Dear Church Family,

I’m so grateful for our worship team including our kids’ choir, adult choir, orchestra, band, tech team, Carey Dyer and Morgan Farris. It was such a great evening or worship and gratitude. In this season of thanksgiving, may we all cherish the blessings God gives us including our salvation. I read another great devotion by Pastor Rich Bitterman I hope encourages you:

How a Church Becomes a Restaurant

Times Square hums outside. Neon. Taxi horns. A thousand screens vying for attention.

But inside this old sanctuary, pizzas steam from brick ovens where hymns once rose.

Tourists laugh beneath the glass. They check their phones. They chew.

They have no idea that the light above them once fell on missionaries praying over passport stamps and open maps. They do not know this building was called Gospel Tabernacle. They do not know A. B. Simpson stood behind a pulpit right here.

They do not know the Christian & Missionary Alliance was born under this dome. They do not know Tozer once thundered in the same room they now photograph for Instagram.

A church once lived here.

A church once burned here.

And now the flame is cold.

Yet the dome still catches the light.

THE WARNING THAT STILL WHISPERS UNDER THE GLASS

The people who first heard Hebrews faced a danger that feels eerily close to the silence in this room. They were tempted to drift. To return to old comforts. To loosen their grip on Christ. They had not walked away yet. But the thought flickered like a spark in dry grass.

The preacher of Hebrews shouted across their hesitation.

If you step out of the light of Christ, the only path beneath your feet is darkness.

Truth becomes error. Grace becomes insult. Christ becomes an afterthought.

Then his tone shifts. The warning still burns, but now there is tenderness in his hands.

“Beloved, we are persuaded of better things concerning you…”

He had watched their lives. Their quiet service. Their love for the Name. He saw evidence of salvation in the fellowship of their church the way someone looks at an oak tree and knows the roots run deep.

That kind of fruit should have lived forever under this dome too.

But if a church isn’t diligent…if it grows lazy in doctrine, sluggish in prayer, careless in holiness—the lampstand dims, and the room grows quiet. A church can drift as easily as an individual. Sometimes the whole congregation lets go of the rope. The historic church in New York was abandoned.

And one day, without ceremony, the doors lock, the sign comes down, and the stained glass glows over a new religion: appetite.

ABRAHAM AND THE BUILDING THAT FORGOT HIS LESSON

The preacher reaches back to Abraham to steady his wavering audience. Abraham received a promise. Then he received an oath that sealed the promise with the weight of God’s own name.

Two unshakable realities.

A foundation that never moves.

Abraham clung to that promise through famine and confusion and heartache.

He held it when God asked him to raise a knife over the child he loved and when nothing made sense but the voice of the One who promised.

Abraham’s hands never relaxed.

That is the difference between a church that keeps its witness and a church that becomes a restaurant and it’s not history or fame.

Grip.

A church that stops clinging to the promise will still look impressive for a while. Crowds may come. Programs may run on schedule. But somewhere in the rafters the anchor rope frays. Somewhere behind the pulpit the grip loosens. Somewhere under the dome the prayers fall silent.

By the time the doors close, the building is only admitting what the people already confessed with their lives.

This is Hebrews 6 in brick and mortar.

A case study in what happens when the hands slacken.

THE FORERUNNER IN THE HARBOR

The preacher gives one more picture, one that every sailor in the first-century Mediterranean understood.

A ship fights the wind at the harbor entrance. It can see the shore but cannot reach it. So one man climbs into a small boat. He rows ahead while the waves slap the hull. He carries a rope. He ties it to the great harbor stone.

Then the crew begins to pull.

Hand over hand.

Rope burn on their palms.

Salt spray on their faces.

The shore never moves.

They do.

That man is Jesus.

The anchor stone is heaven.

The rope is hope.

The forerunner has tied it fast. The anchor holds. The harbor waits. The only danger is letting go.

That is the urgency of Hebrews.

That is the rebuke beneath this dome.

That is the warning pressed into the tile floor of a restaurant that once trembled with psalms.

The dome is not tragic because a church building changed tenants.

The dome is tragic because a people who once held the rope stopped pulling.

THE DOME RETURNS IN THE FINAL SCENE

Stand here long enough, beneath the colored glass, and you can almost see it.

Not a memory.

A witness.

Light moves through the stained glass and spreads across the room like a testimony. The blue panes glow like deep water. The gold flashes like a lamp in a desert tent. The red burns like a prophet’s voice.

It watches the pizza ovens and the families and the tourists.

Not with contempt.

With warning.

It remembers when the saints gathered here with worn Bibles and earnest hearts.

When the promises of God were sung so loudly the rafters shook.

When missionaries knelt on this floor before boarding ships to faraway lands.

It remembers the prayers and the tears.

It remembers the grip.

Buildings forget.

Glass remembers.

And one day, when the trumpet sounds, that dome will stand before the King as a witness to what once was. It will testify to the faith that burned here. It will testify to the faith that slipped away.

It will shine its colors across the judgment seat like a final journal entry of a people who began well and ended quietly.

Pull the rope.

Grip with your whole soul.

Set your weight against the promise and refuse to release it.

Christ waits in the Harbor.

His rope is already fastened.

His anchor is already steady.

Every church that holds the rope arrives.

Every believer who keeps pulling enters joy.

Every hand that refuses to slacken reaches shore.

And when you stand there…when your feet touch the sand of the Kingdom…

you will look back at the old dome in Times Square

and realize it was never about the building at all.

It was about the grip that carried you home.

Press on,

Mark