A dear brother in Romania sent me an email this morning which encouraged this old preacher’s heart.
He said: “This message was a great comfort for my soul yesterday and today, while I listened to it.”
That prompted me to have a listen and I hope you understand me when I say that I could listen to what I said 30 years ago as someone simply listening to a preacher.
I was humbly blessed and so very thankful at the honour bestowed upon me to speak so of Christ.
I send it out with the hope that you too will benefit from the message, preached in Faith FPC, Greenville, SC, USA in October 1993.
The phrase ‘keep company with’ refers to marriage, religious affiliations, social associations and business partnerships.
It is important to the Lord just what impression the Christian’s ‘crowd’ sets forth.
I recall my maternal grandmother being quoted as having said on this matter: “Show me your company and I will tell you who you are!’
I suppose that very well known adage: ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ states the same basic truth. Who you are drawn to and with whose company you are content and happy to be in, tells an observer what your views and affections are.
It is for this reason that the Lord, like any father, shows concern about the crowd we identify with and the Holy Scriptures contain many directives on this matter.
MARRIAGE.
Whom a Christian marries is not a matter of indifference to the Lord, any more than it is to caring earthly parents. Thus we find Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, urging this maxim upon Corinthian Christians. “The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord,” 1 Corinthians 7:39. The choice of the woman as to who it is she marries is limited by this rule. She is at entire liberty to marry, or not to marry, and to marry whom she pleases. That is not forbidden by the laws of God. But she is limited by the ‘spiritual’ character of the man she would marry. The marriage union must be ‘in the Lord’!
The word ‘only’ clearly indicates that she is limited to one category of men from which she would choose her husband. He ‘must’ be a Christian, he must be one of the Lord’s people.
My fifty plus years of pastoral labours have brought me into contact with many households, both within my own flock and outside it. I have noted on many occasions the unhappy price paid by a man or a woman who ignored this injunction and instead allowed their own feelings and emotions to overrule God! I saw that it invariably brought unhappiness to the disobedient Christian, to the one they married and to the children born of the union. Irrespective of the circumstance of how the unscriptural union was formed — often as a result of an unsaved person making a false profession of faith in Christ in order to find acceptance with the Christian whose hand in marriage they desired — without exception it had a grievous impact upon the family unit thus formed. (more…)
US President Joe Biden is visiting Ireland this week
“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn,” Proverbs 29:2.
Today, Joe Biden arrives in Northern Ireland for what is thankfully a very short visit before moving on to the Irish Republic.
Joe Biden is very much pro-abortion, (to the embarrassment of many of his fellow Roman Catholics in the USA and Ireland, north and south) pro-sodomite, pro-transgenderism, pro-Sinn Fein/IRA and utterly anti-Protestant and anti-British!
We pity those who love righteousness in the United States who have had to suffer his presidency and the embarrassment that this aged ‘ejit’ (he will doubtless rejoice in having such an Irish disparagement directed at him) has brought to his nation.
Sadly, their distress will have been heightened of late with his announcement that he is to run again for the presidency!!
It would be an exercise in blatant and abject humiliation for any Unionist to be present at any function he will engage in during his brief stay. David shaking hands with Goliath and embracing him would not adequately illustrate the ignominy of a representative of the Unionist people welcoming this political nincompoop to Ulster.
He comes to join with those who are celebrating the signing of the treacherous ‘Good Friday Agreement’ 25 years ago. It is one of the greatest and most bare-faced dissimulations since Judas kissed the cheek of the Saviour!
As Jim Allister, TUV leader said recently:
“In swimming against the tide of hysteria about Joe Biden’s visit, let me be clear that this President is an avowed nationalist partisan who in his past, when the IRA’s murder campaign was in full swing, joined with other meddling US politicians to seek to prevent extradition of wanted IRA terrorists (eg IRA escapee Joe Doherty), who more recently (Feb 2022) likened the struggle of the Palestinian people to Britain’s treatment of Irish Catholics for over 400 years, and who has championed the Union-dismantling Protocol.
“Little wonder he wants to celebrate the terrorism-rewarding Belfast Agreement and try further pressure on unionists to operate the Protocol’s dismantling of the Union and partitioning of the United Kingdom.
“I find nothing to celebrate in the mass release of murderers, the ushering of terrorists into government and the imposition of an unworkable system at Stormont – all the handiwork of the Belfast Agreement. But from the perspective of an avid all-Irelander like Biden a milestone of achievement.”
Ulster is caught up in a hysterical storm of lies and deceit and blatant propaganda regarding the ‘GFA’. The newspaper columns and pulpits of the ecumenical advocates have vainly sought to have the people of Ulster swallow that which is all too obviously a deceit. The ‘GFA’ did not bring peace. It saw hundreds of murderers released early from jail, the perpetrators of a terror campaign elevated and politically ‘fumigated’ and foisted upon those in Ulster they had sought to eradicate by murder. (more…)
