I once read in
Dr. Charles Stanley’s In Touch
magazine his listing of four essentials for finding New Life in Christ. It is well-worth sharing:
1. Claim
your salvation and live into it:
God’s unconditional
love and un-deserved redemption, simply stated, gives you the spiritual and
emotional freedom to grow, change and to be transformed by the power of God in
your life.
2.
Be Intentional about your spiritual
growth and your relationship with God: Growing in the image of Christ involves intentionality. In your New Life (Born Again life, to use Jesus’ words)
relationship with God through Christ, the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in
you. With His power and presence, you
can seek God’s face daily and grow in your knowledge and love of the Lord.
3.
Immerse
yourself in a caring, loving, sharing Christian fellowship: True Christian fellowship is a foretaste
of the Communion of Saints gathered in Heaven from throughout time and
for always. It is in relationship
with others that you learn to unconditionally love the way Christ
unconditionally loves you. You are called by Christ to move ever more
deeply into being involved in other people’s lives. It is in the Church that you
can be a blessing to others, and in the process yourself can be blessed by others.
4. Allow God’s Holy Spirit to lead you
from self-absorption to self-giving: At its heart the Christian journey is
a movement from self-absorption to self-giving.
To be like Christ is to sacrifice, even suffer, for others. Jesus says in John 15:13, “No one has
greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
This sounds like something reserved for the Saints (with a capital S),
but to think so would be unbiblical.
No charge. If you or someone you know 
Sunday afternoon, November 9 from 4:00 to 5:30 PM, we are gathering at the Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity, North Augusta
Differentiated from the culture by being a community
centered on the uniqueness of Christ (God incarnate) and work of Christ (His Cross
and Resurrection). 
The German theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) described worship as a great cosmic drama. In the Eucharist, which has been the central act of worship for the Christian community from the very beginning of the Church, God is author and director of the drama. God has written us a script in two acts; we call the two acts the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Table. God invites us not to be the audience, but to be the participants, the actors, in this great drama. It is we who are invited to take our place at the Eucharistic Table as a foreshadowing of the Great Banquet Feast of the Lamb and our place at the Lord's Table forever.