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Welcome the Season Fall is the season associated with harvesting. It is the time to gather the ripe crops from the fields. Like harvesting crops, we need to take time to enjoy the reaping of what we have sown. Take time to look back over your year. How have your grown? Worshipped? Laughed? Instead of seeking to accomplish something new, take time to celebrate what has already been accomplished. Thank God for the abundance in your life~~~family, friends, church, job, food ~~~the ways God meets your needs daily. Embrace the present. Savor it. Prepare your heart for Thanksgiving with a posture of gratitude for the provisions God has already provided. Let's welcome the season of fall with these words from Psalm 95:1~7: Come, let's shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation! Let's enter his presence with thanksgiving; let's shout triumphantly to him in song. For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. The depths of the earth are in his hand, and the mountain peaks are His. The sea is His; He made it. His hands formed the dry land. Come, let's worship and bow down; let's kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care. |
Revolve in your mind that wondrous word, "faultless!" We are far off from it now; but as our Lord never stops short of perfection in his work of love, we shall reach it one day. The Saviour who will keep his people to the end, will also present them at last to himself, as "a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, but holy and without blemish." All the jewels in the Saviour's crown are of the first water and without a single flaw. All the maids of honour who attend the Lamb's wife are pure virgins without spot or stain. But how will Jesus make us faultless? He will wash us from our sins in his own blood until we are white and fair as God's purest angel; and we shall be clothed in his righteousness, that righteousness which makes the saint who wears it positively faultless; yea, perfect in the sight of God. We shall be unblameable and unreproveable even in his eyes. His law will not only have no charge against us, but it will be magnified in us. Moreover, the work of the Holy Spirit within us will be altogether complete. He will make us so perfectly holy, that we shall have no lingering tendency to sin. Judgment, memory, will - every power and passion shall be emancipated from the thraldom of evil. We shall be holy even as God is holy, and in his presence we shall dwell forever. Saints will not be out of place in heaven, their beauty will be as great as that of the place prepared for them. Oh the rapture of that hour when the everlasting doors shall be lifted up, and we, being made meet for the inheritance, shall dwell with the saints in light. Sin gone, Satan shut out, temptation past forever, and ourselves "faultless" before God, this will be heaven indeed! Let us be joyful now as we rehearse the song of eternal praise so soon to roll forth in full chorus from all the blood-washed host; let us copy David's exultings before the ark as a prelude to our ecstasies before the throne.