Denton Presbyterian Church

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Worship Services – February 21st

February 19, 2021 By Denton Presbyterian Blogger Leave a Comment

While we plan to hold services Sunday, February 21st, we do ask that if roads around you are icy, please consider staying home and worshiping via the livestream.

Our services begin at 10:30 am. You can join us in person in the gymnasium at First Presbyterian Church (1114 West University Drive, Denton, TX). You can join us virtually through the weekly broadcast on our YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-l2Yf1biBIwHxIirI53IA   You can also visit the channel to watch prior services.

Please visit the Our Ministries page for details regarding Bible studies and our weekly Prayer Time. These are also shared in a weekly email notice. If you would like to be included in that weekly email, please go to the Stay in Touch page and submit the completed form.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to respectfully ask that everyone wear a mask when joining us for worship at the church. Remember we can all come together faster if we can do our part to end the pandemic. Our Worship page has additional information on the special precautions we are following during COVID-19 for everyone’s safety and comfort. If you have any questions about the gathering process after reviewing the information on the Worship page, please reach out via the Contact Us form or directly to any of the Elders or Deacons.

Opportunity to Assist Others

We are collecting canned goods and other non-perishable foods to give to the Denton Christian PreSchool to help with the needs of some of the families in the school. Please consider bringing a few things each week to donate! Find more details here.

Please note we will use the same Sunday Bulletin that was planned for the February 14th service. Link below!

Sunday Bulletin

Reading of God’s Word: Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26
Hearing God’s Word: John 13

To be added to the weekly email that contains announcements, the bulletin, etc., go to Stay in Touch and complete and submit the form.

Filed Under: Bible Studies, COVID-19, First Presbyterian Church, God's Love, Gospel, Grace, Philippians, Prayer, Service Opportunities, Virtual Service, Worship Tagged With: Bible Studies, Book of John, broadcasts, God's love, online service, prayer

Perfect Love – December 27, 2020

December 26, 2020 By Denton Presbyterian Blogger Leave a Comment

We know that holidays can be a mixture of blessings and challenges – especially during times such as these. It can be a joyous time – but can also be a lonely – even fearful – time. God sent us His beloved Son, Jesus Christ, for just such times. His birth, death, and resurrection all occurred during times that were filled with challenges, fear, and confusion. He shed His grace – then and now – on the weakest, the most vulnerable, the most needy. He continues to meet us as we truly are and to offer us His redemption. He is no stranger to our fears, our hopes, our successes, and our failures. We thank God for the opportunity to come together and worship Him and hope you will join us – either virtually or in person.

Church services begin at 10:30 am. You can join us in person in the gymnasium at First Presbyterian Church (1114 West University Drive, Denton, TX). You can join us virtually through the weekly broadcast on our YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-l2Yf1biBIwHxIirI53IA   You can also visit the channel to watch prior services.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are respectfully asking that everyone continue to wear a mask when joining us for worship at the church. Our Worship page has additional information on the special precautions we are following during COVID-19 for everyone’s safety and comfort. We want to do as much as possible to help those who are at risk to feel like our worship service  is a safe and healthy place to gather. If you have any questions about the gathering process after reviewing the information on the Worship page, please reach out via the Contact Us form or directly to any of the Elders or Deacons.

Sunday Bulletin

Reading of God’s Word: Psalm 46
Hearing God’s Word: 1 John 4:7-21

If you would like to be included in the weekly email that includes additional information about Bible studies and other church activities, please go to the Stay in Touch page and submit the completed form. 

Filed Under: COVID-19, Fear, First Presbyterian Church, God's Love, Good News, Virtual Service, Worship Tagged With: 1 John, fear, Jesus, perfect love

The Lord’s Prayer – Worship – September 27, 2020

September 25, 2020 By Denton Presbyterian Blogger Leave a Comment

We look forward to having you join us for worship in the gymnasium at First Presbyterian Church (1114 West University Drive, Denton, TX). Services begin at 10:30 am.

This week our services will be led by Justin Smith.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are respectfully asking that everyone wear a mask when joining us for worship at the church. We ask that you visit our Worship page for additional information on the special precautions we are following during COVID-19 for everyone’s safety and comfort. We want to do as much as possible to help those who are at risk to feel like our worship service  is a safe and healthy place to gather.

