, please speak to Pastor Steve and he will try to make sure yours is not included.

Have You Missed Church?

You can listen to recent sermons online at curwensvillealliance.org. If you would like a CD or a cassette tape of a sermon please speak to Russ.

Also, if you heard a sermon that might bless someone else, send them the address of the church website so they can listen.

Thanks to Scott Brubaker for the great time we had on the Motorcycle ride.

[View with PicLens]

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If you like Twists and Turns, this ride through the Quehanna Wilds was one of the best. Thanks to everyone for the fellowship shared and thanks to GOD for the beauty of The Pennsylvania Wilds!

The story is told of a soldier in the army of Alexander the Great, who was brought before the great world-conqueror for court martial. The soldier had been found guilty of cowardice, an offense Alexander the Great particularly disdained.  When the emperor had listened to the charges and the evidence, he turned to the soldier facing condemnation and said: “What is your name?”

“Alexander!” was the reply.

Again the emperor questioned, “What is your name?”

And the second time the soldier answered, “Alexander!”

With a cry of rage, the emperor roared, “I say, what is your name?”

And when the soldier answered for the third time, “Alexander!” the great general angrily replied, “You say your name is Alexander?  You are found guilty of cowardice and you must now pay your penalty.  Either change your conduct or change your name, for no man can bear the name Alexander, my name, and do the thing you have done.”

Likewise, as ones made in the image of God, as ones who bear the name, “Christian,” we have a responsibility to reflect God’s likeness well.

This podcast speaks of the creation of man in the image of God.

On the farm where I grew up, my Dad had made a cistern at the top of the hill that he kept full of spring water to supply all the other houses in the community. That cistern needed to be kept full.

To check its depth, you would have had to lift a large cement lid from the top and then you could see it. Except for one thing. My Dad had inserted a small hole in one of those cement lids with a flip cap over it. So you could open that lid and place a rod down into the cistern and measure the level easily. Dad made measuring the water level easy. He wrapped a rubber band around the rod and used that rubber band to mark the depth of the water. Then next time, he could compare the water level with the previous week.

You would think that would be a foolproof method of keeping track of the water level, but it was flawed. It was flawed because it didn’t take into account a little boy who couldn’t keep his hands off of things. That would have been his youngest son. Every time I went by that rod, I would run my hand across it and roll the rubber-band up or down. His measuring technique produced error.

In our passage today, Jesus is saying that our measuring stick for our spiritual depth is flawed. Some of us feel like the depth is just right, but the technique we use is giving us corrupted data.

This podcast works to help us understand the errors of our measuring devices and gives us good counsel on how to increase our spiritual depth.

Today I want to talk to you about distractions. Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a distraction in your life. Something to reduce the monotony of things. Other times distractions can be a problem. When I was 16 years old I traveled with the Pennsylvania Youth Chorus. We saw some pretty neat places. We visited Dinkelsbühl, Germany. Have you ever seen Dinkelsbühl? It’s a beautiful village in Germany, still surrounded by medieval walls and towers. We sang in Innsbruck, Austria. A place world-renowned for skiing. We drove through the Swiss Alps. The mountains were beautiful. We went to Italian cities like Venice, Rome, and Florence. We even saw Michelangelo’s David.

You know what I took pictures of? Motorcycles. Michael Angelo’s David? Nah. The Roman Coliseum? Meh. St. Peter’s Basilica? Thanks, but no thanks. I wanted to see Motorcycles.

You’re probably saying, “How could any human being be so dense as to miss all the history, beauty, and art of that region of the world?” And if you feel that way, good. That’s how God feels about you and me when we allow distractions to cause us to miss what’s really important.

This sermon addresses the issue of distractions in our spiritual life.

So here’s the Back to School Sermon. You may feel this is a bit early, but usually, when I wait until later, many of the students are already gone. In the past some of them have listened online or on their iPods. That’s great. But I want to speak to the students before their brains shut down for the first day of school.

This sermon is about Five Lies I Heard in School. Lies that can be extremely damaging. Lies like these are not limited to the school setting. Even young Timothy was warned by the Apostle Paul, to guard against such things. The last two verses of the first letter Paul writes to him say this…

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge,  which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you. — 1 Timothy 6:20-21 (NIV)

So as Paul warned Timothy against wandering from the faith, I am warning students.

You can right click here and download the sermon or you can listen online. Or look us up on iTunes.

