I am reminded daily of a sermon I heard in March of 2007.  It was a sermon that changed my life.  Thank you Capt. Elvi Carter from the Eastern territory.  I am sure I can not tell this as well as he did but I know the Lord will bless someone from it like he did me. 

Sunday morning came as usual in this church.  Everything was as it normally was.  We did our little welcome.  You know the one where you walk around and greet and hug everyone while you sing a song.  We said the opening prayer.  We started praise and worship.  Sometime between the first praise and worship song and the second I looked up and noticed a man had entered the chapel and had sat in the back pew bye himself.

He did not look very happy.  He sat there through praise and worship.  He sat through offering. 

The pastor began to speak.  Out of nowhere the man stood to his feat and loudly proclaimed, “I have sat here and listened to you people sing and speak of this God of love and I wanna tell you something. There is no God.  If there was a so called God that loved everyone,  my 9 year old daughter would not be laying in the hospital dying of cancer.”

One by one people of this small congregation started trying to talk to this man.  They told him stuff like, God does love everybody and He allows things to happen for a reason.  This man did not want to hear any of this “junk”.  This went on for a few minutes when the people of the congregation noticed that an elderly lady member of the church was just sitting there not saying anything to this man.  They ask her “why are you not talking to this man.  Stand up and tell this man about Gods love.”  She still sat there and just listened.  The congregation began to get upset with her.  The man turned and walked out of the chapel still yelling, “There is no God.”  The people of the congregation were very upset with this lady for not standing up and saying something.  Yet she still sat silent.

A year went by.  The elderly lady just quit coming to the church.  Nobody new why.  Sunday morning came as usual.  Everything was as it normally was.  We did our little welcome.  We had the opening prayer.  Just then a man walked in the chapel. It was that same mean man.  He stood in the back and began to speak.  “Do you remember me?  I know you do.  I just wanted to tell you something.”  He held up a picture of a little girl.  “This is my daughter.  She would have been 10 today.  I am a Christian now and I know that she is at home with the Lord.  You see the Lord reached me when I came to your church last year.  It wasn’t anything you people said though.  You know that little old lady that used to go to church here?  She helped me learn the truth.  When I left here I went back to the hospital and sat with my daughter. That lady showed up there.  She did not tell me about God or God’s love.  She just sat there with me.  Every day she came by.  She held my daughters hand, she made me home made food and brought it to me, she even washed my clothes.  You see I wasn’t ready to hear about God’s love and she knew that.  Instead she showed me.  She showed me until I was ready to hear about it.  She showed me everyday until the day she died when she looked at me and told me she was going home to be with God and that she had done all she had done for me because God loved me. 

That day I understood what God’s love truly was.  This wonderful lady had been serving me while all the time she was very ill.  She put my needs before her self.  This was a true act of love.  I began to read the Bible and found that the Lord had sent His only Son to die for me.  This was true love.  The kind of love she had shown me.”  He turned and walked out of this church again.  This time the members had nothing to say.

Are we showing God’s love to people or are we just talking about it?   

The first part of this blog is from a blog I read tonight and in reading it the Lord spoke to me and filled me with a message that I feal ever Christian in the world should hear.  Please take the time to read it all.  Thank you "Grant" for the beginning of this.

What would you do if you came to realize that your church was wrong on a major issue? Would you leave, start a new church, work for change from within, or just quit Christianity altogether? All these are typical reactions.

For instance, supposing your church taught about asking Mary in heaven to make requests of our Father in heaven for those of us on earth. One day you wake up realizing that neither Jesus nor the Apostles taught this, and you come to believe that the focus is all wrong, that Jesus taught us to pray to our Father in heaven. What would you do?

Suppose your church taught that speaking in an unknown language is mandatory initial evidence that you are filled with the Holy Spirit. However, you come to realize that this is dubious theology and that even non-Christians have a similar experience, and wonder whether or not this modern phenomenon is even related to the biblical experience. What would you do?

Suppose you wake up some day to find that your church's teachings in a particular area are based upon prejudice, ignorance, superstition, paganism, exegesis, bad logic, urban legend, or pop-theology. As you dig deeper, you are confronted with something that really offends you, the possibility that your church could be dead wrong in certain major areas of their focus.

