March 13^th 2022

9:30 am ------------------------Christ: Son of David, the Giant Slayer – 1 Samuel 17

10:00 am --------------------------------------Just Wait, You’ll See – Psalm 27

To Our Congregation: The Lord came for brother Terry Worthan the other day. Terry was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Winston, Georgia for 52 years. He was a dear and faithful pastor, brother and friend, and will be sadly missed. Years ago he paid me a high honor by asking me to preach his funeral. The arrangements for brother Terry’s funeral are incomplete at this time. Sister Patsy Worthan’s address is on the bulletin board downstairs.

Wisdom in Death

“Lord, make me to know my end and the measure of my days that I may know how frail I am.”- Psalm 39:4

When we, by God’s grace, are wise enough to face death, judgement, and eternity, things are seen in their proper light. All these fine ideas of fame, fortune, and friends, and our so-called importance melts like frost in the sun. Death reveals the truth, blows away the chaff, shuts a man’s mouth, and opens the books! Death takes no notice of what I thought nor what others thought of me, but only of what God thinks. “Oh, that I may win Christ and be found in him.”

-- Henry Mahan (1926-2019)

God's Word Shall Lead You --- "When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee." (Proverbs 6:22)

These are the words of a father and mother to their children concerning the written Word of God. This parent, a believer in Christ, is persuaded of the ability of God's Word, with His blessing to lead, keep, and talk. They would impress this upon their children. God's Word shall lead you. It will LEAD you out of the way "which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." The way of works religion seems right, but man's works being imperfect will always end in death. The Word shall lead you to the way, the Lord Jesus Christ that is also the truth and the life, the only way to God. It shall KEEP you when you sleep. The believer in Christ being reconciled through Him to God is able to lay down and sleep in peace. "I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety (Psalms 4:8.) It will also TALK to you. God's word speaks to us as we read and hear it. I don't know how many times I have been told after a service something to this effect. "God answered my question in your message," or "You dealt with something in your message that has troubled me." I brought a message recently from Proverbs, and could not help but think after the message, "I wish that all of our young families with children had heard this message." It seemed to me such a shame that they missed it. Every service that a person misses he cheats himself of necessary food. He misses that opportunity of hearing God speak to him from that passage. -- David Pledger

Repentance, The Missing Note – by Terry Worthan (1939-2022)

“And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”

Preaching repentance is not something apart from the Gospel, the cry of repentance is in the gospel message. It is that cry in the Gospel that makes the Gospel become good news. The grace of repentance as it effectually works in the heart causes a man to take sides with God against himself and confess that he and his sin is an obnoxious thing to a thrice Holy God. He is made to see that in his nature and practice he is a heinous thing and must repent or perish, turn or burn.

I am sincerely afraid that great multitudes of professing Christians are no more than that, “Professing Christians”. I am fearful that they have done no more than accepted someone’s proposition and merely agreed with a “simple plan of salvation,” that at best can only produce a false hope. In such cases the heart hasn’t been smitten with conviction of sin, and neither has there been a development of “godly sorrow,” creating remorse and confession of the heinousness of sin before a Holy God. The modern concept of “soul winning” has produced an easy-believe type of religion that has only populated the churches with a mass number of poor misguided souls that are “twofold more the child of Hell” than before.