Christmas: Refiners Fire

Malachi was written during the most depressing time of Israel's history. Not the darkest, that honour goes to Judges or Lamentations, but definitely the most depressing. The Hebrews had returned from exile, been blessed with Godly leaders and rebuilt a temple, but still the people sinned, still they offered blind animals in the temple, still they married the daughters of a foreign God.

There's a depressing familiarity about all that isn't there? Your author has been blessed with loving parents, world class training, a faithful wife, and types this from an office on a million dollar campus, but he still sins, he still shows unfaithfulness, ingratitude and laziness whenever he feels like he can get away with it. And the same is true (to a greater or lesser extent) of you too.

So what's to be done? Malachi tells us. And the answer is not found in religious activity, nor moral relativism, nor a government programme, the answer is a person. This person will suddenly come to His temple, He'll turn up one day and throw out the money changers. This person is the messenger of the covenant, He has made promises to the Sons of Jacob that He will keep. And He's like refining fire.

Fire. Bad news. Fire is a terror, as Smoky the Bear reminds us every summer. Fire will burn up the alloy, and since we're all alloy, we need some good news. The good news? That sweet word, refiners. Yes we're alloy, but there's silver to be made, when we are refined.

So Christ comes to refine us. He comes to end our false worship, our spiritual adultery, our lazy sins. He comes to burn up the things in life that displease Him. He comes to help us live by the Spirit, He comes to help us choose the narrow way. He comes to save, and to sanctify. He has saved us from the penalty of sin, and He is saving us from the power of sin. Slowly but surely those joy killing weeds in our hearts are being burned up. Slowly but surely sin looks less and less attractive, and Jesus more and more.

This is the hope that Malachi held out to the faithful remnant. There won't always be blind and sick animals being sacrificed. There won't always be priests who lead their people astray, Judah won't always be a forgotten backwater, God will keep His promises. The Christ will come, committed to His people, and save them from sin.

And it's that same hope that the whole Bible holds out for us this morning. We won't always sin. One day, we'll be with the Lord, and sin will be, well, not even a memory. But before then, be encouraged, that the Lord is so committed to your happy holiness, to your refinement that He not only lived to make it happen, but He died to make it happen.

Why Does Each Gospel Sound Different?

The first four books of the New Testament report the same Gospel account, but from four different perspectives. They give the same message with differing but perfectly harmonious emphases. Matthew presents Jesus as the sovereign, whereas Mark presents Him in the extreme opposite role as servant. Luke presents Him as the Son of Man, whereas John presents Him as the Son of God. The same Jesus is shown to be both sovereign God and servant man.  

In presenting the sovereignty of Jesus, Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy of the Lord - going back to Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people through King David, Israel model King. In presenting Jesus' servanthood, Mark gives no genealogy at all, because a servant's lineage is irrelevant. In presenting Jesus as the Son of Man, Luke traces his genealogy back to the first man, Adam. In presenting Jesus as the divine Son of God, John gives no human genealogy or birth and childhood narratives. He opens up his Gospel, by giving, as it were, Jesus divine genealogy: 'in the beginning was the Word, as the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' 

John MacArthur, Matthew 1-7, pp xi-xii

John 3:16 (2)

The following is the second part of a message i recently preaching on John 3:16. I was dependent for outline in inspiration on Ray Ortland Jr's book, The Gospel, which you should buy!

The next phrase tells us what He does, He sends His only Son! This is once and for all the proof of God’s love to us. It’s a spreading love, a concrete love, a giving love. God gave willingly, and Jesus came willingly. He is the only Son! There’s no one else like Him. He doesn’t have equals, He doesn’t have a competitor, He is the only Son of God. Everything in the Bible leads up to His remarkably unremarkable appearance. Every moment and movement of history is about Him and Him. He alone is our hope, our Saviour, our joy and our chance to have a relationship with God. Into our cold, dark, loveless world, stepped love, and light and hope Himself. Only Jesus is the proof that God loves us.

And what a love it is! Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to give us a how-to program, or twelve steps to a better weekend. He came to start humanity all over again. He didn’t come to give us things to do, He came to make us new. Jesus life was obedient to God. We don’t do that, we can’t obey God, we can’t live lives that line up fully with His Word. We can’t obey. Jesus death was sacrificial. That was the plan all along, and we can’t do that. We can’t die for someone else’s sins, and our death doesn’t rescue us from the punishment our sins deserve. Jesus resurrection was victorious. That’s what we need. We need victory over sin, we need rescue from death. But we can’t do it. We can’t do anything we need so Jesus did all of it. Jesus is everything we could never be!

