February 4, 2018 WELCOME! WE'RE GLAD YOU'RE HERE We are a group of believers who simply try to follow the Bible as a guide for all we do. Everything done in our worship service is something for which we have a Bible basis. You are welcome to participate as much or as little as you wish. We will sing hymns together and we will observe the Lord's Supper or Communion together. We will also have an opportunity to give to the work of God in this area. This collection is for the members here, and if you are visiting you should not feel and pressure to give. Our lesson time will be divided into two groups. The young children will go to our classroom area in the basement where they will be taught the Bible at a level they can understand. The adults will stay in the auditorium for a lesson at an adult level. We do try to serve the community, and if you have some needs that we can help you with, mention it to one of the members. Thank you for worshipping with us.

FAMILY NEWS

WELCOME GLYNN LANGSTON: We are thrilled to have Glynn with us this morning. Toward the bottom of this page I have a short story about how I got to know Glynn. Glynn has been blind since birth due to oxygen starvation. He has been a missionary in several overseas fields including France and Ireland. He speaks several languages and is a licensed amateur radio operator (ham). He and his wife, Ann, are the parents of two grown children. They now live in Lafayette, Louisiana, although Glynn spends much of his time in Ireland. His ministry provides materials and machines to assist the blind all over the world, and his studies have produced many conversions to Jesus Christ. Glynn will be with us for our morning class, our worship service, our devotional at Timbers, and with us this evening (the evening class was cancelled due to the weather).

POTLUCK TODAY. PLEASE PLAN TO STAY! We have a lot of food; so, if you did not bring anything, do not worry about it.

TIMBERS TODAY: We will have a devotional at the Timbers Nursing Home today at 2:30. We need singers and people who will interact with the residents and maybe push them back to their rooms. The devotional will last about 30 minutes.

TODAY'S LESSON

CONQUERING WORRY
Philippians 4:4 – 7
Glynn Langston

PAGES THREE AND FOUR

THE CAKE

My dear friend, Paul Methvin, told this story at the Tahoe Family Encampment this past summer. It is so good, I would like to share it with you.

“When I was a child I was watching my mother make a cake. She measured out some bitter chocolate, and I knew I liked chocolate, so I asked her for a bite which she let me have. It was bitter and I spat it out. She took some vanilla and added it to the chocolate, and I licked the spoon because I like vanilla; but, it too was bitter. She took some lemon juice, which I knew better than to taste, some baking powder, which I also didn't like, and a bunch of lard which she offered me on a spoon; but again, it was disgusting and I wasn't about to taste it. She mixed all of these unpleasant things together and put it in the oven. When she took it out of the oven, there was this wonderful smell and later a wonderful taste. The cake was a huge success; but, it was made up of a bunch of things that individually were not good at all.

“Don't you see that life is very much the same? The apostle Paul had a life made up of a bunch of unpleasant things. His father was a Pharisee (Acts 23:6) which was a group of legalistic, cynical Jews who fought against Jesus all of his life. He persecuted the church (Galatians 1:13) and killed and imprisoned Christians (Acts 7:58), making havoc of the church (Acts 8:3). He was educated in the graduate school of Gamaliel, but became so unpopular that in Damascus the Jewish leaders tried to kill him and he had to be let down the walls of the city at night in a basket to escape (Acts 9:23 – 25). He spent three years in Arabia (Galatians 1:17) and began a ministry in Acts 13 that involved a long road of beatings, floggings, stonings, and imprisonments. It is from all of these negative things that Paul is able at the end of his life to express a satisfaction and a joy from all he has been able to do (2 Timothy 4:6 – 8).”

My cake life has also been made up of a lot of bitter things. Raised by an atheist family, involved in organized atheism, educated in a very liberal, immoral university, driven to a near suicide by consequences of an immoral life, suffering a son born with numerous birth defects, having the love of my life die, and rejected and condemned by brethren who should have been supporting me have all been ingredients that went into my “cake.”

How about your cake — your life’s experiences? Each event may be hard to bear and may be bitter, but the oven of life bakes us and at the judgment what God will see is a cake that the Spirit has produced from all our hardships and pain. We just need to add the right ingredients by obeying God's Word to make it sweet and palatable to God.

GLYNN LANGSTON

It is a huge privilege to have Glynn Langston with us this morning. In 1986 we did a lectureship in Manchester, England, with Arthur Barry, the preacher there, setting up programs that led us to Scotland and Ireland in 1992. Somewhere around that time I had a letter from a missionary in Ireland named Glynn Langston who, with his wife Ann and his two children, had been doing a great work in France and had come to Ireland.

At that time we were switching our video materials from the old 16 mm films on huge reels to VHS, but we still had the 16 mm films. Glynn wrote me to ask if we could let him have a set to loan out in the English speaking countries of Europe the same way we loaned films in the U.S. We sent him 3 sets and for several years he loaned them out all over England, Scotland, Ireland and even in Africa. We kept corresponding and I learned that Glynn had a amateur radio operators (ham operators) General license — this highest level of ham operators at that time. I had a radio club at Riley High School that had several kids who were ham operators, and so we communicated that way for a while.

As we talked, Glynn expressed concerns that his kids were being educated in Irish schools, and he wanted them to become accustomed to American schools; so, we talked about his moving back to the states. It was several years before I realized that Glynn was blind; but when I learned that, I thought how wonderful it would be to have a ministry to the blind. Our materials are now sent to nursing homes and other facilities where visually impaired people can use them. Glynn handles that. More later.

— John Clayton

Our sign by the street!

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