Dear Brethren,
We have our pre-Church anniversary services today and on Wednesday Midweek service along with the observance of the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. Let us individually and corporately continue to sincerely and humbly pray, prepare, and be present in all these worship services and gatherings, and diligently perform our respective ministry assignments, duties, and responsibilities. Ministry is a stewardship, and the Bible is very clear that God has called all of us to be faithful and good stewards. The Bible in I Peter 4:10 distinctly exhorts, “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
We continue to steward faithfully and diligently as a Church and individual member of His Body, God’s manifold grace, particularly the Gospel we gratefully received and was consequently entrusted to share to the rest of the lost world. We thank God for the 64 years of His enabling and sustaining great grace in doing so as His representative Body in this part of the world. Truly we can testify, as the Psalmist would declare in Psalm 126:3, “The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.”
My dear brethren, it is vitally important that we understand, as members of Bethany, that every one of us is a minister. We are to realize that all of us are in the ministry together. And as such, we are to faithfully and diligently steward what God has gifted us, and called us to do. We are to keep the main thing of reaching the lost with the Gospel, the main thing in our Church function, to the glory of God!
As we formally celebrate next Sunday God’s great grace in those 64 years, we again emphasize through the highlight 18th World Missions Conference our basic purpose and thrust of being on-Mission with God, wholeheartedly committed to CONTINUE with courage, conviction, and confidence in our Biblical Mandate of carrying-out Christ’s Great Commission.
All By God’s Grace and For God’s Glory!
Pastor Gerry Nable