Our culture, and every religion is based on the idea of people getting what they deserve. In the Gospel we learn that we deserve nothing, but that because He loves us, in Christ, God gives us everything.

And this love saves us from death, and gives us life. whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Those are the only two options on the table. Death or life. Death doesn’t mean to cease or to stop. It doesn’t mean oblivion. It means the everlasting torment of eternity away from the love of God. Away from the goodness of God, in the cold, dark, sin filled place called Hell. That’s one choice, and the other choice is life. Life is know Jesus Christ, life is the opposite of the horrors of Hell, it’s the joys of Heaven. But those are the only two choices. We don’t like to think about death, we don’t like words like perish, but we’re forced to by this verse.

So how can we escape perishing? How can we make sure we’re headed for life not death? How can we be sure that Christ’s death pays for our sins? Because of the phrase we skipped. Whoever believes in Him. Believes doesn’t mean what we often think it means. It doesn’t mean to agree with something or like something. like believing in recess or ice-cream. It means to become part of, to believe into. The one who believes has Christ as the centre of their life, and the centre of their plans. He’s not the side dish anymore, He’s not a weekend distraction, He’s the main course.

What matters then is not how good or how bad we are, but whether or not we believe in Christ. Whether or not we’re ‘in Him.’ God, in His love, has proved His love by giving us His Son. We must walk out of the darkness into the light and accept Him, or face everlasting death. God has made things simple, do you believe in Jesus? Are you 'in' Him?

John 3:16 (1)

The following comes from a recent message i preached on John 3:16. I was dependent for outline and inspiration on Ray Ortland Jr's excellent book, The Gospel, which you should go and buy.

I was reading the other day that more than 75% of car wrecks take place less than 10 minutes from where the people involved in the wrecks live. Most of the wrecks you get into will be within walking distance fo your own front door, or the front door of the other person in the wreck. This was because when we get close to home, and on familiar roads, we pay less attention that in a place that we don’t know very well. I think we have the same danger with tonight’s Bible verse. We are so familiar with John 3:16 we could probably quote it in our sleep. But this is the most famous verse in the Bible for a reason, and it’s a reason worth paying attention to.

It’s the most succinct, meaning short and accurate, presentation of the Gospel. John 3:16 is about the Gospel and you, so let’s walk thru it one phrase at a time and see what truth we can unpack from it. And as we do, let’s be praying that the Lord would speak to our hearts, and help us understand the truth of the Gospel in this verse.

For God so loved the world. What we think about when we think about God is the most important thing about us. If we think God is a cat, or an ice cream, that’s going to impact the way we live. If we don’t think there is any God at all, that’s going to impact the way we live. A lot of people think God is just a friendly old man in the sky. He wishes we’d do better, love more and sin less, but he loves us anyway. He’s a bit lonely, a bit boring, and just loves it when we come and visit with him. That’s the view that a lot of people, even in the church, have of God.

But that’s not who God is at all. In Genesis 17:1 God says, ‘I am God almighty.’ He is almighty! There’s no one that compares with Him, there’s no one who can approach Him in power and control and might. He needs to tell us that He is almighty because we so often forget. We need to remember, when we’re hopeless, when all the odd seem against us, when we seem to have no future, that God is almighty! We don’t have to dream or expect small things from God, we can do dream big and attempt great things fo us. This is who God is! Almighty!

And, we’re told, God loves the world. This is a surprise, or at least it should be. The world is not lovely. You and I are not lovely, our culture is not lovely. We are not lovable. But God is. God is lovely, and His love overflows onto and into you and me! God is light, but you and I love darkness. We’d rather have things our own way all the time in the darkness of sin that step out into the love of God. This is how we’re born. In John 3:19 we’re told that ‘light came into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.’ We reject God, the light, and so does our culture, because our deeds are evil. Remember when Jesus was fishing with the disciples, and because of Him they pulled in so many fish that their nets broke? Peter told Jesus to get away from Him because he was a sinful man. Our sin can not bear to be near the holiness of God. Isaiah cried out ‘woe is me,’ when he saw the light of God in Isaiah 6.

