Bringing Your Neighbor to Church

Today has been proclaimed Bring Your Neighbor Day and I hope that you were able to bring a friend as a guest to this morning’s worship assembly as well as to the Fellowship Group meeting that will follow. If you did not get to bring anyone with you today, I hope that you still got a chance to engage someone in some salvation dialogue this past week for we want to bring others to heaven with us, don’t we? Speaking of Bring Your Neighbor Day, a good question to ask is whether we have a scriptural precedent for such. Of course we do. In Matthew 9:10, you find Matthew bringing his tax-collector friends to the Lord. In John 1, you have Andrew and Philip bringing Peter and Nathanael. In John 4, you’ve got a woman bringing practically her whole village to hear Jesus. And if you were to add a subtitle to the book of the Acts of the Apostles, it too would have something to do with Bring Your Neighbor Day for we find a lot of that going on there as well. As we know, there are many facets to our walk with Jesus as we live a life that lifts up the Lord. In addition to our living an upright, moral life, a life in which people are loved and served, families are honored, and personal integrity is the order of the day, is this matter of bringing people to the Lord. Quite simply, where would YOU be if no one had ever taken the time to teach and encourage you to obey the gospel? Then why wouldn’t you also want to take the time to bring someone else to Jesus? Let us continue to pray for those opportunities to bring someone else to Jesus as well as the courage and wisdom to recognize those opportunities as they occur in our lives .