Thankful for...

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope all of you ladies did as well. For a while earlier this week it looked like we might not be able to come back for Thanksgiving due to some car trouble we were having, but we were able to get it fixed. We so enjoyed spending time with family and hearing what everyone is thankful for. I am thankful for many things. I am thankful for the fact that when God looks at me in His holiness; He sees me in Christ! He sees me in the righteousness of Jesus and loves and forgives me! I am so thankful for the things that God is teaching us and how He continually works in our hearts to make us more like Jesus. I am so thankful that Jesus has freed me from slavery to sin and that I can now obey Him with joy instead of out of a sense of obligation or a feeling that I must earn His grace. I am so glad that He generously and freely gives us all good things because of Jesus. I could go on and on, but one thing that I want to focus on is a ministry of our new church Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, KY which I am thankful for.

Immanuel Baptist Church is so focused on bringing the gospel to the surrounding neighborhood that it is in. It is located in the inner city (in a ghetto), so they have alot of contact with homeless people as well as people who live in drug houses or who are prostitutes. In order to minister to the neighborhood, they had a Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday the 22nd of Novemeber where all of the small groups brought the traditional food and then served it up joyfully along with some "down to earth" interaction, singing of some more familiar hymns and a 20 minute gospel presentation to 200 men, women and children from the Shelby Park neighborhood.

The neat thing is that these people weren't strangers to the church either. Every Friday they come to the church and are fed lunch, hear a gospel presentation, sing (or just listen)some hymns from old hymnals and they are given free clothes from the clothes closet and food for their home from the food pantry. If Immanuel Baptist Church closed down tomorrow the people of Shelby Park would notice. There would be many people who would be lonely and hungry and thirsty and naked. There would be people who would be lost in their sin and not ever hearing anyone telling them that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. And there are so many other ways that the people would feel the loss.

This year I am so thankful that our family has this great opportunity to actively learn how to minister the love of Jesus and forgiveness of sins to people in such desperate situations and circumstances.