Welcome to Oak Springs Community Church!
Thanks for visiting our website! Oak Springs Community Church is a group of believers dedicated to loving God and the people in our lives, for His glory. Our mission is to get the good news of Jesus Christ into the lives of the people we live with, work with, play with, and interact with. These relational connections we have are the ‘live wires’ God uses to transform lives! We hope that your visit here will be inspiring.
We meet together on Sunday mornings for worship and study of God’s Word. We welcome you to venture out to Grand Isle Senior Apartment Homes in Murrieta each Sunday at 10 AM to experience God in worship and to study God’s Word with us as we equip one another with the truth.
To say, “our doors are always open” would be a little misleading, for our “doors” belong to the Grand Isles. But it is an understanding of Oak Springs’ that we are ‘open doors’ to the love of God and His grace by the sheer fact of His open arms to us. We’ve been embraced by our Heavenly Father and we are just one of many of His open doors to the world He loves and gave His only begotten Son to rescue. So, we welcome you with open arms!
Good Monday morning...
… and as we enter the first full week of 2025, I am aware of how much life is defined by the people we share it with. Lisa and I were reminiscent of how our friends Mary and Bill were finalizing their decision to move to Michigan last year at this time. Mary got to see where Bill would live after she tapped out and was taken home to heaven. Cancer was a brutal and relentless beast that tortured her body, yet she fiercely fought until she was satisfied that Bill was set up for his retirement years. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t remember with great fondness the season we got to share with Bill and Mary, especially in the six years prior to their move.
Speaking of heaven, the baseball story that inspired so many people over the years, which I believe was originally told by the late evangelist Billy Sunday, is now over 100 years old. I loved telling this story at celebrations of life, where so often people are contemplating their own mortality. It first likens life to the game of baseball: to score you have to touch all four bases. First base in life is a relationship to Jesus Christ; second base in life is to love one another; third base in life is to serve one another; and home base is heaven. I would often tie the life I was honoring to each of the four themes as I led people through the story.
On October 10, 1924, the World Series was in game seven between the New York Giants and the Washington Senators. The game was tied up, 3-3. The Senators had an outfielder named Goose Goslin who was having a great series. In the ninth inning he went to bat and drilled the ball deep into the outfield. By the time the Giants had got to the ball, Goslin was rounding third and heading for home. When the throw came in it appeared to everyone that Goslin had beaten the throw and scored the series winning run. But when the dust settled around home plate the umpire called him out.
In those days there were no public address systems like we have today. But the umpire grabbed a megaphone and said to the angry crowd, “the runner is out because he failed to touch first base.” Records indicate that the Senators won that game in the 12th inning to win the 1924 World Series. The point that I have enjoyed is the life lesson of being sure to have a relationship with Jesus! Thank you, Billy Sunday, and thank you home plate umpire… for the illustration that will live on as a reminder of the importance of faith in Jesus. After all, He is the Judge who will declare us safe at home, or, as we saw at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “away from me, for I never knew you.”
For His glory,
Pastor Mike