This week at church: wed night – 1 hour, Sunday morning worship practice – .5 hour, Sunday school – 1.5 hour, service – 1 hour = 4 hours.
This week, Zach led the Sunday School class. We opened the class by asking for prayer requests, then we prayed for each request right after it was made. I liked this because usually, we sped forever making prayer requests, then at the end no one remembers any of them. This way, everyone was remembered and no one was left out. Then we talked shortly about what we learned the week before as a refresher, and talked about how chapter 2 and three were related. We dug into Ephesians 3 and read the whole chapter. We found three things – 1. First and foremost, we need to be saved by grace. 2. God’s people today are found in all nations, not just one. 3. Both Jew and Gentile alike can share in the body of Christ – the church! So… if God’s wants all to share in the body of Christ, what is the church to do about it? We came up with this: the church should display the Lord’s wisdom, should be unified, and should grow spiritually as to cause others to grow spiritually. We also talked about some things concerning this matter, and I will display them as my post questions: How is the church doing this?
What are we doing wrong / right?
What can we do better?
kara
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Response to question 1. I think we are doing a lot of things write as the church. If we weren't, they church would not have survived for 2000 years and it would not be thriving like it is today. However, I think the church is really only good at doing the first two steps. They help people recognize that they are saved by grace and/or get people to accept Jesus' gift of grace and they are great about letting all nations participate in God's gift for us. We do foreign missions, support missions financially, etc to ensure that. But we don't get the concept of the 3rd step. We see Christianity not as a group pursuit but a individual pursuit. Though we are individuals and we do need to make an individual pursuit for God (or we would be COMPLETELY amiss) God shows us that we need to be united in mind and spirit with other Christians to pursue Christ together. We almost have no concept of this. We let our differences define us and we seperate ourselves from other denominations and thus other Christians. This is not what God wants. Of course all Christians will not agree on all issues, but we should get over those issues and pursue Christ together. Without that, we cannot pursue Christ to the fullest extent as the church.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your idea : "We came up with this: the church should display the Lord’s wisdom, should be unified, and should grow spiritually as to cause others to grow spiritually." I would say that much is left out of there. None of that has any bearing on anyone without the basis of love. Having "God's wisdom" or "being unified," or even growing spiritually wont do anything to save anybody... because, in effect, we dont save anyone. But if we display the love of christ to each other and to others then our witness will be indescribably more. - because then God is doing it, not us.
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