Lord willing, I will be teaching an adult beginning guitar class for Majesty Music Academy in Spring 2018. If you know of anyone in the Greenville, SC area who might be interested in learning guitar by enrolling in a guitar class, please let them know about this opportunity.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
Understanding what the Bible teaches about marriage is a crucial matter. Pastor Minnick’s recent message, “Marriage of God’s Making,” provides eminently biblical instruction about this vital subject.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
“Created Male and Female” is an excellent sermon by my pastor Dr. Mark Minnick that is worth listening to and will profit you.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
El hablarnos a nosotros mismos correctamente es una disciplina cristiana esencial. Los siguientes 18 pasajes nos dan declaraciones bíblicas directas las cuales nos instruyen sobre lo que debemos decirnos a nosotros mismos.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
Based on information from a friend, I downloaded this morning an excellent free audio transcription program: Express Scribe!
I have several audio sermons that I would like to transcribe and found that this software makes the task a lot easier. I praise God for this free resource!
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
I praise God for the grace that He imparted me to minister His truth about music to the brethren of Foundation Baptist Church on March 26, 2017. At my request, Pastor Gillis has written a recommendation letter for my ministry.
He also shared the following “blurb” with me about my ministry:
Most Christians agree that music is an important factor in our worship of God. However, there is much debate about the style of music to be used. Most agree that what the words say is very important, but there is disagreement about the morality of the music itself. What do I think? That’s not important. What God says in His Word is, however, critical. Dr. Rajesh Gandhi recently spoke at our church on Acceptable Music for Corporate Worship. The four messages focused on what the Bible says about the subject. Foundational to the series was an effective refutation of the popular meme that music is neither right nor wrong (amoral). This was interwoven with a Biblical theology of music throughout the Bible and the history of man. For those who want to please God with all they do, including their music, this series of messages is essential. May God open the doors for this message to be taught.
If you know of any brethren who would be interested in having me minister to their people on this subject, please have them contact me. Thanks for any help that any of you as readers of this post is able to provide me with in reaching more brethren with these messages.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
God has revealed what He wants all His people to do on His day:
Psa 92:1 <A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day.> It is a good thing to give thanks unto the LORD, and to sing praises unto thy name, O most High:
2 To shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night,
3 Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound.
4 For thou, LORD, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands.
Under inspiration, the Psalmist exclaims that it is good to sing praises to God’s name using stringed instruments both in the morning and in the night on the Sabbath Day. This is one of the clearest passages that teaches the importance of corporate worship both in the morning and in the evening on the one day of the week that God specifically set aside to be uniquely His.
For NT believers, the Lord’s Day is that day. Based on the teaching of this passage, believers all over the world need to accept the truth that worshiping God corporately both in the morning and in the evening on the Lord’s Day with the use of singing accompanied by musical instruments is a good thing that God wants us to do every week.
I think it is very disturbing and concerning that churches are discontinuing corporate worship services on the Lord’s Day, especially in the evenings. We should use passages such as this one to disciple believers all over the world about what God wants His people to do on His day.
We should also strongly encourage our brethren that developing skillfulness in instrumental musical ministry is an essential aspect of giving God the glory due His name.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
Lord willing, I will be preaching a series of four messages about the Bible and music on March 26! I would appreciate prayers for Spirit-filled skillfulness in preparing for these messages and in preaching them. Thanks in advance to anyone whom God leads to pray for me concerning this preaching series.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
My ministry this year was greatly blessed by my beginning this year by reading the entire Bible in 59 days! I also made it through the NT this year a second time and read much of the Bible in Spanish.
This year was an especially fruitful year for me in ministering the Bible because I had two new teaching opportunities. I also had many other opportunities to minister, especially in teaching, music ministry, and writing on my blog.
I had two preaching opportunities this year: prayer meeting at my church, Mount Calvary Baptist in Greenville, SC, and a Sunday morning service in a church in Georgia. Although I had already preached both these messages before elsewhere, preaching them again allowed me to improve both messages substantially.
Two new opportunities to minister were given to me this year in teaching at my church: teaching a combined adult Sunday school class and teaching a 16-week adult Sunday school class in the fall. In addition, I taught Sunday school once at a church in Georgia.
I did the Scripture reading for two morning services at my church. For the first time, I also read Scripture for a morning service in my church’s Spanish ministry.
I ministered with other instrumentalists in one opener for a service and in two offertories. I accompanied various people singing specials in our Spanish ministry four times this year.
Online, I was able to teach guitar to a developing guitarist overseas who has made encouraging progress in preparing himself for using the guitar for ministry. My teaching guitar this year also included instructing a few students personally.
