Your spiritual home

I know a married couple living in Canada who love walking holidays. In England they linked up others from North America and they all enjoyed the British countryside. One Sunday they came to a small town to stay for the night and being early evening they decided to attend worship at local churches. Most of the group went to the Anglican Church but the couple known to me decided to go to the small Gospel Chapel.

When they met up, they compared notes and the larger group felt fed up and unfulfilled by their church service. They had made up the bulk of the congregation and it was coldly formal and no one talked with them. They had sat, listened and left with no interaction with the minister who seemed in a rush to leave or the few local people who left hurriedly. It had been religious ritual only with no Gospel warmth and no sense of God’s presence. By the way we are not condemning Anglican churches, just expressing what those people experienced in that one church.

The couple at the Gospel Chapel had a completely different experience and were richly blessed. They had been warmly welcomed with all the members of the congregation wanting to speak with them and to know how they were getting on. After the service they had tea, coffee and cakes. It had been an uplifting and heart-warming experience which left the other group feeling as though they had truly missed out.

Church is more than formality and it needs to be warmed by the love of Christ. True Christians reveal the love, care, kindness and blessing which Christ has imparted to them. If Christ is your Saviour share your experience with others, if He is not then do open your heart and life to Him and experience His wonderful salvation. Christian faith is more than religious ritual, it is a relationship with God through Jesus Christ His Son.

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”

Psalm 133 verse 1