Contemporary Praise

By Steven Skelley

Saturday evenings have been a blast! We start at 6:30 pm with a coffee and dessert fellowship time which includes an open microphone session where you can share a song, poem or testimony.

At 7:00 pm, our worship service begins. We learn some of the best modern praise songs, pray for people’s needs, share praise reports, and hear a relevant message in every day language. We’re spending most of this year with sermon messages on each book of our New Testament Bibles. Every month we also celebrate communion together.

We have had number of first time visitors. We have had a very positive response. We haven’t heard any negative comments.

We all want to thank everyone who has supported this new outreach ministry. Thank you for attending, for set-up and tear-down, for the snacks and for all your encouragement. This is such a special congregation. We are blessed!

Walking on the Path

By Patience Nave

“By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. 

Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.”  John 15:8-9 AMS

     We have a fig tree out in the back yard, and for years it has borne nothing but leaves!  I planted it when we first came here, hoping for a wonderful crop of figs each summer, but no figs came.  I watered and fertilized and pruned, and it grew taller and taller, wider and wider!  But still no figs! 

     Several years ago, Wallace said, “That tree has got to go!  It is worthless—no fruit and not even any shade.”  Only because I begged him not to cut it down did it stay.  And this year, we are glad.  It is absolutely full of big, juicy figs that we regularly enjoy with a little cream and sugar for breakfast.

     I looked at it rather critically the other day.  It isn’t doing anything that it hasn’t always done.  I don’t even water and fertilize anymore.  It just stands there, abiding in the ground where we planted it, but now bears fruit.  I couldn’t make the figs happen.  They just did. 

 

     I treat my own life the same way I treated the tree.  I try to make my life produce things, but all the straining and effort on my part to be a “fruit bearing Christian” are to no avail.  The fruit only comes when I “abide in Jesus” and in His love.  “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,” says the Lord of hosts.  (Zechariah 4:6, ASV) 

I am not supposed to make “the fruit” come.  I am only to love Him and truly seek daily to do those things that he has shown me, and somehow the fruit just appears!  What a marvelous comfort to be able to rest in what He is doing in our lives and leave the “fruit bearing” to Him!

 

Prayer:  Father, bring us ever closer to You so that our lives will bear much fruit!  You promised that, as we abide in you and in Your love, the fruit will appear.  And Lord, make our fruit so sweet that others will enjoy it, just as we are enjoying the sweet fruit of your fig tree.  Amen