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Sunday service sin…

Mid-week service not sin…
Chatting in church sin (even if I’m preaching to someone)

Watching TV in church not sin (if we are watching Passion of the Christ)
Do not play in church

We are here for business

Unless it’s Drama Unit 

Or choir leader singing ‘I feel like jumping’„
Then we say, let’s worship the Lord

Concentrate

Focus your mind

Let your heart be placed on Him

…All these so that we can give a ‘worthy worship’

How do we judge its worth??
Back to the point; What is ‘church’?
Paul said this in Colossians 1:18 ( NLT)
“Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body. He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead.”

So he is first in everything
Body of Christ=Church.
You have to say that so much to yourself until it sticks to every part of you.
Coming together as believers is for our own good, but we are ‘church’ as we are!
In Paul’s journey as he went from place to place preaching, from prisons to beating, how many Sunday services did he attend? Get your mind established on Grace.
So why then do we gather?
Ephesians 4 NLT

Verse 11:  Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 
Where you see church, put HIS BODY.

Now, the scripture above explains why the gifts were given.
Verse 12: Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ.
Building up the body is not building big buildings and good instruments if you carefully look at the above scripture.
When you catch the people in that gathering outside and ask them questions about their faith, what would their answer be?
How equipped are the people??
The strength of a church (denomination) is not in amount of people, or equipment, but in how equipped the individual members are.
Verse 13: This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
That is what the church should cause ‘UNITY IN FAITH’ and not difference in doctrines!
And it says there ‘measuring up to the full standard of Christ’

How do we measure up??
Verse 14: Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 
Verse 15:  Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.

Speak the truth in Love, not tossed by every wind of doctrine and acclaimed rhema.
Let’s just stay one place and put our hearts to learning.
This is what a church (denomination) should be set to achieve.
Now,

Is your church achieving that? Or are we still playing Sunday?

Where believers who have been saved 20years still wait for visitation and pampering from pastor and then no one can even explain how God is ‘Trinity’ yet we go to church on Sunday and ‘not ping’?
At times, I tend to keep quiet because I don’t know how else to tell a catholic that Mary is just a disciple and that she isn’t a virgin. How can someone give birth and be a virgin? ‘Blessed virgin Mary’. 
They always get angry.

It’s okay.
I would weigh between my Love in helping people see the truth with my love in not offending them and then decide how exactly I can walk in love.
Colossians 1:27 (NLT)

Verse 27: For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.
Our Focus is that Christ in you is the HOPE of Glory as KJV renders it.
Anything that is received in ‘HOPE’ speaks of a glory that is to come and is not yet. In Ephesians Paul used the same words;
Ephesians 1 (NLT)

Verse 13:  And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago.
Verse 14: The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him.
The Spirit is a Guarantee of a PROMISE.
Also in Romans 8, clearly written

(NLT)
18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. 
19 For all creation are waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 

20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.

 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 

23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 We were given this hope when we were saved.

25 (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it but if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)

So in these places, Paul spoke of a future Glory that is a sure inheritance for those who have CHRIST IN THEM (believers that have received the Spirit)

How do we have Christ in us?

The Holy Spirit of Christ
Romans 8 answers

(NLT)
9 But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. AND REMEMBER THAT THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST LIVING IN THEM DO NOT BELONG TO HIM AT ALL.) 

10 AND CHRIST LIVES WITHIN YOU, SO EVEN THOUGH YOUR BODY WILL DIE BECAUSE OF SIN, THE SPIRIT GIVES YOU LIFE BECAUSE YOU HAVE BEEN MADE RIGHT WITH GOD.
Notice the last part of verse 9

“And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to him at all.”
So the bible teaches that if one has believed in Christ, they have received the Spirit and they are SURE to partake of a Glory in the future.

Now Paul spoke of that Glory in his second letter to the Corinthians chapter 5
And that is where he makes the statement that we live by FAITH and not by SIGHT.

We have faith that God is able to raise us together with Christ, read through.
(NLT)

1 For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.

 2 We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. 

3 For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.

4 While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life.

5 God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

6 So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. 

7 For we live by believing and not by seeing.
I have Christ in me

I have an assured inheritance

I taste of His Glory now

I would have an incorruptible inheritance in the future
Thank God for Jesus

Stay blessed.
Uc Truth.