March 5, 2026
I pray that something you heard during our Missions Festival has stuck with you, as it has with me. Perhaps it was Chris Vogel's encouragement from Matthew 9:38 to pray for workers to go into the mission field, because even in a twenty-minute radius from POPC the PCA is only gathering 1% of the population to worship the living and true God on a weekly basis. Perhaps it was Chandler Rowlen's reminder that God's kingdom grows through sowing the seed of the Word and going to bed. Perhaps it was Nate Bonham's powerful descriptions of the harvest's working, winnowing, and wedding. Maybe it was a missionary or ministry that captured your imagination.
Whatever it might have been, I encourage you to let the meditations of your heart impel you to action—whether in praying, engaging in more fervent evangelism here, participating in a local ministry in our area, taking a foreign mission trip, or financially supporting our missionaries and ministry partners through our missions budget. If the Lord is leading you in any of these ways, please let your shepherding elder know so that he can be praying with and for you. Reach out to Pastor Charles or me (and soon, Lord willing, Pastor Matheus!) for any help getting connected to a ministry. And don't forget to pick up a Missions Passport in the Sanctuary to aid you in your praying, and to fill out a missions commitment card to communicate your desire to give and/or to pray.
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Be praying for an upcoming transition in leadership in our Women's Ministry. When Tammie Haynes retires from the position of Associate Women's Ministry Director on April 30, the Session has approved hiring Anna Segrest to step into that role beginning on June 1. We're thankful for the Lord leading Anna to desire this work, and we look forward to her serving our women! She and Jennifer White, our Women's Ministry Director, along with several other POPC ladies, are in Atlanta this weekend at a Women's Ministry Leadership Conference. Please be in prayer for their time together in God's word!
Also, continue to pray for the visa process for Matheus Santos and his family. A petition for his R-1 visa has now been filed, and we should know more information about its status in the next couple of weeks. Pray that everything will be approved in a timely manner so that he, Debora, Melissa, and Daniel can move here in mid April as planned!
Finally, pray for me next week. During our Spring Break vacation, I will be speaking at the pre-conference of the Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary's Confessional Conference. My topic is a look at the life, difficulties, and usefulness of James Adair Lyon, a 19th century Mississippi Presbyterian who pastored in Columbus around the Civil War. Pray that my talk will be useful to the saints there!
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As our country engages in a new war in Iran, I've thought again of C. S. Lewis' wisdom in his WWII-era essay, "Learning in Wartime," found in his book The Weight of Glory. He writes of three enemies that war raises up against students in particular, but his words apply to all of us. The enemies are excitement/distraction, frustration, and fear.
Excitement - "the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. . ."
Frustration - "the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. . . [The Christian response] is that of leaving the future in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord." It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received."
Fear - "War threatens us with death and pain. . . But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or that—of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. . . Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. . .Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it was good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows."
May the Lord grant safety to our troops, and to our country in these coming weeks and months. And may He grant us peace of heart, and strength to resist the spiritual enemies that war brings with it.