There’s a great movement in our culture at the moment that the most important thing is self esteem. The most important thing is that we feel good about ourselves. The great sin of 2014 is making someone feel bad about themselves. The Bible tells us that our problem is we don’t feel bad enough about ourselves. We don’t realize how deadly our sin is, we don’t realize how evil our rebellion against God is. When we do realize that, we realize all the more how extraordinary God’s love for us is. God would be perfectly just if He cast us off into the hopeless, cold, dark world we’ve created for ourselves. But He doesn’t...

Grace Filled Community

The following is from 'No Other Gospel; 31 reasons from Galatians that salvation is by faith alone', by Josh Moody, p259.

Here are five comparisons of a legalistic community and a grace-filled one.

1) A grace filled community seeks to restore those who make a misstep, whereas a legalistic community  condemns them.

2) In a grace filled community, the mature are those who, like Jesus, reach out to restore and save, whereas in a legalistic community, those held up for honour are, like the Pharisees, seemingly able to achieve more personal, if superficial, moral attainment than others.

3) A grace filled community encourages those who are secure and have an appropriate self-confidence, which is really a confidence in what God is doing in their lives through faith in Christ, whereas a legalistic community encourages insecure individuals to try and prove their worth by being better than others.

4) A grace filled community is full of individuals who think very little of themselves, not because they do not have self worth but because they are thinking of others, and how they can help them, whereas a legalistic community is full of individuals who think highly of themselves and are thus self-decieved. Anything good comes from God, for naturally none of us is good.

5) A grace filled community is filled with energy service and outreach. Each one carries his load of restoration, other peoples burdens, whereas a legalistic community is full of individuals who do very little, because they are always wondering about whether they've done enough to be saved. Rather than focussing on what God has done, they are focussed on what they need to do.

What did the Lamb Do?

The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and said, 'behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.'

John 1:29

Isn't it good news that Jesus takes away our sin? That he covers it, atones for it and ransoms us from it's penalty and power. It's the shed blood of Jesus, and His substitution death and resurrection that makes the good news good.

When John the Baptist sees Jesus and calls Him the lamb of God he is speaking fluent Old Testament . What was the purpose of the lamb? To die, to shed blood, to cover the sins of God's people. Once a year on the day of atonement, the priest would enter the most holy place, sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat, and when he came out into the daylight again Israel breathed a sigh of relief knowing that another's blood had been accepted as a sacrifice for their sin. Their sin demanded death, and death had occurred.

Those lambs didn't die as an example. They didn't die to show people how to obey, or how much it costs to follow God. They died to cover sin. And Jesus is the ultimate one who died to cover sin. The death of a lamb can not pay for the sin of a man. If i write off your car, you're not satisfied when i draw you a picture of a car and give that to you. Justice has not been served, and God is just.

It's good news that Jesus didn't come to set us an example. It's good news that we're not supposed to have faith in God like Jesus had faith in God. Good, good news.How monumentally depressing it would be to sit in the side room off my kitchen, cradling my coffee, trying to warm my heart up with the news that Jesus was my example. That's awful news, bad news, heart cooling news. Imagine saying, every morning, today, you must be holy like Jesus, you must be pure like Jesus, you must love God like Jesus, you must love man like Jesus, and if you don't, you've no hope. I just wouldn't get out of bed.

Instead, much better news the Gospel brings. Jesus purity paid for my impurity. His white hot devotion covers my mumbled inattentiveness, His obedience covers my disobedience and His love my selfishness. What extraordinary news! What liberating news! I'm not supposed to have faith in God like Jesus had faith in God, i'm supposed to have faith in Jesus.

In His life lived for me, His body broken for me, His blood shed for me, His resurrection won for me. In His wounds i find comfort, because they don't say 'do better,' they say 'job done.' The risen Christ doesn't say 'go thou and do likewise,' He says 'come and have breakfast.'

Then, and only then, if my service worth a rip. When i remember the 'dones' of the Gospel, my 'dos' are the overflow of love, of joy at the death Christ died for me. To take the substitution of Christ out of the call to obey is to gut the Gospel of it's goodness and power. Christ has come to take away your sin, rejoice, and have faith in Him.

