Hi, Brothers and Sisters be blessed!
We always thank our Almighty God for grating our lives. We were living with so many people, but now we cannot see them, they have passed and gone like flowers that shed from their plants. So, every single day we see a new morning we have a cause to thank God and glorify his name.
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This morning, our devotion is what friends do we have, do we have friends who always inform us to go to clubs, go and drink alcohol, go and search for girls and many others things which do not bring salvation, or we have friends who encourage to go to Church, go to prayer meetings, go and do evangelism and many other things that promote God's words? As the saying goes: "show me your friend and I will show you my character." What character do your friends possess, is it character that always push you to sin or character that save you from sins? You must choose a good character that will advise you to strive and search for the salvation which is in Jesus Christ.
Character is something that influence our lives much. If all your friends have good characters that search for good things you will also develop those habit of searching for good things, however, if your friends have bad characters that spoil life, you will also copy them and at the end your life will spoil. We cannot from making friends since mankind is social being, we are in a society, we are in a community surrounded by many people which always we have to build our human relationships with them, we cannot isolate ourselves. But consciousness is the key to our friendship that we choose. During our tender age we mix with so many friends in our communities in which we live, we mix with friends in Schools. Many of these friends that we meet influence our lives a lot, either in a good way or bad way.
Our parents have much responsibilities in shaping our lives a lot, helping us to develop our good character in the sense that, they are our immediate group of people who effect socialisation in our lives. They coach us, train us and direct where our feet should step or never step. At the initial stage if they fail to honour this responsibilities it means our character can be spoiled. There are many parents who at the initial stage pampered their children, they failed to control or monitor them, even when they started with outdoor lives their parents refused to talked about it. The friends their wards followed at the initial stage were bad friends, but they failed to talk about it. All these can develop into bad characters.
In the Spiritual aspects, the parents must redeem for their children in prayers about the friends that they choose. Children leave their parents and go to Schools, many of these children live in boarding houses of which they mix with so many students from different backgrounds, some of these students possess bad characters that have a great influence on their friends. In schools many bad behaviours are learnt, those are the places where students learn lesbianism, gay, fornication, drinking of of alcohol, smoking of Indian hemp, drug addiction and so many bad acts. Many lives are afflicted with demons and powers due to the characters they were introduced to them at early stage in School. But if these children are closely marked by their parents and with God in control, their characters would be shaped and become good people with good character in future. Thank you colleague! Let's help to develop good characters for our wards.
