A Unified Church

 A Unified Church
Getting Back to the Basics

Video of Blog

This blog is basically going to mimic what I posted in my YouTube video on this subject.  Today I want to talk about "A Unified Church - Getting Back to the Basics."

Questions to ponder:

1.  Who is the Church?

2.  What makes the people the Church of Jesus Christ?

Answers:  

1.  The people are the church.  

2.  If you profess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are part of the body of Christ and by this you and others who have done the same make up the Church. 

Ephesians 2: 8-9

    For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is a gift of God.

Roman 10:9

    That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

What makes a person a Christian and part of the body of Christ which makes up the Church is what he/she believes about Jesus Christ.

So when I say, A Unified Church - Getting Back to the Basics, what do I mean?

      

    Well before I answer the what, I need to answer the why.

        Why must we get back to the basics?

   1.  We are in dire times

• Things are happening in our lives that we have never seen or experienced before.  i.e. the pandemic, monkey pox
• Wars and rumor of wars, like the war in Ukraine

    2.  We live in a day and time of cancel culture

• We have to fear doing or saying something wrong or if not wrong, but just something that is disagreeable to someone else and videos began to appear on YouTube of others trying to cancel us.
• We are imperfect beings and will make mistakes from time to time.  We should not have to fear the mistakes we might make while walking in our calling.
• God used imperfect people like murderers, adulterers, tax collectors

    3.  The message of the gospel (Good News) has gotten lost                     in this cancel culture

• We care more about denominational and doctrinal differences than about spreading the good news of Jesus Christ.
• We fight amongst each other about who is more right than the other because of what group we belong to.
• We have lost sight of John 3:16
• For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that who ever believes in Him, shall not perish but have eternal life.

So when I say that we need to get back to the basics, John 3:16 just hits home for me.

I heard someone say recently that it is not about you being gay, an adulterer or fornicator or any of the other multitude of sins that the Bible speaks about.  What the Bible calls sin is always going to be a sin, regardless of the times we live in.

So if you are an unbeliever reading this blog or listening to the video version today, I am not here to tell you the many things that you should stop doing or not do, but I am here to tell you the one thing that you not only should do, but the one thing that you need to do.

It is not until you do this one thing that Jesus Christ can then help you to stop doing the many things that are far less impactful to your eternal life than this one thing.

I wish I could remember the pastor who put this thought in my mind of little "s" sin and big "S" sin.  It is all about the idea that God hates all sin, but the one sin that will forever separate you or I from God is the rejection of His Son, Jesus Christ.

--Now to the What --

For us to be unified as a church and to get back to the basics, we as the church need to lead the world in getting rid of this cancel culture.

• I am so grateful that God is not a cancel culture God.  He did go there for a minute in the days of Noah, but He stopped short of complete destruction of man by saving Noah and his family.

We have so many denominational and doctrinal differences that we find it almost impossible to stand united with other Christians of differing denominational and doctrinal backgrounds, even when we know that they are speaking a biblical truth.

What should draw us together is that we place our faith alone in Christ alone, regardless of our denominational or doctrinal differences.

The fear, not just in the culture, but in the Christian community, is that if I stand with you on a biblical truth and there is some sort of blemish or misunderstanding about your ministry or personal walk with Christ, I too am now connected to your blemish and not the Kingdom of God; all because I stood with you on a biblical truth.

• It is almost to the point where if I am imperfect (which we all are - Romans 3:23), God can no longer use me to be His messenger.
• Thank God that is not the case.  If it were, Paul, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Moses, just to name a few, would not have been able to be used by God. 
• When I read the Bible, one thing that has always attracted me to the word is that God used imperfect people to spread His message.

If I know that God uses imperfect people, and I am studying the word to show myself approved, I should be confident in the word about biblical truths as opposed to worrying about someone creating a YouTube post trying to cancel me or my ministry.

-Bottom line - 

The world needs to see a unified church more than ever, right now

As part of the body of Christ, please pray daily for a unified church.

Be Blessed

The Importance of Seeing God over People. - A Unified Church

I have noticed in our current Christian environment, that some of us as believer’s have gotten so caught up in how we see spiritual wrong in others that we misrepresent the presence of God in our actions.  The world calls this kind of behavior, “Cancel Culture.”  What we see, interpret, and think to be right or wrong has become the final authority as opposed to what the word of God really says about something.  Our seeing, interpreting, and thinking have become externally driven by the world and not internally driven by the Holy Spirit or the word of God.  We have become multiple groups within a group, where each group has pitted itself against the other.  I don’t know about you, but where I am from, I call this a gang mentality.  I have never seen anything positive come out of such a mentality; especially nothing that will build up the Kingdom of God.

In Mark 9:38, John, one of Jesus’ disciples, comes up to Jesus and tells Him that he and the others saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name and they tried to stop him because he was not one of them.  Jesus stops John dead in his tracks and says to him, “Do not hinder him, for there is no one who will perform a miracle in My name, and be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me.  For he who is not against us is for us.”

I see in this verse that Jesus did not focus on what He thought the man was doing wrong, but rather on what He knew the man did right.  The man may or may not have had the purest of motives, but he did have the right solution in Jesus Christ.  Even in Jesus’ response to John, He implied that even if the man had evil motives, he might come to believe just by seeing a miracle happen in the name of Jesus.

Let’s let the belief in the power of the name of Jesus be what unites us as the solution for the world, as opposed to the many man-made nuances that we have allowed to divide us for so long.  Like the world, the church will always have differences that we could debate.  However, the world needs to see a unified church, speaking of a unified truth about a unified solution found in Jesus Christ.

It would be an amazing thing if we could all accept the example of Jesus.  When we see someone attempting to cast out the ills of this world in the name of Jesus, let’s not hinder them simply because they don’t belong to our group.  Let’s rest in the fact that if they are not against us, they are for us because we know that Jesus is the solution for our hurting world.

Be blessed