THURSDAY November 2nd
HOUSE – 1 Peter 2:4-5
‘As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’
There are different ways in Scripture for which the Church is described, Paul uses the analogy of Christ as the Head and the Church as the body. This is such a powerful illustration. We know that if the body becomes disconnected rom the head that is it! Instant death. Think about it spiritually! We must stay firstly connected to the head, but equally importance is the connection we have with one another. I have often spoken about it and will continue to speak about, we need each other, let me tell you today, I NEED YOU! Yes, I need Jesus, but I also need you! And whether you like it or not you need me, we all together need each other! And I thank God for the gift of Christian fellowship, oh how often it has been while found in fellowship with other believers that Christ has done something in my life, met my need and often time spoken to me through what someone else has read, shared or preached.
We are a part of the complete house, the Church Universal, which Jesus is building, but we have also become a part of the house which he has set here in this place, the local Church.
Peter uses the illustration of being built up together as living stones into a spiritual house. It is a house, a place of fellowship that is like nothing else to be found in this world.
You can go to the pub, the cinema, the theatre and ‘have a good time’, you can go to a football match or the like of it and ‘have a good time’, the same can be said about many other things, but they will never do anything for your soul and will never do anything for you spiritually for these things are temporal, and yet we willingly adjust our schedule and plan way ahead of time to go to various places and do various things while at the same and sadly far too often too many of the stones are missing from this spiritual house when we come together because it doesn’t fit in with their schedule or order of importance.!
We have just had storm Babet come hurtling through the Northeast, I guess we all made sure that we kept the doors and the windows shut! And I guess that we were all glad that every brick that was used in the construction of our homes were firmly fixed in place, none missing, no gaps to help protect us from the storm.
We need to really grasp hold of the seriousness of the days in which we are living, there is a wild spiritual storm blowing, and it is blowing increasingly stronger every day against the Church, that is you and me as Christians, against the Word of God, against everything that God has set in place for the good of society, there is going to be a fresh push to pass the conversion therapy bill, there are continual cries to push and promote the ideology of the LGTBQ+ community, efforts to ban the practise even of silent prayer or Christian activity near abortion centres! The storm is blowing, the Church needs to be united, we locally need to be united, joined together, no stones missing as we seek the help of God to bring us through the storm, or to keep us in the storm.
May this spiritual house stand firm, because we take up the seriousness of the hour and make every effort to come together to for fellowship and prayer.