My Dear Galatians...Pow!

Letter writers are affectionate people aren't they? I'd never really thought of it before, but how often in the course of normal conversation do we greet people with 'my dear?' But when we write letters, we do it all the time. It's just convention of course, the letters we write to the bank, or the health insurance company, or the taxman might not end up very affectionate!

Letter writer's in Paul's time had conventions too. Introductions, greetings, and a wish for beneficence. Paul normally followed this tradition, but not when he wrote to the Galatians. His letter to them opens with more of a punch in the face than a kiss on the cheek.

Why? Because important matters were at hand, and time couldn't be wasted. The Galatians, by their actions if not their words, were denying the Gospel. They were turning away from the Gospel to 'another' Gospel, really no Gospel at all, and were risking anathema because of it. This was no time for convention, this was a time to confront his readers with the reality, the very God-ness of God.

How does he do that? He starts by reminding his readers who he is. He's an apostle, sent by Jesus, for Jesus, to them. Sent by God, not by another man, with God's message, not the message of another man. It was a message that had cost him a lot, a message that would eventually cost him his life. He didn't care to be made much of, like his opponents. The Galatians were challenged about who they were listening to, and why they were listening. We live in a culture of a million voices don't we. Voices on tv, on the internet, in the workplace, in the culture. Who are we listening to? God's messengers, or the world. The divinely commissioned Apostle or the Judaizers? God, or man?

Paul then reminds his readers why these things matter so much. He reminds them that God the Father has raised Jesus from the dead. They didn't gather to worship a dead icon. Jesus isn't a new Moses, helpful and holy, but dead. He's alive. And because He's alive, prayer works, and repentance is free, but sin is deadly and abandoning the Gospel suicidal. Paul reminds the Galatians, and us, that church is not a game. Jesus is alive, so don't turn away from Him. Jesus is alive, and has proved Himself by walking out of the tomb, it's astonishing that you leave him as soon as you see something shiny. The Galatians, and us. Paul doesn't leave us with the option of a Gospel-lite, of adding a Jesus layer to our American dream. Jesus is alive, so desecrate the altars of your idols. Who is our Gospel about? God, or man?

And Paul reminds is in verse 2 that we're all in this together. He doesn't need the authority of 'all the brothers who are with me,' but he has it. The Gospel wasn't Paul idea, the brothers are with him, the brothers that God has saved and added. Are you with the brothers? Galatians, are you with the brothers in Jerusalem, in Antioch, or Corinth and in Thessaloniki? Or have you abandoned us? Are we with the brothers in Greenville, Reading, Provo and Seoul or have we abandoned them?  If we've abandoned the brothers with our bodies, maybe it's because we've abandoned the Father with our heart.

Paul never got over being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus. He was overflowing with His Savior till his dying breath. He knew what was of God, and what was of man, and he was prepared to pack a punch with that truth...even when he was saying hello.

Nothing Thrills Like the Gospel

One of the marks of Gospel wakefulness is the the failure of anything else to thrill the soul like the Gospel. When the heart enjoys Christ and savours His power, sin grows bitter. Even good gifts that God made recede to their proper flavours. Good things that we have made 'god things' don't cease to be good; in fact they continue to provide pleasures and satisfactions but they keep their proper functions and blessings in service to the common grace the God of glory ascribed to them. 

Gospel wakefulness doesn't lead to asceticism. It does not lead to a withdrawal from society and simple pleasures into a monastic regimen. Rather, Gospel wakefulness is foremost about orienting your spiritual system around the sun. When the sun is the center of the solar system, the planets don't cease to exist. In fact they exist more securely, more beautifully, in their proper positions and proportions. With God at the centre of your universe of worship, with the Gospel at the centre of your life all other good gifts -peoples and pleasures, thoughts and things - take their proper place and proportion in our lives. They are more pleasing and enjoyable because they give the pleasures they are designed to give and no more. 

Gospel Wakefulness, Jared C. Wilson, Pp 59-60

Book Review: Gospel Deeps

Have you ever walked around your local book store, whether Christian or secular? Have you looked at what the popular books are? Self help books, dieting books, Amish fiction and children who 'went to heaven.' It's a brave man that writes books that fall into none of these categories.

