Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in life thought well of you? Like if your boss always complimented you, or always gave you a bigger raise than you expected? Wouldn’t it be cool if all your family members were always giving to you and telling you how wise you are? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone treated you with the utmost respect all the time? Dream on! That won’t happen in this life, anyway.
You and I will live out our lives on this earth with imperfect people. People with strange habits and quirks will irritate us. We would never think that we are that way also, but we are. Even in church there are some imperfect people.
And it is to those Christians, God’s own children, still imperfect, that God calls us to be joined.
One man prayed, “God, you know I love you, it is just your children I don’t like!”
In order for us to find our real purpose in life, we have to do what God commands and get connected to other Christians in a genuine relationship that God speaks of as “Family.”
When a person becomes a Christian, he is no longer a stranger either to God or to other Christians, he is now a part of God‘s family.
Eph. 2:19 (NKJV) Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
God places people into a family. A local church. A Christian does not just belong to God, he also belongs to everyone else who belongs to God.
Rom. 12:5 (NIV) In Christ we who are many form one Body, and each member belongs to all the others.
Now this is important because many Christians try to live their lives in spiritual astral projection—- an out-of-the-Body experience!
The person who says,” You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian,” is like someone saying, “I am in the National Football League, but I don’t play on any team”, or “I am a college student, but I don’t attend any college”. It just does not make sense.
You cannot find your purpose in life without God’s family. He put you there.
Romans 12:10 (NIV) Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.
The New Testament is filled with “one another’s”. Pray for one another, care for one another, be kind to one another….. all these “one another’s” require you to be bodily present to do them…Not being a functioning part of a local church is saying “no” to God’s plan. The guy who says, “I won’t be at church in person, but I’ll be there in spirit,” doesn’t know that we don’t believe in ghosts. People make up all kinds of excuses for not going to church.
Two men were fishing on a lake, feeling guilty that it was a Sunday morning, that they were not attending church, and that the fish were not biting.
The first guy eventually says: “I should have stayed home and gone to church.”
To which the other angler replied: “I couldn’t have gone to church, anyhow. My wife is sick in bed.”
Remember we understand who we are by doing the things our Creator said to do.
1 John 3:1 (NIV) How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
Getting connected to His family is the way we begin to see who we really are. He made you to belong to a family unit so you can grow into what He made you for.