I greet you in Jesus' precious Name. It is Sunday morning, the 10th of December 2023, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.

We start in James 3:12:

Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh.

Then Galatians 5:22-23:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Identity. How do people see us? I looked up the word in the dictionary, identity means distinctiveness. We've got to be different. We must be unique. We must be original. We must have a specific character and a personality. When you see a cowboy walking down the road, how do you identify him? By the hat he wears, the buckle, the belt around his waist or the boots he wears? No, you identify a true cowboy by the way in which he treats his horse and the way in which he can ride that horse.

I went to a restaurant once, and the swing door where the chef and the servers came out of the kitchen had a big sign above it. It said: Never trust a skinny chef. Never judge a book by its cover. You know, they did a test once, they wanted to prove the importance of first appearances. They put a book on the shelf in a bookshop with nothing written inside it. It just had blank pages, but it had a beautiful cover on the outside. Do you know the amount of people who came up to the till to pay for the book, and the lady at the till would say have you opened the book and looked inside? And they would say no. They opened it up and there was nothing inside.

There's an old legend that John, the Apostle, who was the last one to die, when he was very old they would carry him into the meetings on a stretcher. He would always say, little children love one another, with tears in his eyes. And they would say why do you always say that, John? He would say because that is what Jesus used to say to us when he was with us on earth.

Today, let's be Jesus to some lost soul.
Have a wonderful day.
God bless you and goodbye.