Sometimes we get to fretting over everybody else and forget the things that we need to be concerned with ourselves. Peter once seemed to be overtaken with this mindset. After Jesus had put him to the test with the repeated question concerning Peter's love for him (John 21:15ff), Peter looked and saw "the disciple whom Jesus loved," probably John, leaning on the breast of the Savior. He then turned to Jesus and asked, "... and what shall this man do?" The sense of his question seems. to be "what about John?" Jesus had told Peter what would befall him in his later years, and instead of dealing with that, he wanted to know about his brother!

Jesus, in effect told him, "Peter, don't worry about John" (v. 22). This is not to say we should be unconcerned about a brother, but as we sometimes do, we are more concerned about what that brother is going to do and forget about our own obligations.

Christianity is a personal lifestyle. By that we don't mean that we are the standard of life and can live it any way we choose with impunity. Rather God has set the standard, and most of us have enough to do keeping our own lives together without always won­dering, "what about John?" Concern for a brother? By all means, but don't forget your own life as well. Make your decisions of life within the framework of God's word; let him be the standard, and you will have enough to do to make your own life what it ought to be without worrying about what somebody else may be about! - Bill Moseley

 

 

 

Solomon said, "As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman without discretion" (Prov. 11:22). It would be hard to imagine two things further apart in beauty than a "fair woman" and a "pig's nose!" Yet there is apparently some way in which they would be similar. What is it?

Women have been fed the line today that they don't have to be women in the traditional sense. Some of them seem to want to placed in the same situations as men in everything. The more some of them look like they ought to be playing linebacker for the Green Bay Packers; the more they can guzzle beer with the best of the booz­ers, and the more they can curse like the proverbial sailor - well, that in some way makes them "with it today. " What it does is make them about as fair as a jewel in a pig's nose! And whatever beauty it may have had is ruined by where it is.

I appreciate my sisters in Christ who know what womanhood is and what it ought to look like. Those that epito­mize grace and femininity are bless­ings indeed to God's people. And so to the ladies of the church here in Taylors, "thank you for being what God wants you to be!" - Bill Moseley