Reading of God’s Word

Psalm 33

Hearing of God’s Word

Luke 11:1-13

We are very blessed to be able to continue our live broadcast on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-l2Yf1biBIwHxIirI53IA

Bulletin for September 27th

We look forward to worshiping with those who can meet in person and online. If you have any questions about the gathering process after reviewing the information on the Worship page, please reach out via the Contact Us form or directly to any of the Elders or Deacons.

Filed Under: Featured, God's Love, Prayer, Worship Tagged With: Book of Luke, prayer, The Lord's Prayer

May 10th Sunday Service

May 9, 2020 By Denton Presbyterian Blogger Leave a Comment

We hope that we will be able to meet together soon. However, this week, we will continue to hold our services via a YouTube Broadcast. Below is a link to the YouTube channel on which our services are broadcast. Click the link (or copy and paste into your browser if the link fails to open). Once on our YouTube channel, you will see not only the current broadcast but also links to videos of the prior services.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-l2Yf1biBIwHxIirI53IA

Below is a link to the bulletin for this Sunday’s service. It will open in a separate window. You can print it or view it on one device while you stream the broadcast on another. Note that a link to the bulletin is also posted on YouTube videos, just below the viewing area.

Bulletin

For offerings and/or gifts to help those in the church, please visit the Giving page on this website and use the PayPal link to donate. You will be given an opportunity to add a note to designate how you would like your money to be allocated.

We encourage you to take advantage of this safe way to donate. You can set up a recurring donation if that works best for you. Recurring donations can be cancelled by you at any time. You can also mail your donations and the address is also listed on the Giving page. We appreciate your continued financial support.

If you have any questions about the service, please use the Contact Us form on this website, or reach out to one of the church officers directly if you have the contact information.

Please feel free to share the links for the service with others. During this time, we have a unique opportunity to share the Good News with a much broader audience than just our local community.

Filed Under: Donations, God's Love, Good News, Gospel, Luke, Sunday Services, Virtual Service, YouTube Tagged With: Book of Luke, donations, giving, online service, virtual service, YouTube

Fear and Love – A Devotional from Dave Wilson

May 2, 2020 By Denton Presbyterian Blogger Leave a Comment

1 John 4:17,18 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 

This is for my children, my wife, my friends old and new, and anybody else that wants to listen in. I am a fearful person, a worrier to the nth degree. I am afraid of pain, of other people’s pain, of my own pain but I don’t think I’m afraid to die. I realized this when I was in a bus accident when I was 16 years old. I won’t give you all the gory details, but it was conceivable that I was about to die and I was OK with it because I knew where I was going. Today I want to look at I John 4:18. I want to look at two things: fear and love.

The first thing is fear. Let me give you some context. In verse 17 John talks about the day of judgment. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher of the 20th century, gave some advice with regards to the day of judgment. He said, “Stand in front of the reality of the day of judgment.” Now, you’ve got a few types of folks and maybe you will see yourself in one or more of these.

The first type are those who out and out reject the day of judgment as nonsense or maybe even as evil. They are appalled by the very idea of it, it smacks of trying to control people with fear. If you have a commitment to free will, then this is you. We’re going to rebel against anyone trying to mess with our free will. Or the day of judgment seems to them as the epitome of ignorance. Once again the epitome of knowledge to them is self-determined; to say that all mankind is held to a standard other than the one they make up themselves or have agreed to follow is offensive to them. We can all say that we fall along this spectrum most days, meaning, whether you’re a Christian or not you don’t like the idea of judgment and to be afraid of it would mean that it seems reasonable to not like it. Some of us are more brazen – we hate the idea, we hate anything about it – but all of us have some hatred of the idea, if we’re honest.

The second group are those who, probably in a way to suppress fear or hatred of the idea of judgment, choose to ignore it. These are not the ones actively hating the idea or hating the idea that God is judge. They instead are seeking a life void of anything to be afraid of. They are usually the fun people in life. They don’t want to ask the question of “What is life‘s meaning?” Life‘s meaning to them is to avoid this question altogether. But things like war and pestilence and disease and the insane bombardment of information we currently are subjected to make this way of living impossible, and that is ruining our worldview and exposing us to the stuff we’ve done everything we can do to suppress. And out of these moments bubbles up the overflowing fountain of fear and hatred. The unknown is all of a sudden made known, and we are forced to confront a reality we have so desperately tried to keep far away from us. Christian and non-christian alike are equally affected.

