Ken Pierpont's Blog, page 39

Bittersweet Journal (Number 63) An Old Receipt

There are two fields that lie just north of our place. I call them the “near north field” and the “far north field.” Beyond them is a woods that shelters a pond. Beyond the woods the Falling Waters Trail crosses running east and west.

Farmer Clark took the beans off the fields north of Bittersweet this golden October afternoon. I had a lunch meeting at Spring Arbor University and took the back road there and back to enjoy the autumn afternoon. In the late afternoon I took George, the Red Jeep, out for a drive through the countryside to watch the start of the harvest.

This time of year I always think back to the October our family returned to the rolling farmland of southeastern Ohio from living in Oklahoma City. I close my eyes and remember the bus ride home from school out to the farm on winding gravel roads under arches of trees bright with color. The air was cool. The sky October-Blue. My little brothers were waiting in the yard in flannel shirts with a football.

Even more than that I remember the autumn of 1994. From 1990 to 1994 we lived in a farmhouse on a dead end road in a peaceful, remote valley in Ohio. About that time on one of our jaunts up into the Ohio Amish Country—Holmes County—I happened on a book that would be on my life-list of favorites. The book was written by an Amish farmer and arranged according to the seasons. Each of the essays was based on something he had observed on his small farm in Ohio. He called the book Great Possessions.

I kept it on my night table and every night before bed I would read a chapter and close my eyes and lie in bed and think about what I had read and wonder why it moved me so deeply. We knew we would never be able to purchase the place we were leasing, but walking in the snow on a hill overlooking the farmhouse on a winter night, warm light within spilling out on the snow, something stirred within me and I prayed that one day, if it be God’s will, we could have a modest country place of our own.

What I did not know is that I would move to a small town then, of all places to a hotel in downtown Flint, then a working suburb of Detroit before, as a smiling providence to counter a season of slander and betrayal, God would give us our own farm house in the country.

Now on October nights I don’t long for the country or the moonrise or the fragrance of burning leaves. I don’t pine for the sight and the sound of geese passing before the moon. I don’t imagine a silver brook running under scarlet maples or whitetail deer grazing in the field. I don’t imagine that and dream of that and long for that and pine for that, I experience that every single day of my life.

I don’t go off to camp to visit someplace beautiful. I go off to camp to visit someplace else that is beautiful. To experience the beauty of the countryside I just get up in the night and watch the moon out the bathroom window, or sit in a rocker on one of our porches, or I go out and mow or trim or rake or gather windfall limbs and build a fire.

Sitting in my reading spot in the southwest corner of the living room I page through my original copy of Great Possessions and come upon a receipt used as a book mark. It is from Dale’s Cardinal in Danville, Ohio. It is dated November 24, 1994. It was a Monday, my day off. At about quarter of two in the afternoon I bought nine dollars and twelve cents worth of groceries. It looks like we had goulash that night and maybe cookies for dessert.

The trees on the hills between Danville and Apple Valley Road were bare by then. It was 50 degrees and sunny as we drove the undulating hills to home. The temperature dropped down to 37 that night. The furnace would have kicked on. There were only eight of us at the time. Wes would come along in a little less than a month and Hope would complete our family five years later after we moved to Michigan.

A friend of mine and a teacher in my grad school taught me this: “When God is going to do something He puts a prayer burden on the heart of a believer.” This is one of the reasons that I have learned to pay attention to the things that I have a strong inclination to pray about. You never know the plans God’s has for you. These are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about home alone with a favorite old book on a cool autumn night.

Bittersweet Farm

October 15, 2019

The Love of God (Sermon) Video

Series: Knowing God by Heart

Sermon: The Love of God

October 6, 2019 AM

Bethel Church | Jackson, Michigan

Ken Pierpont, Lead Pastor

At one point in the message I said, “I would give young for rich…” what I meant to say is, “I would give up being rich to be young…” Oh, well.

The Love of God (Sermon) Audio

Series: Knowing God by Heart

Sermon: The Love of God

October 6, 2019 AM

Bethel Church | Jackson, Michigan

Ken Pierpont, Lead Pastor

https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-10-06AM-The-Love-of-God.mp3

Praying Simple

I have borrow a favorite autumn scene from John Sloane. You can have a copy of this framed on your wall. Visit his site. It’s full of delightful wholesome beauty.It’s a crisp fall morning. It’s been a warm fall, but the temps dropped into the 40’s last night and this morning it was cool enough for me to wear a nice, thick flannel shirt -jacket that I have been looking forward to wearing on the first cool, autumn morning. This morning I put on my new, warm shirt and drove Grendel over to speak/preach/tell at Jackson Christian School. I taught them how to pray:

–Help me prayers

–Please help others prayers

–Thank you prayers

–I’m sorry prayers, and

–I love you prayers

I told them what my mother taught me when I was a little boy crying at night because I lost my baseball.

