Brett Anderson gave a challenging word that stirred up courage to trust God in the messiness of living life in community. He reminded us that living life with people as a family is always complicated, but it’s those people who prove to be both incredible and a disaster at the best of times. Life Changers Church’s mission is to Reach Far, Raise Up, and Release Wide, and you can only do that with people.
The difficult truth of living life together is that often we are the problem, not them. Settling this in our minds makes life easier. Sadly, the world has lost its mind and is out of control, where the people are so connected, yet there is so much disconnection. People are living isolated, anxious lives.
We need community and each other, where we get to open up and do life together. God created us for relationships. The Church is the community’s building where Jesus needs to be the Cornerstone, who sets the foundation and keeps us from cracking or falling apart. It is the Plumbline of the Word of God that sets us living straight lives. Building anything without Jesus as the Cornerstone will just be a waste of your time and effort.
WE ARE BETTER, TOGETHER
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 reminds us that love never fails, and without love, we gain nothing. We need to anchor our life on God’s love. Community and love go hand in hand for your relationships to succeed and flourish. All relationships need to be built on God’s characteristics of love, and not our watered-down version. The Bible is full of relationships. The Lord’s prayer of “Our Father” reminds us that we are God’s children, which connects us together as a family. We are all living stones in the building of God’s Church and Kingdom.
When we filter our relationships with love, we can endure the frustrations and overcome the challenges we face. We must expect drama and conflict in our relationships, but that is the cement that binds the Church together. Expect resistance but learn to work through it to make it smooth so the Church can shine. There is a cost to everything that we do, but we need to calculate the greater cost of not doing it. Listen to the call of our Father to belong, for He did not design us to live as lone rangers, outside of community.
3 types of Community are:
- Church Community – Being plugged into a Church community can save your marriage and help you when your family is sick, when your faith is shaken, and when your courage or hope wanes. The world is often a brutal and dark place, where we can struggle to process things, but together we can lean on each other and find a way. It is where we learn to trust God together and see miracles happen.
- At Work – We have an incredible opportunity to reach others in our workspace. People are waiting on the other side of our obedience to show them Jesus. God has placed us in our businesses to love one another and to show them a better way of reacting and responding to situations that is so different from the world’s culture. John 13:34 tells us that it is our love for one another that will show others Jesus.
- In Relationships – It is in the covenant of marriage, our closest relationship, where we are most challenged. The devil uses our relationships to press our buttons, and boy, does he know what buttons to press! We need friends who will take us to Jesus when we can’t get there ourselves, and vice versa.
Working life out in community is hard work, but we need to be willing to fight for our family, our friends, and our work colleagues. Our greatest tool we have is prayer, and we all have access to that. Philippians 2 teaches us how to be in a relationship with others. We need to be there even when we don’t feel like it. Coal on the outside of a fire needs to be put back in the middle to get warmed up, where it can be stoked by each other’s embers to keep the flame going strong.
There is no shortcut to the process of growing and learning to become more like Jesus. If you are a woman waiting for a husband, trust God for one in His timing. We need women of God to meet men of God to advance the Kingdom of God. Get plugged into a Life Group community where you can do life together. Church is not about coming to listen to hear God’s Word or to fellowship over coffee; it is where we get to be a part of a community, which is a privilege, an incredible opportunity, but also a great responsibility. We need to open up our lives as we trust people and take risks, contending for our community. When we keep saying yes and showing up, watch what God does. Make a decision to belong to a community so you can become a part of each other’s testimony.