Many schools started a new school year this week. It seems like the summer breaks for our school age children and those who work in our educational systems gets shorter each year. Please continue to pray for our students, teachers and administrators as they begin a new school year. Hopefully, you have made time to spend with your family over the summer. Spending time together will build memories that will last forever. Even when it may seem our children aren’t paying attention or are not interested, years later the memories will come back to them of a time well spent together. As our family has occasions to be together, we recall events and tell stories of events that happened when we were growing up together. The best times together were spent worshipping.
We grew up in a small town in a rural area and had a close bond with all the families who worshipped together. We spent a lot of time together even outside of worship. We had two gospel meetings each year. Each one would be a full week. The minister who had been invited to speak would spend the week with some of the members of the church visiting people in the community, studying with them, and inviting them to the gospel meeting. Each night of the meeting, our building would be full. We would have to pull out folding chairs to put in the isles and everywhere we could find a space to put them to have enough places for people to sit. We heard sermons that were focused on the goodness of God and the eternal blessings through Christ and His church. We also heard sermons on the terror of being lost eternally. When the Lord’s invitation was given, people responded.
This same thing would happen at all the congregations around us. Many times, it would be the same men preaching that had just preached in our meeting. We would attend all those meetings as well, many times hearing the same sermons but it never got old. We just concluded our gospel meeting at Walter Hill with Allen Webster. I couldn’t help but to think back on the days of my childhood and the gospel meetings with a church building full of people hungry to hear the gospel preached. The best family time together is spent worshipping together.
Consider Psalm 122:1, I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the Lord.”