The News & Record - South Boston, Virginia

Home • News • Sports • Classifieds • Community • Health • Entertainment • Obituaries • Opinions • Weather

Advertising | Contact | About Us | Register

News

National Academy members speak in Danville on uranium

02/06/12 - 7:53 am

Looking back at 112 years of Virgilina history

02/06/12 - 7:48 am

Happy birthday, Virgilina! Few people know it, but the town will be 83 years old this February. According to the first town council minute book, Virgilina was incorporated and its…

- More News

Sports

Comets fall to Patrick Henry

02/07/12 - 9:43 am

Community

Opinion

A&E

Weddings-Engagements | Community News | Calendar | Society

Plain and Simple for March 4, 2010

By Clyde M. DeLoach

SoVaNow.com / March 03, 2010

This past week, I came across a true story told in Preaching: Word and Witness (11-20-05). There was a church in Corinth, Miss. named the Fillmore Presbyterian Church. It had been in existence since the early 1800s. Like many churches, it had fallen on hard times in the 1960s and finally came to a place when it felt as if it must close.

As the last Sunday approached, the leaders of the church came up with a great idea. They wanted to attract as many people as they could for the last Sunday’s celebration. So they sent out word that anyone who came to the last worship service could look around the church and take any little memento that they wanted to take. If they wanted to take a bible or a small picture or any other small reminder of the church, they could.

In preparation for the big day, the leaders of the church began to look around the church for different souvenirs. They went down into the basement where people had seldom gone for years. As a matter of fact, they went way down into the basement where no one had gone for years and years and years. It was there that they discovered something no one ever suspected would be there. They found tons of ordnance. That is, they found tons of bombs and ammunition.

After some research, the authorities were able to discern that the ordnance came from the Confederate Army during the Battle of Shiloh back during the Civil War. The shocking truth was that the church had been sitting on enough explosives to destroy half the town for one hundred years and never knew it.

The implications of this story are many. How many churches today are sitting on tons of explosive power that we don’t realize that we have? In Acts 1:8, we are told that “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you shall be my witnesses.” The early church moved from being a small group in a backwater country in an isolated part of the Roman Empire to the world religion that it is today. How did it accomplish this amazing feat? It utilized the power of the Holy Spirit.

Too often we in the church bemoan the fact that we do not have this program or a certain amount of money. We look around us and surrender without a fight. We forget that we are sitting on the most amazing power that the world has ever seen. Jesus said that he would not leave us abandoned; he was giving us the Holy Spirit. Let us use some of that power to reach into the world and continue the task that is set before us. Let us make disciples for Jesus Christ.

Halifax Community