Taken from 1 John 3:16.
In my own words - "Just like how Jesus laid down His life for us, so we should as well lay down our lives for our fellow believers".
To care, to nurture, to encourage, to forgive, to encourage and all other good deeds alike - the way we're supposed to be towards our brothers and sisters in Christ - thus, stresses the importance of belonging to a local church where we would learn to get along with imperfect people having various likeable and unlikeable behaviours and attributes like ourselves. Now that I've read about this, I must say that I'm still learning to put this into practise - it's a continuous process which I hope I would master by one fine day, by His guidance and grace.
I've really have to settle in a home church soon. I further read that uncut arms and limbs from a body would be rendered useless, much alike members of a church who have backslidened or stop attending church would be without the support of others and the protective covering of the spiritual leaders of a church. These people rendered alone spiritually, would be utterly defenseless against any attacks by the evil one.
Text also states the importance of having spiritual partner(s) who would be having accounts of our daily actions as to keeping tab of our spiritual lives. I've read this now in 2 books by 2 different authors - so I figured this practise is of much importance. Having spiritual partner(s) - by mutually supporting each other, we keep each other in check. The phrase as Rick Warren puts it 'Mind Your Own Business' doesn't apply in Christian Life - to me, that's very true if we were to have a spiritual partner who we are not to hide anything from, thus forcing us to make sure that we're always aligned to the teachings of His Word, so that at the end of every day, we could come clean with excellent grades in our performance/progress report.
p.s. just for the fun of things, since these clock works as below are always in my head. With peeps all o'er these localities, it helps to avoid disrupting them at wrong hours like graveyard shift hours, etc.
Signing off exactly at time...
Wednesday, April 28th 2010
2.25 am (KL)
1.25 am (Hanoi)
Tuesday, April 27th 2010
6.25 pm (London)
2.25 pm (Ontario)
11.25 am (CA, WA)
Posts
2 comments:
Love it, Sam! You are so right on point. I've said it to you before, but I just think it is SO absolutely important to have a spiritual relationship with fellow believers to keep us accountable and on the right path. Of course if we are alone, the enemy will have greater ground in us because some of us easily believe/rely on our own thought processes - but that is how satan works.. he squeezes in a little lie shrouded in intellectual truth that we may fall prey to if we are living based on our own understanding. And if we do not have those close to us who we talk to about spiritual matters, then we are just giving that ground over to the enemy to infiltrate. In reading Watchman Nee's book "The Spiritual Man" I understand from him that you can actually be possessed by demons without even knowing it (that is, they have much ground/connection in your life by speaking directly to you disguised in your own thoughts) and that they will basically throw off your entire walk with the Lord because you will never be able to contact the Lord in your spirit while believing in outright lies. The Lord is a law (of righteousness), much like gravity is a law, and you either know Him in truth or you don't. If you don't know him in truth, you are going to have a very turbulent spiritual walk with Him in which you will be deterred very much so by the enemy. That fellowship is SO important! I pray that us believers begin realizing that the Body of Christ (the church & the church life) is why Christ came down as a man.... so that we not only might be close with God but also that we may be Christ's brothers/sisters/family in union! Explain to me how we can have a family, yet be so separated with denominations, ideals and such? Its completely contradictory to what God plans for us! Anyway, my rant is done :)
lol-ed on the rant thing. :P
yea, sadly too many denomination and organisational structures when it comes to churches - the text i read says of church nowadays are more to organisations rather than living organisms.
oh and good evening, ashie :)
back to bed again - just 4 hours of wink catching for now :)
Post a Comment