What a week! For me, it’s one of the best weeks of the year. Long hours. Challenging relationships. 132 little sinners, the exact combination of which have never been in a room together before. Serving together with brothers and sisters in Christ from multiple local churches. Youth spreading their service and leadership wings. Adults growing in their giftedness and finding their groove for this annual outreach. The memory verses. The stories of kids working hard to memorize those verses. The skits that slowly unfold the gospel message of belief in Jesus alone for salvation. The Bible teaching that focuses kids’ hearts and minds on the Savior. And the songs. The earworm songs. All of that. That’s VBS. So exhausting. So rewarding. If you’ve never volunteered for VBS before, you should consider it.  There are a million little ways to help that only take little snippets of time. VBS shows us what we can do when the entire New Life family is pulling in the same direction! What might God have you do to help us reach out to our community and sister churches?

Before you know it, school will be starting and that means another year of Sunday School for kids and HigherED for adults! We are working on the line up of classes for HigherED, so if you have a topic or book or Bible book you’d like a group to study, let us know at info@newlifelamesa.org.

Are you willing to lead or host a LIFT Group starting this fall? This ministry has been such a great help to so many. All of our groups are continuing (to the best of my knowledge!), but we are always  open to adding more groups. Email me at info@newlifelamesa.org, if you have room in your schedule to lead a group or room at your house to host a group or BOTH!

In just over two months (September 26-28, Dr. Chad VanDixhoorn will be speaking for us at RefCon2025! Registration opens soon! Our theme this year is Reforming Discipleship. More details to come! For your edification and encouragement to attend RefCon, here is a link to a video of Dr. VanDixhoorn being interviewed by Kevin DeYoung (Moderator of PCA General Assembly for 2025 and our RefCon2027 speaker!) for “Life, Books, & Everything” podcast.

https://youtu.be/seelDqyKQlE?si=lcTIt2P3hcqL9VW1

Friends, it’s Friday, but Sunday is coming! I can’t wait to worship with you this Lord’s Day as I preach from Acts 17 on “Seeking God” in AM Worship and Pastoral Intern Aaron Philip preaches to us of “A Hope in the Night” from Ruth 3 in PM Worship. Make it a priority to be in worship this weekend. God promises to meet us, and he will!

Every blessing,
Pastor Joel

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