Starting with Community
There was a spoken word by Mariah Ivey, which is no longer on YouTube. The words are available at AllReadable.com. We are to be community and I will like to use some of the words she said…
So I was wondering, how long will we fight each other until we supposedly make it to Heaven? (Separate Gods – Mariah Ivey)
I find this question applicable and quite terrifying… When I look at how the churches operate these days, I see one thing very clearly… More fighting tends to happen among the churches… Making the above question very applicable…
Let’s look at baptism for a second… One church believe baptism as a baby is the correct way, where another believes that you are baptized when there is a cross drawn on your forehead with oil… Then also baptism where you are submerged in water… This is ONLY one of the things we fight each other on… (I am working on a Biblical Foundations Blog where I hope to answer some of these questions…)
So why do I say this is terrifying? Well for starters we I have only seen churches come together on a very few instances… One time was a worship night on halloween a couple of years ago… And another was a 24 hour worship… happening yearly…
Tug of war in Christianity
See, that question has been weighing heavy on my heart and in my mind, playing tug of war with the two concepts that we’re Christians and we love or that we’re Christians and we’re supposed to. Daily substantially reading the Word, feeling as though your cup is overflowing but we only live when we want to. See, it’s no longer subliminally given, it’s clear. We come to our place of worship dressed up in our bedazzled suits, sitting on the first pew, receiving and taking in everything our pastors are preaching without first inspecting the fruit, and because we fail to do our own research, we leave the building spewing rotten tongue because half of these *** are preaching tradition instead of preaching truth. (Separate Gods – Mariah Ivey)
Do we love? Do we know how we what it means to love someone? A stranger? Community is not about what we can do or get, but more about what we do… We read the Bible which says “Love your neighbor as yourself” and we believe loving our neighbor is good enough. Know we are supposed to love ourselves most of us have no idea how…
This is the tug of war…. Things we read in the Bible which clashes with us… Our identity is breathed by God, but what we hear so many times is more important than what God says… What we are doing more important than WHAT GOD SAYS WE SHOULD DO…
Body of CHRIST
What does it mean to be the body of CHRIST?
Let’s start with what a BODY is…
So what is it? Is the hand, as an example, a body on its own, basically can a hand function without any attachment to the arm, or is the hand dependent on being connected to the arm and the rest of the body? So what I have observed is that normally when a hand get cut from the body, it tends to die… It is similar to when a branch is cut from a tree, it normally dies… Last I checked my biology textbooks, there are no body parts that can functions apart from being connected to the brain (which is in our heads and protected by our scull)…
Now let me try and bring this to the Body of Christ…
Who is the head of the Body of Christ? Are we the head? Or is it the body of Christ, because Christ is the HEAD of His body… Well to me it does make sense that Christ is the HEAD of the body of Christ… Especially since my head and body is completely connected… And if my body and my head were not connected, I would probably be dead….
In the section on “Tug of war in Christianity” above, I quoted something of Mariah Ivey… I am going to focus on the second have only… (starting with We come to our place of worship…)
We can sit in church everyday, yet not be a part of the body… And our pastors and elders, and whomever else are allowed to preach, may also not be a part of the body… What do I mean? We know our hand is connected to our body, since we have control over what our hand does… Now we sit in the church, but we are disconnected from God, are we then part of the body? Pastors and preachers can speak in front of churches and not have any part of the body of Christ…
So if Christ is the head of His body, that would mean the body consist of believers CONNECTED TO CHRIST… The body of Christ is a community… Then WHY ARE WE REJECTING ONE ANOTHER as the body, believing that we are superior to other believers, and even those that do not believe?
Our problem with community
Our need to be better that others is having a huge impact on how we do community…. It is destroying us and building walls around us… Thus we become lonely and alone on our journey to remain better than others…
Something I recently realized… Why is is that as part of the Body of CHRIST, we believe that we can survive without the HEAD, being Christ… If I, being flesh and bone, dies when my head gets disconnected from my body, HOW CAN THE BODY OF CHRIST LIVE WITHOUT CHRIST? Yet, if we lose a hand, we can still function, but things are harder… If we lose a head, there is no turning back from that…
Living disconnected
So why do we want to live disconnected from God, and still believe we will survive? I understand that God is a Healer, but we still CHOOSE not to be connected to Him. And I say this as I once also CHOSE to be disconnected from God…
Most of my life I claimed to be a Christian, BUT I WAS DISCONNECTED FROM THE BODY… That was visible from my fruit, which I should have seen in my life, but didn’t… If you saw me a few months ago, you would have thought I was dead. I lived in a depression and negativity was my fruit, not the best representation of God… But now I see that it doesn’t have to be…
In the Bible, Jesus said that we should not be “DISCONNECTED” from the vine , in that way we will bare much fruit… IF A PLANT DOESN’T GET WATER IT NORMALLY DIES. So Why do we tend to try stuff, and when we fail we blame God?
Final words on community
I do believe that we are the temple of God, A DWELLING PLACE FOR GOD, but we do not act like this al the time
“Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:19-22)
Whatever we make cornerstone is our lives, we also make God in our lives…
Are we going to continue DOING church, or are we going to start BEING church???
I made my choice, and I choose to be the church in every way… I will not reject someone for something because GOD never rejected me for the times I messed up… And He still isn’t…
Remember, doing church is based on what we MUST do, BEING CHURCH IS BASED ON WHAT WE WANT TO (NOT MUST) DO. Community is about doing life together…
I trust that you will find a group of people whom is God fearing and able to speak into your live…
God bless, and God made you awesome, and for HIS BODY YOU ARE VITAL.