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  John 15:16 “ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. ”   I  recently  visited  students in  Uganda  at African Bible University . I intended to use  a  projector to display  notes about wonderful  Christian truths . When I attempted to turn on the projector, I discovered it would not power on. After a few puzzling moments, I searched to find where the power cord was plugged into a power source. In Uganda the electrical sockets have  an  on-off switch; the whole socket was turned off.   I was not able to project truths about Christ until there was  the  power to do so.   Likewise,  our lives can't project   the light of Christ apart from  his  illuminating  presence and power.    The Lord  Jesus use d  another image to teach  our total dependency on Him . He is the true vine, and  Christians   are branches in Him . Apart from C

  “Behold how good and pleasant it is when brother dwell in unity.”        One of the greatest gifts  and privileges  we have as Christians is the unity that we have in Christ. This means then that one of the greatest threats to the Church is disunity. These sometimes catch us by surprise because we are looking outside the Church for the attack, when we have a trojan horse already in the Church. Because of th e  danger  of disunity , the Church must  be on guard and must be fully aware of their weaknesses. We also must understand what it means to be unified as believers in Jesus Christ. Finally, we must  strive for the unity and the peace of the Church.   How do we do this?    1.  We have  u nity in Christ.  We must  understand,  acknowledge , and remember that when we are saved by God’s grace, we are united to Christ. That means all who believe are  united as one body in Christ together. (Eph. 1:3-14) We are united because we have the same calling, the same salvation, the same adoptio

  ​ Whenever we think about the of youth ministry this is one of the ways that we tend to think about it. We think of youth and the church. In many of our churches the youth and the church seem to be rather separated. The youth have youth group, maybe a Wednesday night Bible study, their retreats and conferences and the adults have everything else. I’ve been in the area of youth ministry since 2012. I realize that pales in comparison to some other ministers in our denomination. But what I have found is that it is hard at times to get the youth to feel like they are part of the church. We’ve spent so much time treating them like they are separated that when they graduate they don’t really know what to do. Jesus tells us in Mark 9:33 through 37 that to be the greatest we are to be servants and to receive the little children in His name. Later in chapter 10:13 through 16, He becomes indignant when the disciples rebuke the little children from coming to Him and tells them that we must rece

  Does your church catechize?   When I first became a pastor, I discovered that my congregation had never explored either   the  Westminster  Shorter   or  Larger Catechism s .  One member, in her 90’s ,  said that she learned the Shorter Catechism when she was a little girl.  A younger lady, who grew up ARP, had learned it as a  child as well . But  the  overwhelming  majority of  members,  including officers,  knew  very little  of the content of our doctrinal teaching as presented in the se  catechisms.  As an Associate Reformed Presbyterian, this was a concern. The very basics of our doctrinal beliefs were hardly  known among the members of our church. So, we set out on a journey to remedy the situation. We began an adult Sunday School class that studied the Shorter Catechism over a two - year period.   In this article I want to address the importance of catechisms and catechizing. If such an article has already appeared on this  blog , my apologies. However, the importance of the