Healthy & loving church

 4 Sep 25

Today's devotional: taken from YouVersion, Life Application Study Bible Devotion


Healthy & loving church

A healthy Christian community attracts people to Christ. The Jerusalem church's zeal for worship and brotherly love was contagious. A healthy, loving church will grow in numbers. What are you doing to make your church the kind of place that will attract others to Christ?


“Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Acts‬ ‭2‬:‭46‬-‭47‬ ‭NIV‬‬

———————

Reflections

A lot of people think these kind of questions are only for those serving in church, especially the front-liners, such as ushers, info desks, etc. However, I think people overlooked the fact that a church is made of up different parts of the body, front and back and even the smallest and insignificant people are part of the larger community. Let’s not forget the estate and cleaners who help take care of the whole building.


How do we then, make our church a place that will attract people to Christ? I think it will have to start from own culture. Like how Christ deals with our hearts, the church will have to look at its own culture because everything that comes out of it started with the culture. So maybe take a step back and ask ourselves, what kind of culture does our church have? What are the messages that are coming out from the leaders? Are they more concerned with numbers or are they concerned about the hearts of the church members? Are we willing to spend time nurturing the young Christians? By young, I mean both in age as well as the time they have known Christ.


I believe only when the church is united in hearts-for Christ, can it then stand as one who attracts people to Him. The other things are not so important because when we are transformed from within, it will be shown outwardly. We need to be Christ-centric, talking about Christ values, doing all that is important for the growth of our faith.


Things such as prayers. Are we focused enough on prayers? Do we have a good prayer life and having an intimate relationship with God? When our own prayer life suffers due to whatever reasons, our spiritual life will suffer and the other parts of our life tend to suffer as well because we have failed to anchor ourselves in Him. Why then, the wanting to do God’s work when we are just working but not communing with Him as we should?


Things such as forgiveness. Have we forgiven every one that we need to forgive? We cannot do any good works when the very basis of forgiveness is not being done. We come to Christ as forgiven people because He has shown us grace and mercy. We, too, ought to forgive others because He has forgiven us first.


How about loving our neighbours? Are we bearing grudges against anyone even? What is the point of going to church when we cannot even treat our neighbours nicely and say have been badmouthing them due to different issues or challenges you may be facing? Your neighbour can be noisy due to the screaming kids or scolding parents, your neighbour can be hoarders where their things blocked even the only passageway, leading to fire hazards, your neighbour can be strange and try to pry open your windows to see if you are at home, etc. These people have struggles on their own and need people who are loving, non-judging to minister to them so that they can know Christ. If we do like the world does, we aren’t so different from the world. But let’s not forget what we are called to do. Love one another as how Christ has love you. 


May the Lord continue to bless us with wisdom to deal with the things of the world and to do it lovingly.

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