The prophet Amos tells us what us needed for people to walk together: "Can two walk together, unless they are agreed" (Amos 3:3). Our relationship with God – our calling as Christians to serve Him – is compared to a path that we walk with God. But whether or not we walk this path with other Christians depends on whether we "are agreed".

In the church of God community we are not all "walking together". Why not? Because we are not all agreed on matters of doctrine.

The apostle Paul predicted a time when there would be doctrinal confusion: "The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables" (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

"Thanks" to technology and the internet it is possible today more than ever before to find one's own teachers who seem to preach new and interesting things. As a result, some in the church today are like the Athenians of Paul's day, who "spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing" (Acts 17:21).

By contrast, as Christians we "should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting" (Ephesians 4:14).

Paul tells us that God has placed elders in the church whose service in the word of God should help us to "come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God" (cf. Ephesians 4:11-13).

So for us to "walk together", we need to have faithful teachers who teach us the word of God faithfully, not talking about their own ideas, speculations, personal interests, etc., but God's word.

And for us to "walk together" depends on us being faithful to the things that we have been taught: "You must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them" (2 Timothy 3:14).

With these thoughts I wish everyone a rewarding Sabbath!