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Taking Time
| The Sisters Magazine
I
n this busy world it seems increasingly
difficult to find time for Bible study. But
I have found that you don’t find time – time
isn’t something you just happen to find.
It’s there. Just so many hours, minutes and
seconds of it in each day. So you can’t make
time either. But you can take time. You can
take it and do whatever you want with it.
You can make up your mind that the reading
of God’s Word should have a preeminent place
in your life and therefore determine to spend
the very first part of each day with God.
When you’ve made yourself jump out of bed
an hour or so earlier than usual, you’ll have
found that you really weren’t sacrificing sleep
in a cosy bed – you were discovering great
treasures and becoming exceedingly rich.
Perhaps you’ve tried keeping your Bible on the
night stand, and just sitting up in bed to read
when the alarm sounded. But that didn’t
work, did it? Soon you were fast asleep again.
You have to get up out of bed and go to a table
to read and study His Word.
Rarely will a little less sleep do you any harm.
Indeed, the spiritual nourishment gained
thereby will make you wise, rejoice your
heart, enlighten your eyes, and convert your
soul. (Psalm 19:7-8)
Ecclesial Life is Family Life
| Sis Liberty Mandap (Hong Kong)
W
e can easily overlook the importance of
being together with our brothers and
sisters of the ecclesia, just as we can overlook
the love and responsibility we have towards
our natural family members, simply because
we are with them so much. We are not just the
same people who attend the same meetings
regularly, but we are a called out people who
have the common purpose and understanding
of the Gospel. We are one body, one family, in
our Lord Jesus Christ. We are together when
we pray together, God sees us all saying and
thinking the same words to Him as one family.
The body cannot exist without each individual
member, and likewise, we are all important to
God, and therefore we should all be important
to each other. The world tries to lead us away
from really loving each other, it tells us to
worry about so many things which are not
worthy to worry about, and to forget our
family, spiritual and physical.
If we keep meditating on what we read daily
in the Bible, we will see that love of our
brothers and sisters is a really basic thing that
God expects of all who believe in Him. We
know that God’s Kingdom will last for ever, and
that all the faithful will be there, so it means
that we will all be together for ever, and that
process starts right now in this life. We are, of
course, imperfect, but 2 Cor. 3:18 says that we
are all being changed to reflect the Lord’s
glory, bit by bit. So love for each other must
not be simply an emotion, a feeling, words.
We must come to the agape love, the love that
is beyond these things, and show it to our
brothers and sisters and feel it for them. It is
this love which will make true unity, in fami-
lies and in ecclesias. Through our frequent
contact with the words of God in the Bible, we
see and know His love and the love which His
true people had for others, even if they were
weak. The prophets of Israel are the great
example.
We must really be serious about this need for
love and unity amongst us. By it, we can
convert people to the Truth. And yet we are
we doing this? Is the love so great that they
see we are something very special? So I am
writing this in the hope that I can reach the
hearts of all brethren in the world and show
them all the importance of true love for each
other.