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This Week--
The 37th Southside Lectures are just ahead. It’s a special time, a special event– one which promises excitement and joy for each one of us. It will bring together our people into one big joyful family reunion. It will bring our friends to visit; it will intensify our determination to add good things to our faith and thereby multiply our efforts to live closer to God, to appreciate His love and affection, to magnify His Son as our Savior and Lord, and to make new and special opportunities for each one of us. What a week it will be!
The word opportunity was originally a nautical term. It is taken from Portunus, god of the harbor, and described a safe place to put in the ship. We use the term to mean suitable, convenient, accessible.
We have some wonderful opportunities this coming week.
We have the opportunity to refresh our spirituality. We need spiritual rejuvenation from time to time. We become stagnant if we’re not careful. The lectures afford us the opportunity to review our spiritual demeanor by being in the vicinity of good spiritual information. Our speakers are men of the book, men who will bring to our minds what life is actually all about. Their sermons will give us a determination to follow a higher course, to bring to our minds the superior route, the higher way. By hearing the high and grandiose themes of the Bible we will be afforded new ways to conquer fleshly inclinations and focus on the higher matters (I John 2:15-16).
We have the opportunity to regenerate your spiritual energy. The admonitions of “add to our faith,” will be accompanied by recommendations as to how we can re-new our desires to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (II Peter 4:18) thereby stirring in each of us a greater motive to serve and be of service. The lessons will give us infusions of new energy and strength for greater expectations. We will have the opportunity for emphasis on the things of greater importance and higher value (Romans 8:5).
We will have the opportunity to re-access and re-establish our faith. Faith is the fundament on which the entirety of our relationship with God rests. It is the foundation of all that has value and import. It thereby must be kept in good condition. This week will bring the opportunity to revive and strengthen our trust and confidence is our Savior, Jesus Christ. Not only that, but by knowing that “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:22), it is imperative that we be continually adding to that conviction the things that illustrate its genuineness and insure its effectivity. These lectures can make our faith abound to goodness.
We will have the opportunity to refurbish our hope. Hope needs to be freshened up from time to time. Its reaches need to be renovated and made even more real. The program this week is filled to the brim with the assurances of our expectations and the warranty of our forward visions. The subjects will renovate our inclinations toward a heavenly home by giving us the assurances that heaven is real, that a home for us has been provided (John 14:1-6), and that the way to that eternal abode has been clearly marked. The lectures this week will put a shine on our expectations. They will revitalize our inclinations toward a heavenly home.
We will have the opportunity to introduce our friends and neighbors to the truth of the gospel. It will make an excellent chance to bring someone so they can see why we believe that the gospel is the power of God to salvation (Romans 1: 16); and why we choose to “speak as the oracles of God and walk in the light of His word ( II Peter 4:11).
We will have the opportunity to draw strength from one another. We need gain periodic and welcome encouragement as we worship and serve God together. We endorse the common struggle and recommend the gospel by such associations as we all struggle with the pressure and temptations of our secular society. It is imperative that we have periodic spiritual companionship so as to “provoke one another to love and good works.” We each have the opportunity this week to not only strengthen our own spiritual character, but to assist one another as we “grow up into Him which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).
We will have the opportunity to add to our faith this week–but only if we are here and will allow it. Will you be here this week?
