Easter Worship
by secretary (click here for full post)
Please join us for Easter Morning at the Ranch.
Welcome!
by SMCC (click here for full post)
Welcome to Santa Margarita Community Church Online.
“The all loving, self-sufficient God who rules the universe displays His own glory and goodness through the creation of the world. But we, as sinful self-sovereigns, refuse to recognize Him and bow the knee. God has stepped in to redeem and to reconcile us rebels from the power of sin in order to save us from the eternal destruction which our actions deserve. The church has been tasked to spread the news of the glory of God in order to call the world to repentance and to prepare for His coming reign. This is our story.
Before The Beginning…God
God has been eternally declaring his own worth. From all eternity, the Father has looked at the Son, seeing the exact representation of Himself (Heb 1:3), and has declared His own worth to the universe. This is His mission, the praise of His goodness and glory.
In the Beginnning…God Created Mankind
This God created the world out of the overflow of His goodness. Not because He needed to, but because He wanted to. He created us “in His image,” unique of all the living creatures. As His image bearers, ALL people have infinite value – nothing can take that away. We also intrinsically know that there is a God and that we are accountable to Him. God is the creator and we are His creatures. If God made us, then we have a responsibility to obey him. Our greatest good will be God’s glory and His glory will be our greatest good. Our human purpose is to relate rightly to Him, embody His image and represent His glory to the world.
Yet, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Sin is any failure to conform to the moral low of God in act, attitude or nature. The moral law, remember is based upon the character of God. Being against God himself, sin is more than simply a moral evil it is an attack on God himself.
God found eternal satisfaction in Himself and yet we continue to find He and His ways to be less than satisfying. These choices are morally wrong and make us morally guilty. This attack on his character is infinitely heinous and calls for an eternal punishment.
We are still in image, we just don’t reflect it as we could. Our fall into sin clarifies our need for God’s initiatory action and fine tunes the story: the story of God deals with fallen sinners. God will be glorified most clearly in the world by redeeming and restoring lost and rebellious sinners, like you and me.
At Just the Right Time…God sent His Son
In Jesus, God became a man to reveal to us that glory. He believed that if we truly saw what He is like, we would love Him. Jesus reveals God and the way God works in the world more clearly than fallen man because He is God incarnate. And He fully and finally He displayed God’s glory when He died in our place on the cross. God’s justice demands punishment, but God’s love takes that punishment in Jesus. Complete forgiveness comes Jesus’ death on the cross
Today…you and I must Respond
My friends, through this Gospel, Jesus is calling you to acknowledge your sin and to turn from it. He demands it with threats and warnings. It is God who is wrathful against you, it is God who will judge your guilt, it is God who has bound you over to eternal hell, it is God who you have accused and violated. But it is also God who died in your place. So while he threatens on the one hand, he invites on the other. Will you trust him? Will you trust that his death on the cross has paid the full penalty for your sin? Will you be restored to him?
The message of the Church is called the Gospel, the good news. When we declare that there is a God in heaven who reigns over all, the immediate implication is that we do not reign and must bow the knee. When we declare that God loves His own glory above all things and yet extends relationship so that you and I too might be satisfied in His all sufficient goodness, our foolishness becomes evident and we must bow the knee. When we display Jesus in all His divine and human glory, the Spirit awakens our hearts to what we have been missing. That is good news.
One Day…All Things Will be Restored
Jesus was raised to life again, conquering death and promising to do the same for all who believe. The Bible speaks of a time when all will be raised to stand before God who will judge all people by the standard of His own glory and goodness. At that day, those who are judged by their own works will go away into eternal punishment for their sin against our infinitely valuable God. Those of us who are judged by the work of Christ on the cross will go into “eternal pleasures” at that right hand of God. That is, God will make us glad by inviting us to enjoy the glory of the Son, which has made Him glad for all eternity.
We are a rescued people. God created man and all things and then entered in to save us. We are now working with and for God toward restoration, which will take place at the resurrection. We will be raised one day. But so will our hell bound family and friends. That is why we take our mission so seriously.
Our mission is to declare to real men and women the glory of God in Jesus who died, was raised and who will come again to establish his kingdom. That is our story and we love to tell the story.”
