Living in Community

God intends for His people to live in community together, much like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We often think of “the community” as the neighborhoods God has called us to reach.  Community, within the church, describes the kind of relationships God planed for us to experience with each other.  As Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian says, “Christ did not die just to save us from sins, but to bring us together into community.”  Our sins are forgiven at the cross, our sinful ways of thinking, living and relating are healed in spiritual community with other believers.

Dr. Irene Caldwell taught for decades at Church of God colleges and the Anderson School of Theology.  She says, “It is unfortunate that we have so many meetings and so few experiences of really meeting.  Martin Buber once wrote, ‘all real living is meeting.’  For life to have meaning and for learning as change to take place, we all need personal relationships of understanding and depth.  We often work, study, and even worship in the same buildings without coming to know each other as persons.

“Sometimes we meet on the word level where we pass the time of day….Then there is a meeting on the concept level where we share our ideas, maybe disagree, maybe even argue, but we keep the concept out there to protect others from getting to close to where we live.  But there is the possibility of meeting on the person-to-person level….

“The gospels are full of stories of Jesus in this kind of ‘meeting.’  Can’t you just see the vignette of Zacchaeus—a little man, stingy, tight, all drawn up within himself, hated!  The more he was hated the tighter and smaller he became, but he had a ‘meeting’ with Jesus and then the cycle was changed and he said, ‘I give.’

“One cannot really be helpful by saying ‘You’re all right, I’m all right, everything is all right’ when things may seem very out of joint….The challenge is to relate to another as to build him up to the place where he has the power to be helped….It is within a spiritual fellowship that we learn how both to help and to be helped….

“Can we consciously plan for the deeper relationships for which we all seem to hunger?  Can we learn to give ourselves to others so that there will be real meeting?  Jesus promised to be present in such a meeting.”  This is what we hope to doing as we initiate Life Groups through our 40 Days of Community emphasis.  It is about real meeting and real change as we discover how to get real with God and each other. 

Pastor Jay

Going Home

It is amazing to me how shortsighted I have become.  Many times I get bogged down with the mundane, hoping to make it through each day.  I look at my projects and to-do lists and hope to get them checked off in a timely fashion.  I get caught up in the pieces of the puzzle and forget that I am creating a picture.  It is not until something shakes my routine that I end up thinking about the big picture.  For me this last couple of weeks shook my viewpoint greatly.  I realized that I had spent so much time getting through a day and a week that I had forgotten the big picture; I had forgotten the reason that I am living is for the promised eternity with God through the blood of Jesus Christ.  It is so easy to lose sight of our eternity in the midst of time and life.  The greatest gift that my father left his family, friends, co-workers, and community was the knowledge that he was a Christian and would be spending eternity in heaven with God.  Peter writes that we are “temporary residents and foreigners” (1 Peter 2:11, NLT).  Paul writes to the Philippian church, “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from there we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:20, NIV).  When we have put our trust in Jesus Christ and have chosen to follow him, we are no longer citizens of this world, but of heaven.  If this is true, how do we live as citizens of heaven in our daily lives?  Do we talk about our “homeland”?  Do we dream about going there?  Do we talk about it with our family and friends?  Do we ensure that others are becoming citizens?  Do we long to go home?  I cannot wait to go home and be with my heavenly Father and my earthly father.  What a time of rejoicing it will be!

David