January Is Sanctity of Human Life Month
All of January is Sanctity of Human Life Month, and Sanctity of Human Life Sunday is normally celebrated on the Sunday in January that falls closest to the day on which the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973. We will acknowledge the importance of life on January 23 by providing you with information about CareNet Pregnancy Center through a brochure in our bulletin and a video in our worship service.
One of the people involved with CareNet wrote the following thought. It is titled “The Next Step.”
We have all heard the story of the man who turned a deaf ear to the radio warnings to leave his home due bad weather, refused help from a boat and helicopter and then asked God why he didn’t save him when he got to heaven. And God replies, “I sent you a warning to get out and a helicopter and a boat; what more did you want?”
How often do we want to know the plan, see the expected results, be sure of the investment, but then like the man in the story, lack the faith to actually take the next step.
The next step is something Jesus recommended a very long time ago. “Come and you will see.” “Follow me.” These were the words Jesus spoke to the disciples as He called them. He didn’t sit them down and reveal what the next three years would hold. He knew they would be overwhelmed, possibly enough to turn around. He chose to keep it simple. “Follow me” was all He said. Take the next step…
By taking the next step the disciples experienced the wonder and amazement of seeing God at work before them. For me, joining the Care Net team was a similar experience. By taking the next step I have seen lives saved, hearts changed and been in awe of the work God does every day at Care Net,--all in three short months. I can’t begin to imagine what miracles I’ll be privileged to witness in the years to come just because I took the next step and responded to a church bulletin announcement. I wasn’t sure I didn’t know what the results would be. But I sent in the application anyway.
Don’t miss out on the glory God has to show you. Trust the signs He sends you and take the next step.
The Million Pound Challenge
Again this year, The Princeton Club is sponsoring the Million Pound Challenge to help out the food pantries of Southern Wisconsin. Between now and May 31, for every pound of weight you lose, The Princeton Club and other corporate sponsors will purchase 10 pounds of food for the Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin – up to 1 million pounds of food. You can even select which local food pantry will receive your food – which means you can select Westwood’s Food Pantry.
If interested in participating, you can sign up at www.princetonclub.net/mpc. You can also make financial contributions at the web site.
Believing the Right Things
As we examine some of the people who encountered Jesus in the Gospels over the next couple of months, there will, of course, be people who met Jesus that we will not meet. One of them is a man in John 5 who had been an invalid for thirty-eigh years. He met Jesus in Jerusalem at the Pool of Bethesda.
There was a legend about this pool that appears in some later manuscripts of John’s Gospel. The verses are likely not a part of John’s original Gospel, but they accurately describe the probable belief of the people of Jesus’ day about the pool. That belief was that an angel of the Lord would periodically come down and stir kup the waters. The first one into the pool after such a disturbance would be healed of whatever disease he or she had.
Actually the pool rippled periodically because of a subterranean spring, but the man who Jesus met in John 5 believed the legend. He told Jesus he had not been healed because there was no one to help him into the water when it was stirred. Thus someone always got in the water ahead of him.
All that changed on the day he met Jesus. Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walked.” The man was instantly cured. HJe picked up his mat and walked.
There are many teachings and legends that people believe in today. You can find a book or article on a wide variety of belief systems. We are told in any variety of ways to belief in ourselves, to belief in one another, to come together for the common good, and on and on it goes. While we are encouraged in these false belief systems, we are old that God can nothing for people, that he is only a crutch, that he should be left out of our daily experience.
The invalid in John 5 would find out that only Jesus could heal him; the legend he had accepted for so long was false. We need to learn his lesson. Only Jesus can can heal us. We gain eternal life only through him, not through any good that we do. We need to believe in the right things – that is we need to believe in the one and only Son of God – and encourage others to believe in him too.
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