Christian Fellowship

A snippet  in  the   Christian  paper Evangelicals Now caught my eye.

The writer was sitting with a young musician friend when that friend took a call from the London Symphony Orchestra.

It was the offer of work - a dream for any young musician starting out in the profession! He wrote down the dates and ended the call. Checking his diary, he noticed that one of the concerts was on the same date that his Bible study group was going away for the weekend. Without hesitating, he crossed out the LSO dates. He had a prior and more important engagement - to be among his Christian brothers and sisters listening to the words of Jesus.

This incident makes us all question the priority that we give to the Word of God and fellowship in our lives.

I was recently enjoying some pleasant fellowship with a retired minister. He was lamenting the little signs that he had heard were creeping into the life of his old congregation, those little signs of lack of hunger for Gods Word and being with the Lord’s people.

He had been hearing of folk not turning up at the evening service or attending the midweek meeting but sporadically, ‘putting in an appearance now and again’ as he put it.
Then he reminded me of the practice of his old session clerk. Now and again, visitors would call at his house for a ‘ceilidh’ on a Sunday afternoon, expecting to stay into the evening blethering and chatting.

As 6.30 approached the session clerk would say ‘Well I’m off to church now; who’s coming me? And every so often, of a Sunday evening, you would see him with a crowd of visitors in tow, walking down the aisle! Calum was putting the Lord ahead of everything [and everyone] else.

And I ask, ‘Have we lost that spirit, the spirit that puts God and His ordinances first, that wants to be under the sound of the Word with others?’ I think we are losing that spirit. And we cannot possibly be the better for that.

You might think that being ‘casual’ about commitment is a sign of ‘being grown up’, of adults thinking for themselves: we’ve now outgrown trotting along to church like kids being told what to do…

Someone recently said
“Increasing adults behave like teenagers and want to sit on the fence and hang loose , only going where they feel good and never get involved.”
He was writing about local congregations. Where is our spine? backbone?

It is the lack of this quality of ’stickability’ that is such a drawback to the work of God in our day.

Does the slightest thing become an excuse not to go to a service or a meeting? Or maybe something has got us into a ’state’ - is that an excuse for staying away? What good will that do?

Right on our doorstep we have the opportunity of a lifetime to do something lasting for God in our disintegrating society. Let’s not allow that opportunity to slip away!