Gospel Deeps is the third book i've read by Jared C. Wilson, following the excellent Your Jesus is too Safe, and the stellar Gospel Wakefulness. In those books Wilson pulled no punches in getting us away from 'Six flags over Jesus' and confronting us with the rugged, terrifying, comforting beauty of our Lord. Gospel Deeps is not a self help book. There are no 'six steps to going deep' in this book. There's no plan to change your life in thirty days, nothing that will fix your teenager by tomorrow evening. It's a breath of fresh air.

In last years Gospel Wakefulness, and in Gospel Deeps, Wilson shares something of his story with us, how he was brought, mercifully to the end of himself one day, lying on the carpet of his spare room. He's a man worth listening to because he knows the depths of Christ-less despair are matched only by the depths of Christ centred joy.

In ten chapters Wilson invites us to revel in the joy the Gospel, to glut ourselves on grace. He reminds us of the Gospel, he delights in the trinity, he calls us to remember the joy of fellowship with Christ and tells us again of the sharp, deathly edge to the atonement for sin. He doesn't hide from suffering, and shows us that God does indeed keep his best wine in the cellar of affliction. He rubs our hearts in the sheer bigness of the Gospel, and soothes our hearts with the immanence of our God.

Not a self help book. A helpful book.

You and I, your church, my church, The Church, we don't to spend our time analyzing and moralising, we need to spend our time remembering and proclaiming. We need to remember that the Gospel is the A-Z, the beginning and the end, we need to remember, and bathe, in the depths of the Gospel.

There is nothing new in this book, and that is the best recommendation i can give you. It reminds us, calls us, and allures us to the sweetness of the Gospel. And that's what we need.

Run, don't walk, to buy this book.

The Rebel Loving Lord

In Luke 24 Jesus explains to two of His disciples how the whole Old Testament is about Him. I like to think that He spent a lot of time on that walk to Emmaus talking about Isaiah. Isaiah is the Gospel. In sixty-six chapters the prophet unfolds holiness, judgement, sacrifice and grace, almost as explicitly as anyone in the New Testament does. Isaiah 30 is a great example of this.

If we read verses 19-33, who do we meet? We meet the Lord who teaches, and restores and fights for His people. He teaches them when to turn right and when to turn left, He restores them like a beautiful garden, and He fights for them and overcomes their enemies, earthly and cosmic, forever. I love the mixture of intimacy and fierceness in this passage. The intimacy of the one who whispers 'right' or 'left' in our ears, the gentleness of the one who plants and waters and gives growth, and the fierceness of the one whose arm will be seen in furious anger.

This would be an astonishing passage if it were addressed to a covenant keeping people. To a people who observed Passover  didn't trade on the Sabbath  didn't worship bits of wood or indulge in whatever sinful fancy came their way. This sort of God would be a remarkably gracious God if He was teaching and nourishing and fighting for a people who loved Him and honoured Him. How much more should our minds be blown and our hearts be warmed then, that this God is offering all this to a people with their back turned to Him.

Go back a page, and look at 30:1-17. What's happening? The stubborn children of Israel, under attack from Assyria have gone to Egypt for help. Chapters 28-31 contain some of Isaiah's most passionate preaching. He implores his listeners to trust in the Lord, not in chariots, to hope in the One who brought them out of Egypt, not in Egypt. But they don't listen. They rush to Egypt, they take treasure, they give themselves totally to Egypt, totally to what their flesh can see. And it's a disaster.

Sennacherib marches on through Judah, burning up town after town. Only the miraculous intervention of the Lord Himself stops them razing Jerusalem. And this happens because Hezekiah finally sees sense, and finally repents.

Verse 18 is the hinge on which this great chapter turns.The Lord waits to be gracious. He knows repentance is coming, and Isaiah promises his listeners that it will be received. In fact the Lord loves to show mercy to sinners, He loves to display His grace, the apex of His glory. He doesn't wait passively, He's not sitting around anxiously hoping that Hezekiah will lead His people in repentance, but He will wait until the right time to show Himself mighty, and gracious, and glorious.

In Mark 2:17 Jesus tells us that He came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Sinners like Judah in Isaiah's time. Sinners who worship idols and turn to Egypt. Are you a sinner? Do you feel like your rebellion has taken you far from the grace of God? Great! That's the one qualification for entry to the Kingdom! Only repent, and the Lord will teach you, in this life and eternally. The Lord will nourish you, and you'll enter paradise, the Lord will fight for you, and finally overcome the enemies that Jesus disarmed on the cross.

