Serving Schedule

If you are unable to keep your scheduled serving day, please contact the church at least a few days before the service so there is time to find a replacement. Thank you!

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, 68th Regular Convention is July 29 through August 3. Pastor Carlson, along with a lay delegate from our circuit, will be attending the convention and representing St. Paul’s and our circuit. The convention is in Milwaukee, WI at the Wisconsin Center/Arena.

To keep up with the convention timeline, to read the overtures, and to learn about the various candidates who will fill positions nationally, please visit LCMS National Convention – The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Also, please pray for safe travel for all who are preparing to head to Milwaukee in late July.

DAILY LUTHERAN CHAPEL SERVICE… You can listen to chapel services from Concordia Theological Seminary-Fort Wayne, IN live weekdays at 8:35 am Central and on-demand at issuesetc.org and the Lutheran Public Radio mobile app.

The latest Issues, Etc. Journal is out!

Was the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther innovating or in error when he added the word “alone” to his translation of Romans 3:28: “For we hold that one is justified by faith alone apart from works of the law”? Pastor Will Weedon answers that question in his article, “Sola Fide—By Faith Alone.”

Also in this edition, Dr. Donna Harrison recounts God’s persistent call out of Catholicism, Scientism, Mysticism and Evangelicalism through His Word into the Lutheran Confession.

Click here to download the latest Issues, Etc. Journal for free.

SCRIPTURE: “For there must in fact be divisions among you, so that those of you who are approved may be evident.” – 1 Corinthians 11:19

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Discord is a deplorable offense among Christians because it puts them in the worst possible light and makes it impossible for them to steer clear of factions and heresies. Divisions are an offense to the world’s wisest and best who mock God’s church and discredit His Word when they see fighting and disunity amongst God’s children. They say, “Look at how they envy and slander and gossip about one another and eat each other up and spit each other out! How can their doctrine be true and the God they claim to worship be real if this is how they go on?”

Yet our Lord tells us that He did not come to bring peace but division, and Paul tells us that discord in the church is bound to occur. For wherever the Word of God has a foothold, there the devil will also be waging war against it. The devil uses factions and people — YES, the devil uses people to create discord. How does he do it? Paul tells us in early on in 1 Corinthians. It’s always about the teaching, that horrible cuss word of the 21st century Christian, “theology,” a word that has become taboo in the church because many in the Christian Church refuse to believe as God’s Word teaches. Many Christians today are very picky and choosy about what they will believe. They’ll believe some things in the Scripture, but not all things of the Scripture. They’ve allowed human reason to dictate truth rather than the Scripture to inform human reason, and this is much of the source of discord and division among Christians. This was the problem in the Corinthian church, the Galatian church, and even in the Thessalonian church. Human reason, opinions, and a lack of faith was getting in the way of God and His Spirit and people were questioning the very things they were taught by the Apostles.

And this is how the devil works. He introduces the age-old question, “Did God really say…” to every doctrine of God’s Word and brings confusion, chaos, and discord to the Church in the hope that people will get so disgruntled and disparaged by it all that they leave the church and the faith. It’s always been this way. There has never been a congregation full of such purity and unity where all its members believe the same about all things, not that they shouldn’t or that they shouldn’t strive to believe in unity, but because the devil is there waging against God’s Word, there will always be disagreements and discord.

As God’s people, we must guard against this fatal evil, the work of the devil to bring discord. And we do this by being in the Scripture. For confessional Lutherans, we have the Lutheran Confessions which help us by giving us clear statements of doctrine and theology from the Scripture so that we have a way of confessing what we believe in a consistent way. The reformers of the 16th century assembled the Book of Concord as a defense against discord in the church, to keep people unified and to ward off those false teachings and the teachers who teach them. But they were no fools. They knew the church would continue to suffer violence regardless of how clear our confession might be. Thus, we must always pray and be diligent, and we must believe that even amongst discord and obvious workings of the devil amongst us, God is still here, fighting and defeating Satan in the Church, in His holy kingdom.

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“All things are produced from waters, and water was made by the Only-begotten, whose Father gave order and calls all men to be born anew by water.”

— St. Clement of Rome (AD 35 – 99)

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