Purpose Driven Life - Day 21

Day 21.. Protecting Your Church

Unity is the soul of fellowship. Destroy it, and you rip the heart out of Christ's Body. It is the essence, the core, of how God intends for us to experience life together in his church.

In his final moments before being arrested, Jesus prayed passionately for our unity. It was our unity that was uppermost in his mind during those agonizing hours. That shows how significant this subject is. Nothing on earth is more valuable to God than his church. He paid the highest price for it, and he wants it protected, especially from the devastating damage that is caused by division, conflict, and disharmony. You are commissioned by Jesus Christ to do everything possible to preserve the unity, protect the fellowship, and promote harmony in your church family and among all believers. The Bible says, "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." How are we to do this? The Bible gives us practical advice. Focus on what we have in common, not our differences. Be realistic in your expectations. Choose to encourage rather than criticize. Refuse to listen to gossip. Practice God's method for conflict resolution. And most importantly, support your pastor and leaders.

What are you doing personally to make your church family more warm and loving? There are many people in your community who are looking for love and a place to belong. The truth is, everyone needs and wants to be loved, and when people find a church where members genuinely love and care for each other, you would have to lock the doors to keep them away.

Purpose Driven Life - Day 20

Day 20... Restoring Broken Fellowship

Relationships are always worth restoring.

Because life is all about learning how to love, God wants us to value relationships and make the effort to maintain them instead of discarding them whenever there is a rift, a hurt, or a conflict. In fact, the Bible tells us that God has given us the ministry of restoring relationships.

For this reason a significant amount of the New Testament is devoted to teaching us how to get along with one another. Paul wrote, "If you've gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, . . . Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends." Paul taught that our ability to get along with others is a mark of spiritual maturity. If you want God's blessing on your life and you want to be known as a child of God, you must learn to be a peacemaker.

Who do you need to contact as a result of today's broadcast? With whom do you need to restore fellowship? Don't delay another second. Pause right now and talk to God about that person. Then pick up the phone and begin the process. It takes a lot of effort to restore a relationship. That's why Peter urged, "Work hard at living in peace with others." But when you work for peace, you are doing what God would do. That's why God calls peacemakers his children.

Purpose Driven Life - Day 19

 

Day 19  --  Cultivating Community

 

Community requires commitment. If you are tired of fake fellowship and you would like to cultivate real fellowship and a loving community in your small group, Sunday school class, and church, you will need to make some tough choices and take some risks.

Cultivating community takes honesty. Real fellowship depends on frankness. In fact, the tunnel of conflict is the passageway to intimacy in any relationship. Until you care enough to confront and resolve the underlying barriers, you will never grow close to each other.

Cultivating community takes humility. Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don't think of themselves.

Cultivating community takes courtesy. The truth is, we all have quirks and annoying traits. But community has nothing to do with compatibility. The basis for our fellowship is our relationship to God: We are family.

Cultivating community takes confidentiality. Only in the safe environment of warm acceptance and trusted confidentiality will people open up and share their deepest hurts, needs, and mistakes. Confidentiality does not mean keeping silent while your brother or sister sins. It means that what is shared in your group needs to stay in your group, and the group needs to deal with it, not gossip to others about it.

Cultivating community takes frequency. You must have frequent, regular contact with your group in order to build genuine fellowship. Relationships take time.

When you look at the list of characteristics, it is obvious why genuine fellowship is so rare. But the benefits of sharing life together far outweigh the costs, and it prepares us for heaven.

Purpose Driven Life - Day 18

Day 18  Experiencing Life Together

God intends for us to experience life together. The Bible calls this shared experience fellowship. Fellowship now usually refers to casual conversation, socializing, food, and fun. The question, Where do you fellowship? means Where do you attend church? Stay after for fellowship usually means Wait for refreshments.

Real fellowship is so much more than just showing up at services. It is experiencing life together. It includes unselfish loving, honest sharing, practical serving, sacrificial giving, sympathetic comforting, and all the other one another commands found in the New Testament.

The Body of Christ, like your own body, is really a collection of many small cells. The life of the Body of Christ, like your body, is contained in the cells. For this reason, every Christian needs to be involved in a small group within their church, whether is it a home fellowship group, a Sunday school class, or a Bible study. If you think of your church as a ship, the small groups are the lifeboats attached to it. It is only as we become open about our lives that we experience real fellowship.

The Bible says, If we live in the light, as God is in the light, we can share fellowship with each other If we say we have no sin, we are fooling ourselves. The world thinks intimacy occurs in the dark, but God says it happens in the light. Darkness is used to hide our hurts, faults, fears, failures, and flaws. But in the light, we bring them all out into the open and admit who we really are. You were created for community.

Purpose Driven Life - Day 17

Day 17 -  A Place to Belong

 

You are called to belong, not just believe. We are created for community, fashioned for fellowship, and formed for a family, and none of us can fulfill God's purposes by ourselves.

The Bible says we are put together, joined together, built together, members together, heirs together, fitted together, and held together and will be caught up together. You are not on your own anymore. While your relationship to Christ is personal, God never intends it to be private. In God's family you are connected to every other believer, and we will belong to each other for eternity.

The Bible says, In Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. It also says a Christian without a church home is like an organ without a body, a sheep without a flock, or a child without a family. It is an unnatural state.

The Christian life is more than just commitment to Christ; it includes a commitment to other Christians. The Christians in Macedonia understood this. Paul said, First they gave themselves to the Lord; and then, by God's will, they gave themselves to us as well. Joining the membership of a local church is the natural next step once you've become a child of God. You become a Christian by committing yourself to Christ, but you become a church member by committing yourself to a specific group of believers. The first decision brings salvation; the second brings fellowship.