The Whole Building

In a home fellowship hosted by Greg and Heather that Anita and I go to we read through Ephesians 2. The second part (verses 11 through 22) deals with our relationship with Christ and with other Christians. The Lord led us towards further discussion of our relationship with each other and what we are seeing in our church.

A comment Greg made is it seems folks treat church as a Sunday morning event. When in practical application of the Word the members of the local church should be involved with each other's lives at least to some degree. I think we all concurred.

Ephesians 2:19-22 supports this. Verse 21 says, "In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit."

In my mind this paints a picture of a community of believers. It looks to me believers should be in "church" 7 days a week, not just visiting each other during the Sunday morning event. It should be a constant reminder to our local church since we rent space for the service that church is not a physical building, rather it is "God's people and members of God's household" (v19).

Christian Contentment

Anita and I were chatting today about life in that it feels to me I'm just floating through it. I don't have definite plans or goals.

This evening I decided to listen to the message broadcasted on Febuary 14th at TruthForLife and by odd coincidence it addressed this. Alistair Begg was talking about Christian contentment.

In Phillipians 4:13 Paul writes, "I can do everything through him who gives me strength." [niv] I have usually intepreted this to refer to accomplishing something. But Alistair's interpretation reset me to see it's possible that the Lord will give me strength to deal with hardship and failure. There's more observations about this text and so I'll leave it to you to listen for yourself.

There's a couple more quotes I'd like to share and which I think we should hold onto. One is by Alistair himself, "Christian contentment is the direct fruit of having no higher ambition than to belong to the Lord and to be entirely at His disposal." See Anita's post about being the Lord's possession. The other is by Murray McShane, "It has always been my ambition to have no plans with regards to myself."

Well then. May God be praised.