Our Family on Mission

(FrontLineMOG)

For some many years I lived under the guilt and shame of my own sin. I thought, "I'm supposed to be a Christian, but I keep acting like I don't know any better. Surely God is fed up with me by this point."

Then one day, God called me out. It was an inner-knowing. It was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. He said, "You're a mess right now, but you know what... You were a mess when you first came to me and I loved you and accepted you then. What makes you think I wouldn't accept you now if you truly came to me with all your heart, soul, mind and strength."

Friends, since then I have walked in real freedom from the guilt and shame of my sin. I know that Jesus' blood washes me white as snow and that the Holy Spirit will enable me to live a life that is holy and pleasing to the Lord.

It is messages like these that always hit me in the right spot. After many years of walking with people through their hot mess-ness, so many of God's children live under the burden of shame and guilt.

"Hebrews 10:1 The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves. The sacrifices under that system were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship. 2 If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared. 3 But instead, those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins year after year. 4 For it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins."

"The quality of our fellowship with the Lord vertically cannot be any better or more authentic than our fellowship with the saints horizontally. We cannot have the one independent of the other, and we cannot have the one out of proportion to the other. How many of us think that we can, and love to be solitary and isolated saints, having some kind of imagined and euphoric relationship with God privately, but hardly having any patience at all for the saints who are His Body? How can we cherish the Head more than the Body, and how can we honor the Head outside of the Body? The Lord has fixed it like that-the vertical and the horizontal beams of the Cross-and the one is in exact proportion to the other. It saves us from exactly that soulish thing we would love to indulge, namely, isolation, separateness and privatistic living. God has called us to fellowship, and we are not going to see resurrection power and authority if we are not related in the Body authentically. God will not let us 'get by' with a supposed and imaginary vertical relationship with the Resurrected and Ascended One independent of an actual and existential one horizontally in His Body.

This requires something more than Sunday services. The Church needs to consider becoming a community in the sense of a closely-knit integration of life together in an intensive way. If it exceeds the numbers by which true relationship is feasible, then it cannot, in my opinion, attain to this reality. A generalized congregation of three hundred, five hundred or a thousand cannot effect what I am suggesting. Sadly, large church numbers are the great emphasis today, and constitute, therefore, a moving away from God's very provision for our sanity as well as the greater glory, namely, of being "witnesses unto Him."