First Presbyterian Church Of Baton Rouge

Blessed be the LORD! For he has heard the voice of my pleas for mercy. The LORD is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him.

Welcome to week four of Restoring Your Soul Through Psalms: An Introduction to Psalm 28. Only Christianity offers more than we deserve. When we cast our lives into God's hands, we depend on his mercy.

Ancient words of unending power. Psalm 20 contains words to bless others, words you can speak or write that will encourage and lift up weary souls and give them hope. Psalm 20 is also a script to lead us through the passion and triumph of Christ. If we use our imaginations, we can pray this psalm as a great "Yes" to all that Jesus has undergone for us. We can find lyrics to praise him in ways we have not previously thought of. It’s not natural to us to do this. It’s going to take practice. But the path to intimacy with God lies in admiring our savior more and more ardently.

Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, a world expert and engaging speaker, will explore the different types of psalms and take us deep into 25-32.

Welcome to week two of Restoring Your Soul Through Psalms. Join us as we study and meditate on Psalm 20: a Royal Psalm.

The noise and strife, fear and anger in our world tears at all our souls. It wears us down. We need not only good analysis. We need a supply line to the only Source that can sustain us. God’s people have found for 30 centuries that the psalms do just that. They fill us in. They open us to the presence of God.

Welcome to the opening day of Restoring Your Soul Through Psalms! May Christ’s Spirit guide your prayers through Psalm 23 this week.

Christianity identity is received. It’s a gift that comes from placing your life in Christ’s hands. Shed your baggage, pride and stubborn will in order to enter the gate of the City whose walls are salvation. Before you make the decision, those gates look very narrow. Rumors are that life in the city is constricting and dull, oppressive and confining. But the people on the ramparts are shouting a different message. Come in! It feels like death. And it is. You have to drop your pride, your personal identity markers, your goals of what makes for security and well-being. You have to take up the song of praise to the LORD of the City. It’s a narrow pass. But inside, you get reclothed. You get gifted with a new identity that is actually the one most like you all along. You get identity as a beloved, redeemed child of the High King. You become part of his massive re-blessing plan in the world. We have a vision. We have a message of highest hope. We have a gospel. Good news. Good tidings of great joy which shall b

Senior Pastor Gerrit Dawson teaches us the basics of how to read a psalm to encounter God. By the end of the hour, you will have heard from the Lord!

Interaction with the world, even enjoyment of its good, is not what undoes us as Christ’s people. Our over-identification with the world is not simply because we have common cause with the affairs of the world. Rather our failure to lift up our hearts, to see Christ in heaven and give thanks is what undoes our mission and compromises our witness. As citizens of the City of God, we may participate in the life of the world, striving with it, thankful for it, bruised by it, hoping for it, knowing that this is not our truest home. We touch these things but lightly. We do not possess anything and so we possess everything. For we belong to Christ and all things are his (I Cor. 3: 22-23).

Why would a good God allow suffering? Why would we be joyful amidst suffering? What can suffering do to us?

On Sunday, July 19, we welcomed to the pulpit our former associate pastor Dr. Alec Flynt. Arden and Alec and their three children (Caleb, Elizabeth Gray and Lydia) moved to Mobile in 2013 to plant Covenant Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama. Watch Alec's message on God's sovereignty.

The reason we are given such a privileged title, "Priests of the LORD," is so that we may proclaim God's mighty acts of mercy toward us to the world. We have been called in order to be sent. We are the ones who get to make the connection between the Triune God and the world of lost humanity.

Welcome George Gillam! George is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is licensed to preach by the United Methodist Church. George currently works as the Operations Manager at the UpLIFTD. Thanks to a grant from our Session, George also works part time in urban ministry under the auspices of First Presbyterian Church and Whitney Alexander. His experience as a prisoner in Angola for 25 years give him a unique effectiveness with youth.

When you come to Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you have as much of Christ as you ever will. He has made sure of that. The question is how much of you have you given to Christ? Is there room in your boat?

Isaiah envisioned the redeemed people as being the result of God's own gardening efforts in the world. The LORD calls us "the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I might be glorified” (60: 21). The LORD is both the gardener and the ground in which we grow. He nourishes us with his life so that we become what we were made to be. God is the garden itself: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28). His soil is filled with righteousness. This means that if our lives are grown in God, there will be an essential rightness, a wholeness, in all our living. We will be living from an organic relationship with God.

Before blame and shame, we let tears be tears. We just agree that this isn’t right. And then before our emotions are corrupted by an angry agenda, we embrace. And we say, “I am in this with you. We’re together.” Because the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. He calls a people to himself, and then sends us to suffer alongside the suffering. In a thousand, thousand ways, from that place of tearful love, we discover how to live out the name, “Repairer of the Breach." Keep claiming the tears of Christ. Keep praying for your enemies and your friends. Keep calling up faith in the mercies of Christ. Keep repairing the breach in his name. It’s how God see us. It’s who we are.