Right now in the Covid 19 world in the United States of America it all depends upon your age, where you live, your economic status, and where are you are on this spectrum. If you are a teenager or college student with a good family situation and you have parents on the age bubble for this thing, you are going to whistle in the dark until someone close to you gets this disease and dies. If this thing went after the young I guarantee you folks like me would be way more freaked out, but as it stands right now we are worried to some extent about our health and infinitely more worried or fearful about money. So we whistle in the dark until a financial ruin day of judgment becomes too apparent to mask with a $2,400 check and our baseless hope in a brighter financial future is torn away. So, we should all stare the day of current and financial judgment in the face and be terrified by it. Yet the Christian answer, the one that comes from God, is that yes there is judgment, there is awfulness, there is true and real fear, but there is something else. Every time my phone buzzes with yet another report, the one I’m really looking for is the one that says, “FEAR HAS BEEN DEFEATED!”

Before I get to the category of love, there is one more group that we need to address. Those are the Christians who, as Lloyd-Jones put it, are “believers who feel it their duty to be miserable.” These are the folks, and all of us have been here, that want love and fear to coexist. Really they just want fear to exist because their biggest fear is that God‘s love for them is impossible. They can’t submit to love so they enslave themselves to fear. These are the older brothers trusting in their good works to save them and using fear as a full body hazmat suit to ensure that love isn’t needed. They have chosen to fear everything else but God. The fear of the greater drives out the lesser. Two months ago you were afraid that it might rain on your wedding day, today you were afraid you might die or someone close to you might die. Two months ago you were afraid that you would not be able to afford a good vacation, today you are afraid of losing your house. Greater drives out lesser. So why not fear (I’m both using the term as reverence and true fear of) God and it will drive out the lesser fear of death, pain, ruin. Why would you choose this? One word, love.

This leads us to our second point: love. God is love. His love for Himself and for you drives away fear because it is greater than fear. It offers life, it offers freedom, it offers forgiveness even in the face of inescapable judgment. I’ve been studying the book of Zechariah with a friend of mine these past couple of weeks and in Zechariah 3 Joshua the high priest is staring judgment in the face. He is in the courtroom of God and he is covered in his priestly garments and they are covered in excrement of every gross conceivable kind. He is according to God‘s law 100% guilty. Satan also stands there as his accuser, he has an airtight case against Joshua. Yet even here the greater drives out the lesser. God’s love dismisses the charges, clothes Joshua in clean robes, and crowns him with glory, not because Joshua did what was right but because God made him clean simply due to his eternal love for him. Oftentimes we become like Satan in that we want to point out the unacceptable nature of ourselves or of others. We make ourselves and others feel as though they can never be clean, much less worthy of glory. But love is greater than this and we must use it to drive away fear, both the fear of being found out ourselves and the fear of others “getting away with it.” This is the teaching, the doctrine, the way of life known as justification by faith. It is the imputation, the declaring, by the only one who can, that we are right before God so that nothing can touch us; it is Romans 8:31-39 type stuff.

So how can we know this love? First, by believing it and second, by practicing it. Especially with those overcome by fear. Love them, sacrifice for them, listen to them, pray for them, serve them. Don’t hammer them for their fears and their commitment to fear. Instead, love them in the midst of it. As you practice love, you will drive out your own fear and you may by God’s grace drive out the fears enslaving those around you.

In conclusion, there’s an article my friend sent me that was in the most recent Harvard Business Review The author was saying that the feeling that we are not acknowledging during this time is grief, basically grief over the thing we love the most that has died, security, control etc. His advice was to acknowledge that. Yes, acknowledge. But is that all? NO! fear and grief can go hand-in-hand, but the good news is that we grieve as those with hope, HOPE founded in love. So go to battle today armed with love, and let God’s love expressed in the sacrificial love of Christ drive out your fear and the fear of those around you.

Filed Under: COVID-19, Devotional, Fear, God's Love, Grace

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Welcome to Our Website

We hope to be a community of faith that is open to the skeptic, the seeker, the new convert, the spiritually mature Christian, and the struggling Christian. We desire to help provide for the … Read More »

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Our Pastor

Our Senior Pastor is Robert Wagner.

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Serving Denton

Since 2007, we have served the Denton, Texas area. Our hope is that, through our ministry, Denton will experience the grace, joy, and freedom of the gospel. Our desire is to serve in a way that challenges and changes our community and glorifies God.

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We are a “Reformed” denomination, striving to be faithful to the scriptures, true to the reformed faith, and obedient to the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. For more information about PCA, visit PCAnet.org

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