Good morning and welcome to Harding Street Church of Christ! We are so glad you chose to worship with us today, and if you are a visitor with us we hope you will stick around after services to help us get to know you better. Next week starts the Conway County Gospel Meeting which is being hosted by Downtown Church of Christ this year. I hope you are all making plans to attend this meeting each night and hear from some wonderful speakers. The theme is Romans 8: Walking with God. This also happens to be my first time speaking at a Gospel Gathering, so if you come you will be able to say in 30 years that you were at the first Gospel Gathering that Geoffrey Bane spoke at! We will not meet here at Harding Street October 13th for evening services or October 16 for Bible Study, but we will instead meet at Downtown Church of Christ at 7pm each evening. You will get to hear a message from Steve Sexson, Richard Kirkland who is the new preacher at Atkins Church of Christ, Ethan Leslie who is the son of Rod Leslie and is the youth minister at River Park Church of Christ in Russellville, and I will end the meeting Wednesday evening.
A Bible verse that stood out to me this week was Ecclesiastes 12:13, “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Are we living our life following this verse? Are we fearing God in our lives? We learn from the Bible that our God is merciful, loving, and slow to anger. But we also learn that God is to be feared, because he is a jealous and vengeful God. Are we living our lives fearing the judgment of the Lord? Because if we are not we need to make a change in our lives. We should live every day looking within ourselves making sure we are living according to God’s will. Then it says to keep His commandments. Not keep a couple, or a few, or some, but to simply keep His commandments. We have to live our lives in a way that we are keeping all the commandments of God. Not just the ones we agree with, or the easy ones to keep. But we are to keep all of His commandments even when it is hard, even when it takes effort, even when no one else around us is keeping them. Why? Because it is the whole duty of mankind. Our purpose on earth is to keep God’s commandments and live in accordance to His will. We have no other reason for our lives but to work for God. A question that has been posed by philosophers for years is what is the purpose of life? That question was answered over two thousand years ago that the purpose of life is to fear God and keep His commandments.
-Geoffrey
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