It was good to hear the message that God gave to Josh this past Sunday.  He spoke from the text in James 1:22-27 with a message entitled “Authentic Christians.”  You can find the message here.

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This morning, I came across a blog dedicated to “Practical Shepherding” for pastors.  It’s very helpful and a recent post gives some good tips for how we all can help minister to the widows and others in need in our church body.

HT: Challies

Tim

I am currently reading C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, and I am convicted to the core by it.  Lewis writes this book as a series of letters written from Uncle Screwtape (a senior demon) to Wormwood (a rookie demon).  Screwtape refers to God as the Enemy, and you have to reverse everything Screwtape says to make it applicable to yourself as a believer.  I love the irony, the way with words Lewis always has, and the elementary application he makes for us as Christians.  Chapter 14 is Screwtape teaching Wormwood how to keep his “patient” (new believer) from being humble.  Here is a few worthy excerpts for us to dwell on:

“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact?  All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.  Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove!  I’m being humble’, and almost immediately pride-pride at his own humility-will appear.”

“Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be.  No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point.  The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.  By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.  And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.”

“The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”

He [the Enemy] would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.”

(Part 2 of 3)

The church isn’t defined by what we want it to be or what others think it should be. Instead, the church is what God has defined it to be.  In Part 1 we saw how God brings strangers together in one body to be His people, creating a new primary ethnicity rather than one that originates with our skin color or heritage. The passage then goes on to talk about an even deeper relationship that exists between us now:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.  (Ephesians 2:19-22)

When Paul, the inspired author of this letter, refers to “the household of God” he’s talking about a family relationship.  That is, through the work of Christ crucified and risen, God has brought us into His family. We are now His children through adoption and brothers and sisters with each other (that beats being Facebook friends pretty much every day of the week, by the way). We may already be using those terms to refer to each other, but do we regularly appreciate the significance of this close bond, not formed by our blood relationship but by Christ’s blood? We are family.

Such a profound truth should affect every aspect of our interactions with and care for each other. When you face a difficulty with a member of your physical family, you probably approach it with a degree of forbearance and understanding that you may not offer a stranger or casual acquaintance (at least you should!). In the same way we should treat other family members in the body with generosity and faith, believing that God is working to continue His work of reconciliation between us and other broken people. If we truly see ourselves this way, we’ll also be quicker to jump into ministries run by our family and help make things better than to criticize how things are being done. We’ll recognize that to treat church as consumers (where what we get is of first importance) is antithetical to our new position as family.

Would you pray with us that this identity of the church as family would be supernaturally applied and lived out in our community at Grace & Truth?