I also sang with a group of men for a special in our Spanish ministry. I wrote one new Spanish hymn for children this year, “Dios es siempre bueno!”
Regular participation in neighborhood evangelism this summer and in Spanish evangelism at various times throughout the year afforded me many opportunities to minister Scripture to both believers and unbelievers. I also worked in registration for our annual Neighborhood Bible School.
In our Spanish ministry, I prayed for and took the offering several times. For our Men’s Ministry, I wrote one article for the manual and attended all of our prayer breakfasts.
Tutoring a Seminary student in New Testament Greek for several months this summer provided me with a good opportunity to teach elementary Greek again. By regular participation in two discussion groups on Facebook, I was able to give God’s truths numerous times to lost people and saved people.
I gave a brief devotional at the beginning of the workday nearly every Tuesday this year. I also frequently shared Scriptural truths with my coworkers.
I posted on my blog 77 times in 2016, counting this post. The majority of my posts shared biblical truths that God has given me over the years in my own study of Scripture, which has been the major focus of my blog from the beginning.
I praise the Lord for His goodness and faithfulness to me in allowing me to minister so abundantly in 2016!
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
I did not grow up in a Christian family and had little acquaintance with the things of the Bible as a child and as a teenager. I had heard the name Jesus but mostly it was when people used it as an expletive.
From watching movies like the Robe and Ben Hur in my childhood years, I did see a moving presentation of the Crucifixion of Jesus and remember being distinctly and at the time inexplicably moved by viewing those scenes, even though I was not saved until many years after seeing those movies.
It was not until I was in college that I was exposed in any continuing way to some things from the Bible. When I would regularly visit a Catholic Newman center on the campus of Western Illinois University, I did not follow much of what was said in the homilies given in those services, but I distinctly remember being strangely moved when we would sing the Model Prayer that Jesus taught His disciples to pray.
I also visited a few churches with friends during those years, but I do not remember anything about what was preached in those churches. My exposure to Bible truth in my college years also included a movie about Christianity that I saw with some Christian friends.
Having had a habit for many years of browsing in bookstores, I encountered in a Christian bookstore some books about the New Age movement that warned that some of the things that I was involved in at the time were of demonic origin. I bought those books, and God used them to speak to me although I was not a believer yet.
God continued to work in my life by directing me to the religion section of the Public Library in Cookeville. From the hundreds of books in that section, He led me to read several that gave me a good overview of the story of the Bible.
God then directed me to some apologetics books in a Christian bookstore in Cookeville. Those books presented me for the first time in my life with the objective historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
About the same time, someone put a tract on my windshield that I read the day that it was put there. Through my praying through the suggested prayers in the back of the apologetics books and at the end of the tract, God saved me!
I am confident that the person who put that tract on my windshield prayed for God to use that tract to reach someone with His truth. God answered that person’s prayers by using my reading of that tract as part of how He brought me to saving faith in His Son.
Soon after I was saved, I wanted to go to church but had no idea about what church to go to out of the dozens of church names that I saw in the phone book for Cookeville. I prayed, and God directed someone to come up to me at work and invite me to his church.
The person who did so did not know that I had been recently saved. God answered my prayer by leading me through him to the only truly independent fundamental Baptist church in Cookeville!
Many years after I was saved, I learned that I had been born in a missionary hospital run by Canadian Presbyterian missionaries in a small town in India. Those missionary doctors and nurses prayed over every baby that was born in that hospital.
Until I am with the Lord, I will not know for sure what they prayed for when I was born. It is entirely possible that they prayed for me to be saved one day, and if they did, God has answered their prayers!
Whether anyone else prayed directly for my salvation, Scripture reveals that Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God, prayed for me to the Father (John 17:20-26). I praise our Heavenly Father for giving me to His Son in answer to His prayers and in fulfillment of His glorious promise to His Christ:
“Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” (Ps. 2:8).
Having been saved by the Father’s fulfilling His promise to His Son, may we all be used by Him to reach many others who will also be saved in fulfillment of the Father’s glorious promise to His Son that He would give Him the heathen for His inheritance. Knowing these things, let us all be diligent to pray and share the gospel of God concerning His Son to people in the power of His promised Spirit whom His Son has given us in fulfillment of the Father’s promise (Luke 24:49; Acts 2:33).
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who is faithful to keep all His promises to His Son and to everyone and everything else, including every living creature (Gen. 9:9-17). “Even so, come, Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20).
Copyright © 2011-2024 by Rajesh Gandhi. All rights reserved.
Rajesh Gandhi holds a Ph.D. in New Testament Interpretation from Bob Jones Seminary; he's a long-time member of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, SC.
