Quote of the Day

"…our society is strongly individualistic and 'me-centered.'  We have a tendency to 'look out for number one' and often have less regard for others.  Whereas in many of our organizations and structures individuality is encouraged, there is little place for it in the body of Christ.  Can you imagine an arm proclaiming its independence from the rest of the body?  Not only would the arm become gangrenous and rot away, but the body would be damaged by its absence.  While the world tends to teach us to be self-focused, as believers we must endeavor to be others-focused.  This is expressed in Jesus's command to deny ourselves....... Many believers today envision the Christian faith as more of a picnic or a walk in the park than a bloody sacrifice of the self, but the former is not the biblical portrait."

 Ten Things I Wish Jesus Never Said by Victor Kuligin

Quote of the Day

(Speaking of Heb 10:24-25)This passage calls us to regular gathering together as a church community.  It could be easy to assume that this simply means that we all need to be together so we can worship together, but the beginning of that passage says otherwise.  In verse 24, the author frames for us why we need to gather together:  in order to push one another to 'love and good deeds.'  This strikes us as a more intimate expectation.  This call reveals an awareness of each other's lives and an intimacy with how those lives are lived.  We are specifically encouraged to gather together so we can be in each other's business.

From the book: Leveling the Church: multiplying your Ministry by Giving it Away - By Micah Fries and Jeremy Maxfield

Quote of the Day

"…we have repurposed the Christian faith in a way that is generically individualistic.  We claim that we don't need the church to worship, that we can worship anywhere.  We claim that no one can judge us.  We claim that our relationship with God is our business alone.  We have even taken the process of spiritual development, and narrowed it down to an individualistic activity.  The height of Christian maturity, in many American churches, is a consistent quiet time…….

Among conservative evangelicals, there are many who are guilty of this radical individualism in ways that are not readily apparent.  Consider, how we regularly judge the success of a worship service.  We leave and say things like, 'That was great! I really got fed today!'  That sounds mature, and faithful.  It sounds like we are prioritizing good biblical teaching, but it is actually in opposition to biblical worship.  When we judge the effectiveness of a worship service by what it does for us, we have made ourselves the object of the worship experience.  Faithful worship is not measured by how much we are filled up, but rather how much we are emptied and worship is about sacrificing ourselves in our worship of the only God Who is worthy.""

From the book: Leveling the Church: multiplying your Ministry by Giving it Away - By Micah Fries and Jeremy Maxfield

Quote of the Day

(On Ephesians 1:15)

There is also gratefulness expressed in his prayer to God for their love expressed 'to all the saints'.  This gratefulness is not just for 'love' being shown and demonstrated, but that it is non-discriminatory among the 'saints' - there is not preferring one above another (Just as a parent is heartened to see their children loving each other equally and not neglecting some)  Knowing what we already know (of what God has done on our behalf) and the uniting us together into one purpose as family (and as a 'team', our understanding of this will draw us toward each other as fellow beneficiaries of God's grace, called to a special purpose together. It is not our distinctions that unite us,but our common likeness (in Christ) and our unified calling - we have the same purpose and so find our love for one another understandable.

- Don Lambert
From his Ephesians sermon series:  http://www.dansvillebaptist.org/ephesians.html

Quote of the Day

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and His work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.  WE have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.

That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more.  One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood.  He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood…..

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.  The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship in in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
From his book: Life Together

Quote of the Day

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life.  But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life.  We have no claim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them.  It is not the experience of Christian brotherhood, but solid and certain faith in brotherhood that holds us together.  That God has acted and wants to act upon us all, this we see in faith as God's greatest gift, this makes us glad and happy, but it also makes us ready to forego all such experiences when God at times does not grant them.  We are bound together by faith, not by experience.

- Dietrich Bonhoffer
From his book: Life Together

Quote of the Day

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive.

He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily.

And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship . . .

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From his book Life Together