Fellowship Sweet

Philip our pastor and his wife Sheila are away at the moment so last week Trevor took the morning meeting and Alec the evening. This week Ken led the meeting and Gareth Philip and Sheila's son gave us a message. It was the first time he had done this, he has shared testimonies with us before how the Lord is working in his life but this was the first time he spoke on a scripture passage. It really was quite amazing how the songs and the testimonies people shared all fit in. Gareth had no idea what the songs were going to be, but the Holy Spirit did :) Gareth shared with us thoughts on "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul", it was thought provoking, uplifting and challenging. All the songs earlier had been about our dependency on God, He is all I need, He is more than enough and so on. We really must do some series heart searching to make sure that God is number one in our lives and that we are not trying to gain temporal things that in the end will do us no good whatsoever, they are fleeting and they are passing away. Gareth reminded us that in and of themselves there is nothing wrong with having nice thing it is when they take first place in our lives and put God second that the problems start. Money and material things are not the problem, the problem is our attitude towards them and if we are striving for more of these things instead of striving to know more of God and walking every day in worship and service to Him then we will grow more and more spiritually weak and our witness will be ineffectual.

Afterwards I went for a BBQ with my daughters and their hubbies at Hannah (my middle daughter) and Phil's home which you can read about here. Break out the barby

The evening service was uplifting also which was taken by Alec and Susan. We were reminded that Jesus is always with us no matter what we are going through, whatever our circumstance, whatever our situation, Jesus is with us and He will either help us through it or take us out of it, either way it will be His will. You can read Alec's message on the Elim website, Think on These things Troubles and Trials and I trust it will be of great encouragement to you, and uplift you and help you in whatever circumstance you find yourself in.

Bad company corrupts good habits

Earlier in the year I was a little incensed at the weeds in my neighbours garden, why?

Because they were creeping over to my garden.

It reminded me of a verse in scripture:

1 Corinthians 15:33

 Do not be deceived: "Evil company corrupts good habits."

Now obviously, I can’t physically remove my garden from next door, what I had to do was take out the weeds as they came over. However, we are reminded in 1 Corinthians 15 of what evil company can do to us if we insist on being in their company. We are surrounded by sinners who are not saved (I was once a sinner in darkness, now I'm a sinner saved by God's grace) does that mean then that we are to take ourselves off somewhere where there isn't any? No, scripture tells us that we are in the world not of it, in other words whilst we have something to do with those around us we are not to do what they do. We don’t find their smutty jokes funny so why should we laugh at them, to be polite, no, we are not called to be polite we are called to be holy, that is, separate from the world in the way that they think about sin and ungodly living. Who you mix with, what you watch on TV and the internet, what we listen to on the radio, what kind of music we listen to, what kind of books we read all influences our spiritual life. If we spend most of our time doing what the rest of the world is doing, then our spiritual life will suffer.

We are called as Christians to be salt and light to the world and we can’t be light to the world if we are not walking in the light, Pamela talks about this in her blog, Glow in the Dark. We are to influence the unsaved and not the other way around. I kept weeding my garden I wouldn't let the weeds take hold, eventually my neighbour weeded her garden too so now it all looks lovely.

We cannot influence the unsaved around us if we are just letting their habits and sins spread into our own lives, we must be holy and let the light of Jesus shine through our lives showing others His wonderful grace and love.