January 14
The priests are rehearsing traditions. They extol their religion and their own piety, while they denounce the Greeks and Romans as heathen, and sinners above others. The wise men are not idolaters, and in the sight of God they stand far higher than do these, His professed worshipers; yet they are looked upon by the Jews as heathen. Even among the appointed guardians of the Holy Oracles their eager questionings touch no chord of sympathy.
Desire of Ages, page 61 from the chapter, 'We have seen His star'
Newark church is blessed with 52 weeks of the year evangelism. It is true that they don’t have many baptisms and they haven’t had a big evangelistic campaign for years – but their evangelism reaps fruit and keeps on from first contact through to deeper discipleship.
We have an evangelistic outreach meeting on a Monday evening. We have question corner and the answer seat. Visitors come and are encouraged to become involved, they are not looked upon as heathens and their eager questions – get answered.
Three wise men turn up in Jerusalem. They get an answer that makes you realise that they aren’t actually welcome. What on earth has gone wrong with the people of God – who are supposed to be growing a community of God on earth?
If we only take the evidence of this paragraph the priests are simply going through the motions. Why? What has come to matter most is doing the job, finding the good points about their religion and are great at saying how good they are worshiping several times a day and read all the right devotionals.
Do we get the message? They are just thinking about themselves and their own needs. They have become self-centred. They have forgotten who their neighbour is. Sorry, they couldn’t care less about their neighbour.
I would love to know what the Magi said as they left Jerusalem. Do you think they felt welcomed?
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Housekeeping details for you
The point of this short blog will become clear if you decide to use this reading in the way we intend it. Netherfield Seventh-day Adventist Church believes in healthy churches. You can see what that means if you head to the relevant Healthy Churches page of the website. We also want other churches to be healthy. That means you can join in our campaign to create healthy churches, with healthy people serving the people in those churches.
A healthy church is one where Jesus comes first. A healthy church is one where the people work together to put Jesus first. One thing we are doing is to join people together to spread that news. I would like you to look at our prayer partners page. This will explain how we want you to use this short devotional. Very basically we want you to find a like-minded Christian friend who you will join with to : choose to pray together every day, decide together on a way to serve other people together, to help them grow as Christians - and to invite the Holy Spirit into your life every day. This blog that you will receive every day simply gives a common spiritual purpose. If you are a newcomer and want to join the blog with this object in mind click here
