WBC100!

WBC100!

Click Here to download this devotional.

Hi Everyone:  It’s been awhile since our last “Monday School Entry” and this one needs a bit of explanation.  Our church is celebrating its 100th anniversary beginning July 1st, 2023…  Pastor Philip Jorgensen and several others have done a tremendous job coordinating and writing a 100-year Century Celebration book chronicling the history of Wylie Baptist Church and the many testimonies of its leaders; vocational and lay, and the families, churchmen/churchwomen of our congregation over the years.  The book will be published in a “magazine” format and is as comprehensive as we could make it.  However, this Chronicle is not about facts, and dates, anecdotes, statistics, events, and happenings though much of that material is given.  No, the stories and testimonies of God’s faithfulness resides in His people.  The Bible is surrounded by the testimonies of people witnessing to God’s faithfulness in an unfaithful and fallen world that awaits its King’s return and the redemption of all things through the Gospel- and please note- we are just as much a part of its pages- that Great Cloud of Witnesses of Hebrews 12.  So, what really matters?   What is Wylie Baptist Church really all about and why?  Keep these questions at the front of your mind and heart as you read the history… As you bask in the Faithfulness of God…  and as you consider Philip’s Final Thoughts that I have enclosed here for a primer as well as my own thoughts called: Stones of Remembrance to complement his…  May God richly bless us as He builds our testimonies of His Faithfulness for His glory and the establishment of His Kingdom.  And as always, all the best to you!

Darrin.

Final Thoughts

By: Pastor Philip Jorgensen

This book will disintegrate. It will slowly disappear and be gone forever.

            That’s partly why I wanted to make it a magazine, so that ironically, it would be destroyed quicker.

I wanted this book to fade, because I want that slow fade to be a reminder when you see it happening, that our part in the story is slowly fading too.  Every time this book gets a tear, or it slouches over in the book shelf and gets bent, I want this to echo in your mind:

“A hundred years passes quickly.”

We hardly remember the names of the charter members of the church.  We barely have records of the first pastor.  What a momentous occasion!...  that we don’t remember anymore.  But you know what will stand?  God’s Work and God’s Word.  That is what this book is about:  God’s Word, God’s Work, and God’s Faithfulness.  Without any of those three, Wylie Baptist (or whatever we were called or will be called in the future) would cease to exist.  And one day, if the Lord tarries long enough, Wylie Baptist will probably cease to exist.  Maybe…

But God’s Work will not have been wasted.  These pages don’t hold much.  A few pictures, a pile of stories, some records…  but each and every one is trying its best to stand as a testament to the faithfulness of God in this place.  Whether on Mud Hill or Buffalo Gap Road or who knows where next, God has been faithful here in this particular place to these particular people.  God has been faithful.

As you see this book rip and shred and waste away, let it be a reminder that one day you may be gone, but the work that God does in your life will stand, and all things He has done through your life will stand.  In fact, if you follow Jesus, you yourself will be standing in the New Heaven and the New Earth, and what a celebration that will be! Not of a hundred years… but of eternity.

STONES OF REMEMBRANCE

By: Pastor Darrin Ray

            In 1st Peter 1:24, Peter quotes from Isaiah 40:6-8 to a NEW church in Rome just taking her fledgling steps into a fallen World with the Gospel Light of Christ’s Kingdom…

“All men are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall but the WORD of the LORD stands forever…”

Yet Peter doesn’t stop there…  He reminds the young church: “and this is the word that was preached to you.  Therefore, rid yourself of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy envy, and slander of every kind.  Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the LORD is good…”  Peter was addressing a young eager church filled with the promises of God’s Word and Commands in their hearts, yet the Apostle’s focus is not just on where they came from (out of the darkness into God’s glorious day- together) nor on where they are headed (spiritual maturity and “great works” done in Jesus’ name over several generations to God’s glory).  No, these are precious stones of remembrance- just like Wylie’s precious stones of remembrance carved with the testimonies of the previous pages of our history.

The preciousness of them is not lost on Peter nor are our stories of God’s faithfulness in the good times, and the bad, in the light and in the darkness lost on us. They are just as precious just as fresh to us as they were to that church in Rome 2000 years ago…  Peter writes to the church then and to us today: “As you come to Him, the Living Stone- rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to Him- you also like living stones are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  For in Scripture it says: ‘See I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.’”  Peter’s focus is not the Stones of Remembrance we erect but the Cornerstone of God’s everlasting Word in Jesus Christ our LORD, the promises and plans of the Father’s Heart through Him- that which really lasts, that which really matters most and matters most to us as God’s children and Christ’s church.  

From the Cornerstone of Christ and our relationship with Him individually, familial, and corporally springs the monuments and remembrances of this His Church but when all else fades and the monuments crumble in history’s pages and into the vagueness of human memory we would do well as a body of believers to think on the Apostle Paul’s Words… “but where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge it will pass away…  Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part then I shall know fully even as I am fully known.  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.” The ultimate testimony of God’s people, the testimony of Wylie Baptist Church is to simply point back to Him who deserves all the glory and who has hidden our souls forever in the cleft of His love… The love of God.  To God be the glory for eternity as His people say “Amen”.