Is Our Doctrine Really Beautiful? If Not Put Some Make-Up On It!

I go to an awesome church!! Our youth ministry has had "True Love Waits" Youth Revivals for several years now and they have always been a huge success. This year Sublett Road Baptist Church led by our Pastor Bill Morrow decided that purity wasn't just for youth and that we were going to have a Purity Revival for the whole church. So far it is going great.....Our evangelist did a great job today and I am looking forward to the rest of the week!

Chase is preaching to us out of Titus chapter 2 and today he shared something about Titus 2:10 where it says that we should live pure lives and do good works ".....that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." I studied it some more tonight and the word adorn is "Kosmeo" in the greek which is the same word that we get "cosmetics" from in English. Does the purity of our lives and our good works make our doctrine more beautiful? We are always hearing people say that we shouldn't try to appeal to the World but these verses clearly say that we can and are commanded to make our doctrine more appealing to the World! Get a load of that!

This made me think of verses like 2Ti 4:3 "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine" and I began to wonder if this is the fault of those of us who profess Christ in the end times....After all the Bible does say "For the time [is come] that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if [it] first [begin] at us, what shall the end [be] of them that obey not the gospel of God?" I Peter 4:17 Is it possible that we who profess Christ and are in the Lord's Churches are actually turning the lost and new believers away from sound doctrine because we are not living pure lives and not doing good works like we should. Could it be that our doctrine is not beautiful because people actually see the lives we are living. It's time that we started adorning God's doctrine with our pure lives and good works so that it will be Beautiful to the World and to new believers! Is Our Doctrine Really Beautiful? Is Your Doctrine Beautiful? If not put some make-up on it!

What Is Really Going On?

I associate with a group of Churches known as The American Baptist Association.....recently my dad wrote a blog on his website http://www.goxstream.org/ about our missionary efforts and I thought I would share what he wrote.

"It was recently reported that over 13,000 souls have been saved in the collective work of our missionaries. This is worth shouting about!However, without dampening the spirit of this wonderful report, we must ask the question, "why have there only been 14 new works started in six months on the foreign field and only 6 new works on the home front so far?" There is something very ominous about this.

Now, I do understand that you can't get everybody baptized that gets saved, and everybody that gets baptized doesn't necessarily end up in church or part of a new church. But if only half of these people ended up in church or a new church there would have been significant church increase and new works being started and it would have been widely reported. But there hasn't been that I can tell.

What's going on? Can someone answer my question? Maybe I'm missing something.With 13,000 plus having been saved we should have heard of dozens if not hundreds of new churches being started. Someone enlighten me?"

I had never thought about it before but the statistics are taken from the 120 or so missionaries recommended by the churches of the association. If you divide 13,000 by the 120 missionaries you get approximately 110 professions per missionary. I agree with my dad ......why aren't we seeing more missions and churches started? What is even more stunning is that many of the new 20 missions and churches started globally in our work are done by the unrecommended missionary force......that larger group of forgotten missionaries that are sponsored by ABA churches that do not go through the recommending process and are never recognized at the "Meetin' ".

I am in full support of the ABA but sometimes we have to take a hard look at what is being done and ask ourselves.....What is really going on?