She called me downstairs and we sat on the bottom step and she said; “Have you told the Lord about it? Have you prayed.”

“No, it seemed like such a small thing…”

She said; “Listen to me. If it is big enough to make you cry, if it is big enough to keep you awake at night, it’s big enough to pray about.”

I have taken that advice thousands of times in my life. I hope to teach the little ones in my life the lesson my mother taught me at the bottom of the stairs that night years ago in Logansville, Ohio.*

Bittersweet Farm

October 4, 2019

P.S. I prayed that night and in the morning I found my baseball and I learned a powerful lesson about prayer.

This painting is by John Sloane

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 62) In My Cozy Corner of the Room

I do much of my writing on the second floor at a wooden desk flooded with soft light up in the corner of our little house. I have a window beside me where I can keep track of the night and day, the changing weather, and the coming and going of the seasons.

According to my faithful little weather app the temperature is going to drop into the 40’s overnight. I should have more sense, but I’m glad to hear it. It’s been warm and beautiful, but in these parts this time of year it’s supposed to be crisp and cool. The wind is picking up outside tonight. You can hear it in the trees. It sounds like an October night in Michigan is supposed to sound.

When people ask me what I love to do, my answer sounds kinda’ boring, I think, but I have always been a word guy, so I love to read, I love to write, and I do a fair amount of speaking. When I’m reading I always feel like I should stop and write. When I’m writing, things always come to mind to read. I wonder sometimes if I’m a writer who speaks, but I’m pretty sure I’m a speaker who writes. At night I am always reading until the very last minute I need to close my eyes to sleep.

Outside the room is a landing and a staircase. The landing is wide enough to accommodate a nice personal library where I have shelved some of my most treasured books to keep them near at hand.

Tonight I have a copy of Hannah Coulter, a novel by Wendell Berry on the desk beside me gently calling my name. Today I spent some time re-reading a couple books in preparation for my message Sunday; The Sacred Romance, by Brent Curtis and John Eldridge, and Life With a Capital “L” by Matt Heard, which is a pretty good book with a not-so-poetic name. I’m enjoying a collection of sermons by the late Eugene Peterson called When Kingfishers Catch Fire. (Matt Heard should have consulted with Eugene for help with a more poetic title for his wonderful book).

Anyway that is what is running though my brain among the flotsam and jetsam of a busy day this evening. I will do some storytelling at Jackson Christian School in the morning. Saturday I will have breakfast with the Bethel men and I will speak later in the day to the Bethel women. Sunday, of course I will teach my class and preach and in the evening we my little brother will come to Bethel to lead us in a hymn-sing followed by a variety of home-made pies and ice cream.

I hope my ramblings have been of some interest to you. I’d love to know all about your life if you have the time to tell it soon. Eugene Peterson wrote some wonderful books on being a pastor. He wrote that a pastor is not just a talker, a preacher, but he is a contemplative. He is a listener. He is a man of prayer.

These are among my ambitions, too.

Wendell Berry writing at the Long-Legged House.

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 61) Falling Out of the Pollyanna Tree

The world we live in is beautiful because it is created and sustained by God. It is broken because it is cursed by God because of sin. Even though we like to say the every day is a beautiful day out on Bittersweet Farm, some days are more beautiful than others, because even on our peaceful acres in our quaint farmhouse we cannot escape the effects of sin and the fall and the curse.

Paul wrote about this with poetic beauty in the eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans. He wrote that because we live in a sin-cursed world we groan and all of creation around us groans.

Yesterday I worked hard which involved hours of moving things and carrying boxes, some of them up and down stairs. When I got into bed I indulged in a little groaning.

I groaned a little last week, too. Last Friday on my day off I was looking forward to some reading and writing and watching the first blush of autumn from one of our porches on Bittersweet, but early in the morning I discovered a plumbing disaster and spent the entire day figuring out how to keep it from destroying our hickory hardwood floors. After hours of work, multiple trips to Home Depot, calls to our plumber son Wes and prayers (no I’m dead serious) genuine crying-out-to-God prayers, Lois turned on the faucet and everything worked like is supposed to. She quietly said; “Thank you.”

But that took a lot of groaning and grunting and grumbling first, because all is not well in this world, even out on Bittersweet.