I was blessed to attend a church where legalism was not taught — more it was nearly absent.  Thank you, Pastor Henkel. But later, I found myself almost being sucked into legalism. Thank God I dodged the bullet – spiritually speaking.

Standing in the back of a new church with some of the elders during Sunday School, I heard them say things like this. “I don’t like the way the pastor’s wife plays the piano.” Another said, “Yes – she plays the hymns too fast – hymns were meant to be sung reverently.” Do you get that? They are not upset with the choice of music. They are saying the tempo of the hymns is bad.

The conversation continued. “I don’t know that we should be eating in the church basement now that we are holding worship services here. Eating in the church building is a sin.” Hmm… that’s hard to defend biblically.

Finally, one of them said, “I am troubled about the teens. They went to the YMCA and were swimming together – boys with girls! I was taught that boys and girls should not swim together!”

These men talked like this with sober expressions on their faces and furrowed brows. They were condemning things that were happening in their church. Not unbiblical things. They were just things that they didn’t agree with. In a sense, they were being legalistic. The Bible doesn’t say anything about the tempo of the music. The Bible does not forbid eating in the church building. There was no church building in the Bible – at least none like this. The Bible doesn’t say anything about boys and girls swimming together. To claim that it does is just wrong.

I said a moment ago that I dodged a bullet because I can remember thinking, “This is what it means to be godly. This is what it means to be an elder. Standing outside the sanctuary critiquing the people inside. This is what it means to be a leader.” Wow how terrible it would have been if I had been pierced by that lie.

This podcast addresses legalism straight on — defining it, explaining why it’s dangerous, and offering counsel on how to avoid it.

Download it by right-clicking here or listen online.

Laurel’s nephews are pedaling across the United States to raise money and awareness of the need for fresh drinking water in developing countries. I have been following them on their journey via Twitter and their blog. In recent days they have made a discovery: While the prevailing winds in their faces as they crossed the plains were difficult, the climb up the mountains was even harder. Let me read to you a page from their blog this past week:

This is Andy.

Yesterday we set up off the Big Horn Mountains. We climbed, and climbed, and climbed. Thirty miles up. At five miles an hour we climbed just about all day.

The views though made it all worth it. I have never seen such lush forests. A sea of pines. I had also never seen snow in July. By the time we got up to 10,000 feet we would have been cold had we not been working so hard.

Then we went down. Maybe the most euphoric hour and a half of my life 30 miles down through a pristine lake, ten sleep canyon, and lots and lots of peaks.

In so few words I was more pleased with life than I had been in some time.

What a day.

We made camp in a pastor’s yard and slept quite well.

What I liked about that was the ups and downs he explains in just a few short words. Riding across the United States on a bicycle has difficulties – thirty mile stretches of pedaling uphill. And riding across the United States on a bicycle has rewards – 30 mile stretches of coasting through lush mountain forests. Life is that way.

And your walk with Christ is that way too. There are times Jesus addresses difficult issues. And those issues are hard pedaling. But he addresses them because they need to be addressed. And as we grasp them and apply them, we experience reward. In these last chapters of Matthew, Jesus has been and will continue to force us to face the darkness at the heart of humankind. He speaks to the Pharisees – the people everyone loves to hate. As he speaks to them, he speaks to us. We’re going to take an overview of this passage and then, in the weeks ahead, look more specifically at the concepts Jesus addresses. The sermons ahead will be hard pedaling. But the final views and the ride beyond will make it worth it.

A dozen or so years ago a woman visited our church and said words like these: You’re not like my pastor where I use to live. He was a GOOD preacher. He gave us the dickens from the pulpit.

So I tuned into that churches web site and this is what I heard her old pastor saying with a tone of severity and authority: Now it’s time for the preaching of God’s word. There will be no moving. No one is going to the bathroom. The ushers have closed the doors. You will remain seated and you will listen to the word of the Lord. The feeling of the message was one of oppression — one that said, “If you so much as look at your watch, you’re not worthy to be here!”

If you find yourself in that kind of place, you are probably sitting under a spiritual abusive preacher.

Everyone is familiar with abuse. Physical abuse. Verbal abuse. Psychological abuse. In Jesus’ day there was a group of people who engaged in a different kind of abuse. It was an abuse of power. It might be thought of as spiritual abuse.  Spiritual abuse is the kind where a position of spiritual leadership is misused to influence of further the self-centered interests of the leader rather than to help the one or ones in the leader’s care.

This podcast takes Jesus’ words about such people and helps us to both avoid becoming abusers and avoid being influenced by them.