Such As I Have Give I Unto Thee

During the month of January, I am teaching a series in Sunday School on "How To Lead Others To Christ." I'm thankful that on the whole, our church members are unashamed to identify with Christ. They are constantly requesting Gospel tracts to hand out, consistently bringing friends, family, and neighbors to church, and continually taking flak for their faith in Jesus Christ. However, when it comes to Christians being able to personally lead a soul to Christ, we need to grow. We have some who are very competent in that area, but not enough. 

Two Sundays ago, after I preached from Acts 8 about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, a good number of our people raised their hand in the invitation to express the following decision: "I have never personally led someone to Christ, but with God's help, I want to establish a goal this year to both learn how to lead a soul to Christ and actually lead someone to Christ." I would like to ask my blog readers who pray for our ministry to make this issue a matter of prayer in 2013. 

Interestingly, just a few days after preaching this message, I was reading a devotional by Charles Spurgeon and I came across this:

Bible Memory Awards

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. 

My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth."     

Psalm 121:1-2

Next Sunday we will be presenting some awards for this past year's Bible memory efforts in our church. The awards include some new Bibles as well as some beautiful, framed Scripture pictures (one of them is pictured above), depending on how many verses each person said. I am always touched by how desirable these simple prizes are to our church people. Yesterday I bought two new kinds of Bibles that have just been printed, and I showed them around after last night's church service. Everybody loved them! One of the young ladies didn't say much or step forward to look at the new Bibles. When I asked her if she wanted to take a look, she sighed and said, "No, it will just make me sorry I didn't memorize more verses." I'm still waiting for the final list from my verse monitors, but when I get the final number of verses quoted, I'll include it in the next email update.  I'm looking forward to next Sunday when we will get to award these Bibles and pictures. This year's pictures turned out so nice that I wanted to share them with my blog readers. Enjoy!

Benefiting From The Bible

If you asked the average Christian which book means the most to them out of every book they have ever read or owned, I believe most would say the Bible.  But although we talk about the Bible a lot, I wonder how many Christians are literally benefiting from it in a real and practical way on a regular basis. We don't get the benefits of God's Word by setting a Bible on the coffee table. Carrying your Bible to church every Sunday will not give you some kind of magical blessing from God. There is a process, some prerequisites if you will, which will ensure that you will receive the benefits that God wants to provide through His Word.

In Psalm 119:161-176 we see the progress of a man's relationship with the Word of God which ultimately culminated in great personal benefit. These progressive steps actually form a cycle which can keep itself going indefinitely. Some spiritual cycles in life are negative, like a rut. For example, the cycle found in the book of Judges as the Children of Israel constantly went from sin to servitude to supplication to salvation...and back to sin again. But the cycle in Psalm 119 is not a negative one. It is an extremely positive and helpful cycle which will keep the benefits of God's Holy Word flowing into a person's life.

1. Assessment

The first prerequisite to receiving benefit from the Bible is that one must have a proper assessment of it. If you do not consider the Bible to in fact be God's Word, if you do not value it highly, and stand in awe of it's truth and power, then you will never be helped by it. Notice what the Psalmist said in verses 161-162.