Thank you once again to all of you who are praying for me. We continue our study of Nehemiah in our Monday night Bible study related that is connected with this website. We've reached the halfway point where the walls are built, but now it is time for the people to be taught the Law to remember who God called them to be--to reteach things that were forgotten to those who were away for a long time, to call those who had been living in rebellion in a foreign land back into a right relationship with God, and to teach the children from that time the things of God--Ezra the priest is going to be the one that takes a lead role in this during the second half of the book of Nehemiah.
In the Wednesday night Bible study I'm helping to co-hose with a group of men I'm friends with, we are studying the first eleven chapters of Genesis and how our understanding of these chapters are foundational to our understanding of God, Man, Sin, and the Gospel. We are also trying to address some specific questions that we know that skeptics and Atheists typically ask that many Christians have never learned to answer and to talk about why it is so important to hold these chapters of Genesis as being inerrant, authoritative, true, and historical--doing otherwise undermines all the rest of Scripture, the very words of Jesus (making Him either ignorant of the facts or a liar, as He cites these passages as true and accurate and for the people of His day to learn from), and undermine the very heart of the gospel. There is a reason that the world and the devil wish to erode the foundation that these chapters lay for us. At church, we continue to study the book of Romans. The legal case has been made that all are guilty and condemned by their own works, whether the Jew who was under the Law, or the Gentile who were a Law unto themselves when they obeyed the Law not having it, for their consciences still bore witness when they were acting in a way consistent with the character of God or in opposition to it, and all men are "without excuse" knowing by the general revelation of Scripture that God exists and His invisible attributes are made abundantly clear through through this general revelation. However, man has chosen to be willfully ignorant, trying to deny God His proper place, imagining that they can play God and choose good and evil for themselves (see Genesis 3). We therefore are in a place with a lot of bad news, if all are guilty, then how will any be saved, or will they? We'll be talking about this over the next few weeks as Paul will clearly lay out the "good news" that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Visit our website at https://hcfellowship.com/ for more information on how to attend our services in-person or how to watch our services online through YouTube. In Sunday School we've finished our series on "What Is the Gospel?" by Greg Gilbert and we are starting a series of lessons from Capital Hill Baptist Church in conjunction with the book The Gospel by Ray Ortlund. The "big question" we're trying to answer now is how the gospel is to be lived out as the local church and how it can only be fully lived out in the context of a local community of believers both inside and outside the four walls of what we call our local church, but mostly outside as we live life together. The commandments of the Old and New Testaments are meant to be obeyed as a part of faith community and cannot be interpreted in any other context. Other Sunday school classes include a class on Behold Your God, a DVD series focusing on the attributes of God, especially His holiness, and how a proper view of God is the foundation for having a proper view of man, nature, sin, and the gospel (and the Word of God where we learn all these things). The other option for adults is the 2021-2024 iteration of The Gospel Project, which spends a year studying the Old Testament, a year studying the Gospels, and a year studying the Epistles. This series is theologically heavy and shows how the entire Bible is a consistent story that God is telling from beginning to end about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Sunday school options are available for children as well. More information can be found at the link to the church website above. Sunday school is only available in an in-person format at this time, but there are many, many other churches, including some in your area, I'm sure, teaching through similar curricula. You can find IX Marks churches near you at https://www.9marks.org/church-search/ and you can find out more about The Gospel Project at https://gospelproject.lifeway.com/. My vocational ministry of being a mathematics tutor by day is going well. I'm making connections with some students there that I hope to be able to share the gospel with. How I do my work and how I interact with coworkers, students, teachers, and administrators is all an integral part of my testimony. What if my words and my actions didn't match? Which would you believe? You would believe what I did, and not what I said, because our "fruit" tells people what is at the "root" of our lives. This is the same for all of us no matter whether we have vocational ministry or are in full-time ministry or our ministry is to our families as we cultivate a gospel culture in our homes and communities. Pray for me as I continue to form connections with people online. Some are in need of hearing the true gospel as they have believed a false gospel. Little has changed on that front other than it's been harder to talk to people in these online communities since nearly everyone is back to work in-person now (they were working form home before during COVID protocols which is one of the reasons they wanted to talk and were in a place where they were willing to talk about sin, death, heaven and hell because God used the virus to draw their attention to these things). All that said, I am rejoicing with so many others that we are returning to some sense of "normal." Please continue to pray for our church as we seek wisdom in pursue options to buy land a build a building as well as seeking a full-time pastor. Please pray for our interim pastor and his family as well as all of our deacons, elders and those serving on the committee for future building opportunities and the pastoral search committee. We're also prayerfully considering who should be nominated to the position of deacon and elder for our next round of elections. This is not something our church takes lightly as we evaluate each potential candidate according to the standards given in Scripture, and we pray for God to raise up men in our church who would want to lead through service and live their lives in a way that will show and tell the gospel in all that they do. Please also pray for our missionaries serving all around the world--some in some dangerous places, for our sister church in Belarus, and for the local church plant that some of our members are helping with here in Richmond, VA (River City Church, https://rivercityrichmond.org/). If you have specific questions about any aspect of the ministry mentioned above or in previous newsletters, please contact me through Discord or Facebook. I look forward to answering your questions as you seek to pray for me and those I minister to. In Christ, Daniel Westfall
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Ministry UpdatesFor those wanting updates on what I'm doing with the ministry, Hopefully these updates will be somewhat regular though maybe not frequent in nature. Archives
May 2024
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