Would It Make Any Difference?
Would it make any difference in your Church if Jesus never showed up? If you took Jesus and or the Holy Spirit out of the average or even out of your Church on Sunday morning would anything change? Is there any life transformation taking place in your Church? If your Church is operating in the flesh -nothing would change and the service would go on as usual because we can do a service without Him.
On the other hand, if your Church is living in the Spirit - the entire feel of the service will change and feel different and exciting with a sense of anticiplation. With the Spirit there is life transformation and miracles very often when you meet. With Jesus the worship experience is God focussed and life transformational. When you depart you know you had been with Jesus and not just another man made service.
If Jesus never showed up at your place on Sunday -would it really make any difference in how your worship service goes?
I still love you and that's why I ask the question? Are you doing it without Jesus - and are you doing ministry in the flesh? Or does everything depend on God showing up?
This is heavy but when grasped it can make all the difference on Sunday.
posted by Bob Carder @ 1:34 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I found this excerpt from a great book entitled, What Jesus Mean, that I knew I had to share the readers of this blog as well as www.javabeansandgod.blogspot.com. Written by Gary Wills, a Catholic Historian and the very best and brightest Biblical language scholar in the world (the words in parenthesis are mine not those of Professor Wills)...
“Didn’t Jesus found a church? The first works of the New Testament have Paul writing to Christian “churches” two decades after Christ’s death. The Greek word usually translated “church” is ekklesia, a gathering–a word that occurs in only one gospel (Matthew’s). It is used for a mob at Acts 19. 32, 40. The gatherings that Paul addresses are those nonhierarchical bodies. He does not write to a leader of the community but to the gathering, in which there are no priests (for us Protestants there are no ordained clergy). Nor are there churches in our sense–that is, church buildings. The gatherings meet at houses, oikoi, 1 Cor. 1. 16, 16.19, Rom. 16.5, Phlm 1.2, Col 4.15, Ac. 11.14, 12.12. This is such a standard thing that Paul could talk of Christians in general as “house-gatherers of the faith”, oikeioi.”
Truth from the Holy Scripture is sometimes tough to hear and tougher to process.
The book is titled...What Jesus Meant...sorry for the keyboard slip...
Would it make any difference in your Church if Jesus never showed up? The heart of the question is “How does Jesus show up?” If His followers know “how” He shows up, there will not be a question about if it makes any difference. The transformation is based on an encounter. Jesus describes in John 14:20-21 the truth of this encounter… “you know that I am in the Father, and you are in me, and I am in you”. I recently heard a broadcast with Henry Blackaby where he stated that the key to a revival of the North American Church will not come through evangelistic efforts, the revival will spark out of His people understanding and claiming the promise of the encounter with a living Savior. The North American Church has bought into the mindset of other belief systems (religions). We are too often looking for “someday”. The Church tends to treat salvation as an insurance policy instead of the breath of life. The beauty of the incarnation is that we do not have to wait until that someday insurance policy (as wonderful as that will be), we can live transformed lives with every breath. I sincerely believe that the key to “doing church” successfully is imbedded in the truth of this encounter. This encounter is the foundation for the exponential growth that can and has occurred through discipleship. The question may not be “Would it make any difference in your Church if Jesus never showed up?” but “does Jesus showing up in the lives of His followers throughout the week make any difference in your Church?”
Our prayer for the North American Church should be that of what Paul prayed for the Ephesus Church (Ephesians 3:14-21) “When I think of the wisdom and scope of God's plan, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will give you mighty inner strength through his Holy Spirit. And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love. And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope. May he be given glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever through endless ages. Amen.”
Post a Comment
<< Home