You now have a choice.

1. You could simply do as the majority do, when they stumble across truth, they pick themselves up, brush themselves off and hurry on as if nothing happened. We call this being in denial.

2. Another alternative is to become disillusioned with your church, and begin to look elsewhere. People change churches all the time, because they lose faith in an institution of human beings.

3. You could become disillusioned with the whole God-thing, the whole Christ-thing, and become an atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, or something else. That is also a choice that many are making and have made.

4. There is also another choice. If you continued investigating theologies, you could eventually conclude that the entire Christian Church is full of mistakes and that no major branch is more wrong or right than another. You could continue to believe in Jesus Christ and that he alone is our Savior and no church.

If you chose option 4, then you are still faced with a dilemma. You now realize that a major focus of your church is in error. You could mouth off about it, become bitter and create a lot of trouble for yourself and others, or you could simply focus on Jesus. If you focus your own and other people's attention onto Jesus, they may also eventually come to center on the most important issue of our faith. They may die, still believing in some error, but guess what, so will you, simply because none of us will ever get it totally right in this age.

As long as we have Jesus, we have what is most essential for salvation and the Christian life.

You know the important thing is to focus on and worship our Lord and our Saviour regardless of all the other things that are around us.  If you get something in your eye you don not pluck it out or if you burn your hand you don't chop it off.  Likewise if the Holy Spirit shows us something that our brothers and sisters in Christ are wrong about, as part of the body of Christ we don't separate ourselves from them.  We wash out our eye.  We doctor up that burnt hand.  We help our brother or sister with prayer and love not condemnation and separation.
My brothers and sisters if you belong to The Church of Christ, the Lutheran Church, the Baptist, The Salvation Army or any other Christian church we must realize that we are all one body.  We are the body of Christ and like my brother said above we must " focus your own and other people's attention onto Jesus" worship Him, praise Him and pray that the Holy Spirit will show us as a whole to pull ourselves together. If we are to love one another as we are commanded then we must put aside our petty differences and join together. 
I hear non-Christians today, as I am sure you have, saying things like "Why would I want to be apart of something like that?  They all claim to be Christians and they fight among themselves about who is right."  You know you have wonder how many souls are we allowing to be lost. 
Do you know what the fastest growing religion in the world is today? You may be shocked to hear that Christianity had a growth rate of 47% in the last 50 years where is Islam had a 235% increase in that same time period.  They worship a false god and are winning more souls for satan then we who serve the one true God have won.  Why is this???  Simple, we have separated ourselves from each other thereby separating the body of Christ to where it does not function as a whole.
You know I can see old satan now with his little demon buddies sitting around the fire talking.  He is saying you know I may not get them but I sure have them convinced that each others denomination is wrong.  They won't be winning to many souls that way. And my brothers and sisters he is right.
For to long now are arms and legs and eyes, you get the point here, have been separated from one another and I for one am tired of being blind and lame and deaf.
Let us truly join with our brothers and sisters in Christ and start a revival, a war against satan. Let us put away our petty differences.  We need to worship together and pray together every chance we can.  After all you love the Lord, you believe that He sent his only Son to die for us and that He rose from the grave, Amen, and that He will be back to take us home with Him. 
Does all the other stuff really matter to the guy on the street slinging dope that will be dead in the morning from overdose or getting shot or the lady selling her body or that little helpless child that walks the streets looking for something to eat because mom and dad are out doing God only knows what.  They don't care about sacraments or whatever else comes between us and I believe neither will God when we stand before Him.  I believe that He will care more about us allowing all this stuff to come between us and not coming together and going after the lost souls of those drug dealers, prostitutes and little helpless children that so need us. 
William Booth said "I'll Fight, I'll Fight to the very end."  Will you fight today for those that can not fight for themselves? Let's take as many souls with us as we can.  Let us really and I mean really "Go therefore unto all the nations" and show everyone that we love them enough to care for their soul.  And as one voice we will proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord.
 I love you all.  God's blessing on you!