Feast of Tabernacles 15-21/7/36/120

Dear Friends,

This is Ingathering and the First Holy Day of the Feast. As it has been each year for some time, many hundreds of you will have been baptized into the Body of Christ and are undertaking your first Feast with the Church of God. At this Feast you will meet people from all walks of life. CCG is now made up of people from dozens of denominations. Some of you will have been ministers of different churches and some of you will have been bishops of those churches and all of you have been re-baptised into the Body of Christ. For most of you keeping the Feast will be a new experience. For all of you keeping the Feast in Booths will be a new experience.

For all of you outside of the US and the British Commonwealth you will find people from many of the Churches of God have joined together and settled their issues on doctrine and have become united as one people settled on one set of true doctrines.

Churches have been formed from the Seventh Day Baptist union in many countries and joined with Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) and Church of God (Seventh Day) and the COG (General Conference) and many offshoots of the Churches of God from the WCG system. Some of the COG (SD) conferences will have joined as late as this week and been inducted, especially in Kenya.

here are many of you who came in from the UCG, LCG, PCG and RCG systems and many other smaller ex-WCG organisations. Many of you have been trained to be RC priests and Anglican ministers and all the Episcopalian type sub-structures of the Anglican system. Many are from other Protestant and Pentecostal organisations. God is joining all these fragmented structures that have formed over the last few hundred years.

You all have one thing in common. You have been put together by the Holy Spirit in one mind and one spirit to be of like mind in the one administration serving the one Lord Jesus Christ in the worship of the One True God. Some of you have just come to the understanding that your baptism as an infant is not valid and you have to be re-baptised  For that reason the Trinitarians called us Anabaptists in days gone past.

After this Feast there will be the later phase of the work continued where the sheep will continue to be joined together and torn out of the hands of the shepherds and reorganised so that they can be judged on how they treat each other. God is judging sheep on sheep and from the goats. There will be four church systems dealt with in the Last Days. As we have said some years ago, the Thyatiran system will be asked nothing further as it has already played its part and endured much persecution among its people. It will simply be judged on how it treats its own people in its own areas.

The Sardis system is dead and as a system does not enter the Kingdom of God. Its people are the ones torn out of the hands of the shepherds. Those left are not part of the Philadelphian system. Each of the faithful remnant is placed in the Church of the Philadelphians which is the church of Brotherly Love and they deal with and support each other in these days ahead. The Second Great Commandment is the rule and measuring rod of the Philadelphians. The church of the Laodiceans is likewise spewed out of God's mouth. They think that they are rich but do not understand that they are poor, pitiable, blind and naked.

The Philadelphians are given an open door and a little strength. It is they that do the work in the Last Days and unite the brethren under sound doctrine in brotherly love. That aspect is explained in the paper The Pillars of Philadelphia (No.283).

Think also of our history and those that have gone before us (see the paper Role of the Fourth Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping Churches of God (No. 170)).

Make friends at this Feast and prepare for the days ahead and the task of spreading the gospel of the Kingdom of God, so that the end may come. It is written:
And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come (Mat. 24:14).

Each of you is being judged by how you treat each other. From the New Moon of the Eighth Month the Churches of God will continue to be consolidated and the sheep gathered and measured.

Those of you that are new to the faith rejoice that God has called you at this stage and that the wages are the same no matter when it was that you were called into the faith and made a labourer in the harvest.

The program for the Feast is simple so that the new ones can study the papers necessary to get them to the point of understanding the plan in which they fit and work in the Last Days.

Remember that Christ said that the gates of Hades, or the grave, or death could not prevail against God's Church.

Satan will throw everything he can against us but he will not prevail, as Christ will return to save we who eagerly await him.

Never before have God's people been grouped and tested on the issues of sound doctrine and brotherly love as they are now and that time is continuing.

This Feast study the basics and the plan with the concepts of the Law and the Testimony and the organisational structure that will take us into the Kingdom in the First Resurrection. If you have been in the faith a long time then help those who are new.

Do not be discouraged as that is Satan's greatest weapon. War is on us everywhere. Economic crisis is everywhere.

Do not judge one another. Love one another and support the work of God.

The harvest is here and the fields are white.  Prepare for the trials we are about to face. Go your way now and enjoy the Feast and as Nehemiah said: "Eat the fat and drink the sweet."

Wade Cox
Coordinator General