“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” John 13:34-35

There were two brothers who fought all the time while growing up. One day the mother asked why they fought. The older brother responded with, “Because it’s fun to fight.” While the younger said, “We fight because we love each other.”

I have one brother who is eight years older than me. Even with that age difference we fought. Actually, he fought and I received. He enjoyed holding me down and bearing his knuckles into my head as he rubbed back and forth to make me cry and scream. The kicking and screaming I did usually annoyed my mother. There are times my mother would tell us that we had to hug and make up. We didn’t like that hugging stuff but it didn’t stop us from fighting.

My dad had a better way to stop the fighting. He would say, “If you don’t stop fighting, I’m going to make you get down in the floor and pray with each other.” No way did we want to pray with each other so when dad was around we didn’t fight. We wanted to but we didn’t.

In the Bible, James asked a question about where disagreements come from among believers. James 4:1 says, “From whence come wars and fightings among you?” Conflicts occur because of selfish desires from within us. I wonder if when we fought within the church family that God would make us get down in the floor and pray together if churches would have less conflict? It’s difficult to be mad at someone you are earnestly praying for. It seems our desires become less important and the desires of another become more important.

Bro. Larry

P.S. You’ve most likely notice that there were no emails for the past two weeks. I had knee replacement and getting back to normal.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” Proverbs 29:18 KJV

Many of you are like me and have given the majority of your life to the church. There are both ups and downs but I wouldn’t want to trade my experiences for anything. The church is based on the reality that we are the body of Christ – living, breathing, and doing what His work is.

Take time to examine your life in Christ in direct correlation to your involvement in the body (church). In order for any church to be successfully moving the congregation through positive actions and attitude we need to be sure of a few things.

The Right View of God’s Church

No matter how messed up the church universal or even our local church, we have to believe in it. Here is the right view: the church is the hope of the world – when it’s working right. We are the hope for your children, grandchildren, etc. In Jesus’ words, we are “the light of the world.” In getting the view right, we need to understand that the church isn’t a building. The church is the people of God.

The Right View of Self

You and I are saved by grace through faith, and this is not of ourselves, it is of God. And every converted sinner is a saved sinner delivered from sin and wrath. Thus, since we are all members of God’s family, we are not perfect (there will be faults and sins) but we have a perfect God who has forgiven us by His marvelous grace. We are described as a new creation in Christ (2nd Corinthians 5:17).

The Right View of Worship

Worship is giving God His worth-ship (the honor and praise He rightly deserves). We primarily think of worship in a public setting through the local church. Do we give our all to Him in worth-ship in our daily living? Think about that.

Bro. Larry

During a revival service in 2006, a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma saw a 58 year-old man suffer a heart attack and fall back into his pew. Since people around were experiencing God, they assumed him to have become overtaken by the service. At the end of an extremely long service at 11PM, when the service wound down, people noticed that the man had not moved for at least two hours. They also noticed he was blue. That’s when they knew something was wrong.

They called 911 while people prayed passionately for the man’s healing but he was “pretty cold by then,” says one observer. The ambulance arrived and took him to the county hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The pastor responded to the media with, “We want people to meet with God at our meetings, but not face to face.”

I’m sure that placed a new emphasis on the remainder of the revival services.

We can define revival as a period of unusual blessing and activity in the life of the church. Revival means awakening, stimulating the life, bringing it to the surface again. Revival is not intended to cause death but to bring life to individuals and to the church. It happens in the church amongst believing people, and affects those that are outside also. Now this is a most important point, because this definition helps us to differentiate, once and for all, between a revival and an evangelistic campaign. An evangelistic campaign is the Church deciding to do something with respect to those who are outside. A revival is not the Church deciding to do something and doing it. It is something that is done to the Church, something that happens to the Church.

Bro. Larry

“Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.” Exodus 20:9-10

Earlier this week on Monday we celebrated a holiday called “Labor Day.” We tend to celebrate it as the last big fling of summer with cook-outs, trips to the lake, etc. Labor Day was created in the early 1900s to allow workers a day off from their labors as an honor for their efforts. In 1940, the revised Fair Labor Standards Act established the 40-hour workweek. Any work above 40 hours was classified as overtime and required a higher rate of pay.

Yet some successful businessmen, organizations, and governments feel we need to be logging more of our 168 weekly hours at work. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (China’s version of Amazon), “is a big fan of extreme overwork” and recently praised the “996” schedule. Those numbers stand for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days per week. Ma, the richest man in China, called the 12-hour workday a “blessing.” Even the state-run media railed against Ma’s blog about work and called the 996 “unfair and impractical.” Tesla’s Elon Musk claims “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

Uber used to rally behind the slogan, “work smarter, harder, and longer,” and WeWork uses its co-working spaces to post the phrase, “don’t stop when you’re tired; stop when you’re done.”

There is sufficient research that shows that people who work more than 55 hours a week “perform worse than those who go home at a normal hour and rest.” Work was God’s gift to man before the Fall, but the curse of sin has altered work and our understanding of it ever since.

Bro. Larry

* Quotes referenced in Newsweek.

Traditionally, May and June have been the most popular months for weddings. One of my daughters even had a May wedding. I recently read an article that the month of August is competing for the number one wedding month by gaining in the numbers of weddings performed.

Today, there is more to discuss than what month is the most popular for wedding ceremonies. Morality issues of same sex marriages, the popularity of divorce, and couples living together outside of marriage threaten the God-given covenant of marriage. During the past few years, immorality in relationships of couples has sank to a new low with the LGBT movement involving same sex marriages. The God-established marriage is at risk.

A gentleman in his forties, who had never been married, told me, “I don’t have anything against marriages. Marriage is a great institution. But, who wants to spend the rest of their life in an institution?” Marriages have been called institutions, family units, a partnership, a team sport, and even a war zone. One man said that his house was like a war zone and reminded him of the Battle of Armageddon. Marriages are too often like war zones and were never meant to be that way.

The most intriguing description of marriage was as “a team sport.” Teams come together to compete, learn, grow, and win, and that speaks somewhat about marriage. But thinking about marriage as a “T.E.A.M. sport” goes even further. T.E.A.M. stands for “Together Each Achieves More.” Two people of opposite sexes, personalities, backgrounds, etc. coming together as one to achieve more . . . more in life and more in honoring the Lord. Not only is marriage a TEAM Sport, it is the ultimate TEAM Sport. Join the team with your spouse pulling together for victory in your marriage.

The words of Jesus spoke of marriage as a oneness, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:5-6).

Bro. Larry