The Pastor’s Point

If you have made the effort to be faithful to your local gathering at church for very long at all, you can relate to the struggle of doing so every Sunday. One Sunday morning, as a woman went to go wake her husband up for church, he informed her, "I'm not going." "Why not?" she asked. "I'll give you two good reasons. One, they don't like me; and two, I don't like them." His wife replied, "Well, I'll give you two good reasons why you should go to church then. One, you're fifty-four years old; and two, you're the pastor!" At some point, every single one of us have have faced this struggle with going to church.  More so than any other day of the week, Sunday always seems like the hardest day to get up and to get going.  Why is this?  Because sleeping in, relaxing, having a "mental health day," watching church online, fishing, golfing, having family time, doing chores or just about any thing else seems more appe

The church is one of the greatest gifts that God has given to us on this side of eternity.  There is no other organization in this world that can compare with what God has orchestrated in the church.  The church is unlike any other mere organization because it is really an organism - it is the very body of Christ.  This is one reason why the Bible puts such a high priority on the assembly of the saints.  Jesus wants His body to live in union with Him and in unity with one another. When you truly get ahold of these truths, it ought to change the priority you place on the church.  Certainly, when you understand how precious and important the church is to God, your response at the very least ought to be to elevate the importance of church in your own life to an equal measure. Yet, it confound me how people continue to find reasons to belittle the significance of the church in their own life.  It is an issue of pandemic proportions in modern day Christianity! In part one of this series, I

The gathering together of God's people in a public assembly is one of the closest things to heaven that we can experience on this earth.  There is nothing in this world quite so sweet and precious as a band of believers gathering together to worship Jesus, study God's Word, share burdens, pray for one another, make decisions of faith and declare the gospel.  The longer I live, the more important and significant the gathering of the church becomes to me. Because of this, it truly astounds me how anyone would want to miss this special gathering of the church.  As a pastor, it absolutely confounds me to see people who claim to be struggling continue to find reasons not to come to the exact place where they could get the encouragement and help they need for what they are facing. Certainly, going to church does not make one better than anyone else, yet the public assembly of the church is something that God has commanded His people to "not forsake" for a reason. (Hebrews 1