Community & The Local Church

...And I am back from the blogging sabbatical! Gotta love an unintentional sabbatical.

Jeff Lacine of Desiring God ministries had a phenomenal series on the importance of the local church. I think Christians today love to talk about community. Key word here: talk. I think community is something we pay a lot of lip service to, but we often struggle to integrate it into our daily living (myself included). The best place to find and partake in community: the local church. Many try to down play its importance, but I truly believe the local church is vital to the life of a believer. It is a place of deep friendship and sharing, a means to interact with grace, and a source of encouragement and support. Lacine's first installment in the series on perseverance (pasted below) is my favorite. To have people in your life "battling" for your sanctification and perseverance - what a beautiful gift!

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. (Hebrews 3:12-14)

In this passage we have wonderful assurance and firm warning. The wonderful assurance comes from the last sentence: For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. Said another way, if we have come to share in Christ, we will persevere. True believers will never fall from grace and be disqualified from their inheritance, period.

On the flip side, this passage comes as a firm warning. We are exhorted to seek out the means that God has appointed to keep us from falling away. Namely, the local church. Not only as an institution or formal assembly, but as friends and encouragers—brothers and sisters battling for each other's sanctification and perseverance. This regular and honest interaction with other believers is a means of grace that God has appointed to counteract the self-deceiving, heart-hardening sin that would otherwise lead us away from God.

God has designed for our perseverance to be realized in authentic community—living and dying together in the gospel of Christ.