Dear Pastor and Brethren:
Thanksgiving Praise!
Our hearts are full of the joy of the Lord as we contemplate all of His blessings to us.
They are ours daily as we read His Word and meditate there upon. If we did not have the Word of God, we would know absolutely nothing about spiritual things. We would not know that we are sinners. We would be ignorant of the wrath of God. We would not know of coming judgment. We would not know that there is a Savior, and we would not know anything of the love of God at all. I believe that there exists in our world, people who are in such ignorance. They are all around us. Although there is much religion, most of it is false. The god they profess to worship is a false god, and the religion they follow is religious philosophy, vain in substance. I thank and praise the God of gods and the Lord of lords for revealing Himself to me through the message of His Holy Word and the ministry of the Holy Spirit of God who drew me unto the Lord Jesus Christ. These spiritual blessings and many more are the foundation of all other temporal blessings. Without them, life would be all in vain, shallow, and presumptuous, the life that the majority of the human race is now living.
Ministry Praises!
Although we have had some sickness among those that come to our services, we have the sweet Spirit of the Lord in our midst in all of our services, and I want to list a few of the blessings within the ministry. The Stiners visited us once again, and LaShonda Dale and her boys came twice during the month. LaShonda is a single mother who goes to college during the day and works all night to support her family. She needs our prayers and encouragement because she has one more semester at school and then will graduate. The men’s prayer meeting that we have each Sunday before the morning service is a time of pouring out our hearts before the Lord in intercession for our spiritual and temporal needs. My heart is often moved by the earnestness of the words that our brethren utter before the Lord. They prepare my heart and mind for the preaching of God’s Word. Another blessing is the singing in which we engage ourselves before the Thursday evening service. Most of the brethren come early, and we start singing from the hymnal in an attempt to learn new hymns to sing for the regular services. Finally, after every service we experience a phenomena that I have only experienced once before, and that on the foreign mission field when we were in Spain. After preaching for 45 minutes or so and dismissing the service with prayer, everyone sits back down and begins to converse about spiritual things on some theme or another. This goes on for at least another thirty minutes and is sweet fellowship for all ofus! Brethren, please continue to pray for us!
By His grace and in loving gratitude,