It’s true with Lois and I and our whole family. We are sinners saved by grace and seated in the heavenliness in Christ. We are, each of us, heirs of eternal life and sealed with the indwelling Spirit of God. We are chosen and cherished by God. We are holy and blameless before Him in Christ. We are a part of the family, but we all still have very real struggles with sin.

Let me repeat myself. Please read this carefully. We still have very real struggles with sin and they can be ugly sometimes. Lois is a gifted photographer and so we have some beautiful pictures of the children and grandchildren. By the grace of God her genes usually overshadow mine and our offspring tend to look more like her than I, so that doesn’t hurt, so we have some nice pictures of the family, but you need to know they are staged, even the ones that look like they are not.

I like to say, the Pierpont Family is like a mediocre roofing job. We look good from the road but up close you are going to notice a few crooked shingles in each of us.

The only thing that all of us are consistently good at in sin. We each wrestle hard with what Paul called “indwelling sin.” But we wrestle by the grace of God. We know that sin wars against our souls every day. Peter said it like this: “Abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”

Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, you’re an optimist. I’m more of a realist.”

I reply, “As a Christian, given how we know this will end for us, I like to think it’s only realistic to be optimistic.”

My son, Chuck told me the other day; “Dad, you need to be careful. Someday you might fall out of the the Pollyanna Tree and hurt yourself.”

I think when I opened up the crawl-space under the kitchen and had to pump 70 gallons of steamy water from under our house I may have fallen out of the Pollyanna Tree and landed in water under the house, but I bounced when I landed because I have spent my lifetime trying to see life from God’s point-of-view and I am not surprised by evidence of fallenness in and around me even out on Bittersweet Farm where every day is a beautiful day and the little light in the kitchen is always on.

Bittersweet Farm

September 24, 2019

(This is Wes, our plumber son. I so thank God for him every day, but especially on days when I am trying to fix the plumbing. I continually thank God for Wes and whoever came up with Sharkbite connectors).

Take a couple minutes to read this. (It is Romans 8 in The Living Bible Paraphrase)

8 So there is now no condemnation awaiting those who belong to Christ Jesus. 2 For the power of the life-giving Spirit—and this power is mine through Christ Jesus—has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death. 3 We aren’t saved from sin’s grasp by knowing the commandments of God because we can’t and don’t keep them, but God put into effect a different plan to save us. He sent his own Son in a human body like ours—except that ours are sinful—and destroyed sin’s control over us by giving himself as a sacrifice for our sins. 4 So now we can obey God’s laws if we follow after the Holy Spirit and no longer obey the old evil nature within us.

5 Those who let themselves be controlled by their lower natures live only to please themselves, but those who follow after the Holy Spirit find themselves doing those things that please God. 6 Following after the Holy Spirit leads to life and peace, but following after the old nature leads to death 7 because the old sinful nature within us is against God. It never did obey God’s laws and it never will. 8 That’s why those who are still under the control of their old sinful selves, bent on following their old evil desires, can never please God.

9 But you are not like that. You are controlled by your new nature if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that if anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ living in him, he is not a Christian at all.) 10 Yet, even though Christ lives within you, your body will die because of sin; but your spirit will live, for Christ has pardoned it. 11 And if the Spirit of God, who raised up Jesus from the dead, lives in you, he will make your dying bodies live again after you die, by means of this same Holy Spirit living within you.

12 So, dear brothers, you have no obligations whatever to your old sinful nature to do what it begs you to do. 13 For if you keep on following it you are lost and will perish, but if through the power of the Holy Spirit you crush it and its evil deeds, you shall live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

15 And so we should not be like cringing, fearful slaves, but we should behave like God’s very own children, adopted into the bosom of his family, and calling to him, “Father, Father.” 16 For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we really are God’s children. 17 And since we are his children, we will share his treasures—for all God gives to his Son Jesus is now ours too. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.

18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. 19 For all creation is waiting patiently and hopefully for that future day when God will resurrect his children. 20-21 For on that day thorns and thistles, sin, death, and decay—the things that overcame the world against its will at God’s command—will all disappear, and the world around us will share in the glorious freedom from sin which God’s children enjoy.

22 For we know that even the things of nature, like animals and plants, suffer in sickness and death as they await this great event. 23 And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us—bodies that will never be sick again and will never die.

24 We are saved by trusting. And trusting means looking forward to getting something we don’t yet have—for a man who already has something doesn’t need to hope and trust that he will get it. 25 But if we must keep trusting God for something that hasn’t happened yet, it teaches us to wait patiently and confidently.

