In ch.4 Paul will concentrate on the church. It is a chapter that makes my pulse race and puts a gleam in my eye...
He starts off with the baseline requirements to make community work. These are the back-to-basic things needed for people to be and become the body of Christ. They are disarmingly simple to grasp, practical and yet challenging.
Here we go:
1. Live a life worthy of the calling: Good community needs a good value system and a great vision. The calling we have received is to follow Christ: To die to ourselves and to live for Him. For us to become less and Christ to become greater. This core-value-system underpins community. If we do not aim this high, community begins to centre on individuals and petty issues.
2. Be humble, gentle, patient and forbearing: These character traits are little decisions we must make every day as part of community.
We have to choose not to take ourselves too seriously.
We must decide not to use our power even though we could.
We must take the next step on the pathway of patience.
We must bear with one another because love causes us to see more holistically.
This is a huge challenge that our ego wrestles against, but bears great fruit when we get it right.
3. Keep the unity of the Spirit. As we learned in chapter two, Jesus, by His death, united us. We don't have to create unity, we must simply continue in it or keep it. When human beings try to _create_ unity it often ends up being uniformity that we are trying to create. Unity starts with God and so it goes without saying that we can only experience it when we are closely co-operating with the Spirit who is the bond of peace.
Wow! Each of these is actually a devotion in itself, but for best impact it's better that we take them together. If we take these seriously, our church community can become a vibrant and life-giving part of the body of Christ.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
