Good Sunday to you. Mine is going fine so far, except for the fact that I went to rest for a few minutes at 3pm and woke up at 5. Now I'll never get to sleep tonight. Actually I don't think I have quite waken yet so please forgive any typos and grammer mistakes. Thanks. Today's service was quite a warning sermon. It was from 1 Timothy 4:1-4 about people falling to apostate doctrine. However, Paul gives us a safe guard from it, in verse 4: keep a pure conscience through prayer and Bible reading. Pastor Josh told this story to illustrate.

There once was an orphan boy named Robert Robinson who attended a revival meeting held by George Whitefield. He believed on Christ and became a seminary student. One day he wrote the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Sadly, his words were prophetic. He indeed began to wander, and after many years he left the faith completely and travelled to France living a life of unchecked sin. One particularly depressing day, he was stuck in a stage coach with a Christian woman. She wanted to share with him this wonderful poem she had found. After quoting the 3rd verse, Robert burst into tears while blurting out "Lady, I know the words to that poem very well. I am the poor soul who wrote it and would give a 1000 worlds to feel what I did back then." The lady, shocked, continued reading verse 4.
O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

By the time she finished, the Holy Spirit had turned this man's soul around to Christ again, and he served His Saviour the rest of his life.

His life, along side the sermon today, gives us a warning that if don't keep our foundations on Christ through reading the Bible often with prayer we will also end up turning from Christ. And while even if we take a 1000 steps from Christ it only takes one step back, those 1000 steps will be the most miserable ones we ever walk.