Your responsibility in God's Family

Psalm 10:12-18

“Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted.   Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”?  But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you, the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless.  Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer; call his wickedness to account till you find none. 

The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.  O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.”

I, like the Psalmist, desire the LORD to move in the hearts of His Church so that the Church of our LORD would awake to why we are the Church.  We were not redeemed, freed from the bondage of sin to spend our time in church programs and political movements, no matter the value.  So why did Jesus step out of heaven, why did He take on flesh, being placed in a young teenage girl named Mary who had no standing in this world and find Himself born in a stable with barnyard animals? 

Was it so we could live in a large home, go to a big building we call a church, how wrong we are on that one?  For if Christ is living in you and you in Him, you are the Church, and when you meet with other believers you are doing Church, or should be.  So this question comes into my mind, how would our world change if you and I went about the ministry of being the Church?

How long has it been since you pondered about why Jesus called you into His family?  1 Corinthians 1:26-31, “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards,^[a]not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.   But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.  And because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The LORD reminds us in Philippians 3:13-14, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”   What would happen to you if you allowed the Spirit of the living God to take off all that past you keep recalling in your mind?  If you ask for forgiveness from the Father it is removed from God’s condemnation, He tells us as far as the East is from the West.

So will we this day choose to be the Church, to look at what Jesus called us to do?  The apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:12, gave this call to the Church in Thessalonica, “we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice