April 4, 2021

He is alive!  This proclamation has thundered a message of hope across the centuries.  He is risen as He said He would! “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).  He is faithful to His word.  In all things, Jesus can be trusted to keep His word.  He said He came that we might have life and that we might have life more abundantly.  For your life and for my life, Jesus has regard for its preservation, protection, perpetuity, provisions, punishment, and ultimately its perfection in glory.  Because He lives, we can have life in its fullest measure.

As the people of God, we have resurrection power.  We can (and should) experience His resurrection power in every facet of our lives.  That power will keep us and deliver us out of life’s difficult circumstances.  If it is a dying relationship, He is able to resurrect it.  Be it husband and wife, parents and children, neighbor and neighbor, most of all, man and his God.  Fractured relationships are not the will of our heavenly Father.  It does not matter how foreboding life’s experiences are, we have His resurrection power in us.  Let Him live in your relationships.  He is alive and we enjoy His protection.

I know what the Chronicle and Time Magazine has to say about terrorist and terrorism, the pandemic, but I choose to let the word come alive in my spirit.  “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house, even of thy holy temple” (Psalm 15:4).

Happy Resurrection Day!

Pastor J. Amos Jones

April 4, 2021

Join us for Sunrise Service Easter morning at 6:00 a.m.

March 21, 2021

“For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” (Malachi 3:6) We thank God that who He is, is who He has always been, and who He has always been is who He will always be.  He is the great I AM.  He is not subject to the whims or capricious ideas of a fickle society.  His immutability allows us to know Him in a real and personal way.  We know that He loves us with an unconditional love, therefore we can trust Him in every facet of our lives.  We know that He is Jehovah-Jireh, “the Lord provides” and will always be so.  Provides: “pro” means before: “vide”, to see.  He is the God who provides, i.e.: the God who has seen all our needs and has already met them.  Just as God provided for Abraham in Genesis twenty-two, so will He do for you in 2021.  He does not change.  The Lord said in Exodus 15:26:  “…If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in His sight, and wilt give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians:  for I am the Lord that healeth thee.”

Just as He was Jehovah-Rapha at the bitter waters of Marah and Elim, He is still “the Lord who heals you”.  He can be to CORONAVIRUS today what He was to bitter waters.  God promised that if the people obeyed Him they would be free from the diseases that plagued the Egyptians.  Rapha means heal, restore, cure.  Healing is what God is. God does not change!  What He was, He is.  What He is, He will always be.  You can, dear ones, trust Him in everything.  He is a keeper.  Praise God for His immutability.

Pastor J. Amos Jones

March 14, 2021

In our Sunday School study, Unit II was The Call of Women.  Unfortunately we missed two weeks of this enlighten study.  Women have always contributed significantly to the work of the Kingdom, but have not always received the proper recognition.  In fact, in the Baptist Church we have bordered on female discrimination.  This, of course, is not the position of our Lord.  Jesus raised women from degradation and servitude to fellowship and service.

In Luke 8 we find women accompanying Jesus and the disciples as they travel throughout preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God.  In Jewish culture, women were not supposed to learn from rabbis .  By allowing these women to travel with him, Jesus was showing that all people are equal under God.  These women not only traveled with Jesus, they supported His ministry with their own money.  “And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto Him of their substances.” Luke 8:2-3).  Jesus elevated the status of women in the Kingdom, a direct contrast to the customs and mores of the Jewish culture. Jesus recognized the enormous worth of women to the Kingdom and this Pastor certainly shares in that recognition.

As Pastor, I am grateful and appreciative to the Father for the wonderful women of Friendship and for women in general. Lesson five gave us some insight into a certain woman named Lydia, a marvelous person who loved the Lord with all her heart.  To this Pastor, Lydia is the personification of the many women of Friendship who love the Lord with all their heart.  Women, co-laborers in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.  To God be the glory for His marvelous utilization of Kingdom dwellers, be they bond or free, male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

Pastor J. Amos Jones

February 21, 2021

   During February as we reflect on Black History, there are parallels inJewish History as presented in the book of Esther that are captivating to this Pastor.  In the intricacy of its plot and the beautiful drama of the book, Esther shows how Divine Providence overrules all things; even in a distant, far country, God’s people are yet in His hands.  The book reminds us that the fate of the Jews was not in the hands of their enemies, but of Almighty God.  They placed their trust in God who would raise up an “Esther” who would “come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”

In the far country of slavery, the ugliest testimony of man’s inhumanity to man, the anti-biblical concept of man having dominion over another man, even there was His providence in the midst of His people.  It is amazing how through the studying of the scriptures that Africans found themselves an important part of the human race and from those early days of slavery until the early 1900s black children would hear their parents say to them “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory.” (1 Samuel 2:8a)

   For the Jews, there was Esther, for African-Americans, there was Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.  There have been great persons of all races and classes and sexes who were martyred for the cause of freedom.  Freedom is not free!  In the book of Esther, there is the inexorable working of divine judgement.  Haman was eventually hanged on his own gallows. 

Dear ones, let me share three requisites from the Word of God:

• And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)
• If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. (John 8:36)
• And let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.  (Galatians 6:9)

Be blessed and let us continue,

Pastor J. Amos Jones