Let your mind be blown, and let you heart be warmed by this God, the rebel loving Lord.

Twelve Ordinary Men

I'm enjoying taking a long look at Jesus as i aim to preach through Mark's Gospel verse by verse with my teen group. We started slowly, but as Mark picks up the pace, so have we. Last week we were in Mark 3:7-35 and i was struck by how Mark weaves his narratives around his themes.

Mark's Gospel is written to answer Jesus' question to Peter in chapter 8. 'Who do you say I am?' Mark's Gospel drives towards the cross in a car marked 'kingdom,' and 'eucatastrophe.' How does Mark work out those themes in a narration as apparently straight forward as the calling of the twelve Apostles?

First of all, why twelve? John Macarthur sees this as judgement on Israel. The twelve tribes have been replaced by twelve men. As Jesus has taken refuge outside of the city because of the plot to kill Him, and expanded His ministry twelve-fold, so he tells Israel that He's moving on and starting again. It's these twelve, minus Judas, plus Mattias who have their names in precious stone around the Heavenly city. These men who have been directly appointed by God incarnate to carry on His mission. Not the Pharisees, not even Jesus' family, but these twelve men. The old has gone, the new has come. We new new wine, here are our new skins.

Jesus' family appears in Mark 3 as well. They come to take Him home in verse 21, thinking that He was out of His mind. Which is a fair assumption, given what He was doing. And then again in verse 31, asking for His attention to be on them. A perfectly legitimate demand in that culture. What is Jesus response? He tells His listeners that a new thing is happening, that the way into the Kingdom of God is now through faith and nothing else.

Who were these twelve men? Some of them we know fairly well. Simon Peter, James, John, Matthew and of course Judas. Some vanish from the pages of Scripture as soon as we hear their names. But this is a close group, this is a group where your name may not be your name. There's Simon the rock, James the short guy, the sons of thunder, Simon the zealot, who might have killed Matthew if they'd met under other circumstances. There's Thomas, the twin who doubted, there's Nathanael Bartholomew, and Thaddeus, which apparently means 'mamas boy.' And as always, as a constant and terrible reminder, is Judas.

Not noblemen, fishermen, farmers, people from the fringes of society. Not the intellectual elite, but Galileans. And Jesus says, 'such shall my Kingdom be.' Not for the people you might expect, but for those i call. Not for those who look good on the outside but for those who are changed on the inside. Out with the old, and in with the new.

It's easy to think that Jesus turned the world upside down, but He actually turned it the right way up. Mark uses something as potentially mundane as the calling of the Apostles to help us see this.

Don't Lose Focus on Sunday Mornings

Sunday morning's service was busy. We had the usual welcome and announcements to make, offering to collect and message to be preached. We also had a separate offering for our mission trip to Utah, a baby dedication,  baptisms and people coming into membership. It felt like a lot to fit into an hour and a quarter, and more than that, if felt like a lot was going on apart from the preaching!


How do we avoid losing focus on a Sunday morning. How to keep from slipping out of our busy week into a busy Sunday morning and end up not meeting with God at all? 


First of all, i believe our Sunday mornings are bathed in prayer. We pray throughout the week and throughout the morning, asking God to be honoured and God to speak during our meeting time. The best way to lose focus on God, is to stop praying. When we don't pray, we're liable to work in our own strength, pointing people toward our own wisdom and trying have our needs met. 


Secondly, everything we did on Sunday pointed backwards and forwards to the Gospel. We gave our money joyfully to support the cause of Gospel in Greenville and beyond. We welcomed new members to our church, covenanting with them. We baptised, and we were reminded of Christ's death and resurrection as believers went under the water and rose back up again. We sang songs that reminded us of the depth of our need and the fulfillment of Christ.


And finally, the Gospel was preached. The Bible was opened and God's man was God's mouthpiece. Everything we did was driven by the Gospel, everything we did served the Gospel. 


The main thing is the keep the main thing the main thing. As the Gospel bears fruit in people's lives, it will produce busier church services. And that is good, and Sunday was very good. If the Gospel is the centre, the church will grow, and God will be honoured, and focus will not be lost.