26 And in the same way—by our faith—the Holy Spirit helps us with our daily problems and in our praying. For we don’t even know what we should pray for nor how to pray as we should, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with such feeling that it cannot be expressed in words. 27 And the Father who knows all hearts knows, of course, what the Spirit is saying as he pleads for us in harmony with God’s own will. 28 And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into his plans.

29 For from the very beginning God decided that those who came to him—and all along he knew who would—should become like his Son, so that his Son would be the First, with many brothers. 30 And having chosen us, he called us to come to him; and when we came, he declared us “not guilty,” filled us with Christ’s goodness, gave us right standing with himself, and promised us his glory.

31 What can we ever say to such wonderful things as these? If God is on our side, who can ever be against us? 32 Since he did not spare even his own Son for us but gave him up for us all, won’t he also surely give us everything else?

33 Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? Will God? No! He is the one who has forgiven us and given us right standing with himself.

34 Who then will condemn us? Will Christ? No! For he is the one who died for us and came back to life again for us and is sitting at the place of highest honor next to God, pleading for us there in heaven.

35 Who then can ever keep Christ’s love from us? When we have trouble or calamity, when we are hunted down or destroyed, is it because he doesn’t love us anymore? And if we are hungry or penniless or in danger or threatened with death, has God deserted us?

36 No, for the Scriptures tell us that for his sake we must be ready to face death at every moment of the day—we are like sheep awaiting slaughter; 37 but despite all this, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loved us enough to die for us. 38 For I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels won’t, and all the powers of hell itself cannot keep God’s love away. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, 39 or where we are—high above the sky, or in the deepest ocean—nothing will ever be able to separate us from the love of God demonstrated by our Lord Jesus Christ when he died for us.

We Are Weak but He is Strong (Sermon) Video

Series: Knowing God by Heart

Sermon Title: We Are Weak but He is Strong

Bethel Church-Jackson, Michigan

Ken Pierpont–Lead Pastor

September 22, 2019 AM

We Are Weak but He is Strong (Sermon) Audio

Series: Knowing God by Heart

Sermon Title: We Are Weak but He is Strong

Bethel Church-Jackson, Michigan

Ken Pierpont–Lead Pastor

September 22, 2019 AM

https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-09-22AM-We-Are-Weak-but-He-is-Strong.mp3

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 60)

Out on Bittersweet

When Lucy Maud Montgomery put the words; “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers…” in the mouth of her character Anne, I wonder if she laid down her pen, sat back, and smiled for a while. I would have. It’s a wonderful line. When October comes I’m always glad to live in a place like Michigan. It’s hard for me to imagine another place I would rather be.

Jerry Dennis, a northern Michigan author, wrote that springtime advances north at about 15 miles a day, about the pace of a steady walk. I wonder how long it takes the color to creep south in the fall? I think about things like this on short autumn evenings. Tonight the deer were grazing in the near north field, as they do every night year-round. Bats were flitting about over the back meadow in the cool dusk. I puttered around in the carriage house for a while. I have a project I’ve been planning there. When it is done it will make good writing so I’m sure I will tell you all about it, maybe even share pictures.

But thinking about October is getting ahead of myself, which one should never do in the fall of the year, the season of all seasons which we hope lingers well into November.

If you are tired of bad news all the time keep reading:

The Northern Michigan Relief Sale

This summer my friend, Paul Gardner, the director at Camp Barakel, attended the Northern Michigan Relief Sale at the Oscoda County Fairgrounds.

I attended the sale with a couple of my grandsons and was rewarded with warm, fresh, homemade cinnamon donuts and a first-edition hardcover of a Vance Havner title I didn’t have.

My friend, Paul attended the charity auction. He bid on a chair made of old camp skis. He won the bidding for the chair. He then bid on a coat rack made of additional parts from the skis but he was outbid by a group of young Amish men. After the auction was over he went to collect his chair and the young Amish men came over, claimed their coat rack, and then smiled and handed it to him.

“We want you to have it. It belongs with your chair.” They chuckled among themselves and walked away to tend to a booth where they were selling things.

My friend Paul, warmed by the gesture, bought a cold bottle of Pepsi for each of the young men and thanked them for their gift.

If you look for bad news you will find it everywhere, but all the news in the world is not bad news, especially if you live with an open heart.



Bittersweet Farm

September 16, 2019

Knowing God by Heart | Omniscient (Sermon) Audio

Knowing God by Heart | Omniscient (Psalm 139:7-9)

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan

September 15, 2019 AM

Ken Pierpont–Lead Pastor

https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-09-15-143511-nu79uagjakwxvnyyogrs-audio-b1705s-e4490s.mp3