Wednesday,
January 8, 2020
Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love. Ephesians 4:11-16
The old saying is so simple and so true:
Give a man a fish and you have fed him today.
Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a
lifetime.
Something of a corollary to that maxim is
related to the life span and health of churches:
If a pastor grows a church it will die when the pastor leaves.
If a church learns to be
healthy it will grow and live.
Pastors do have a responsibility to help
churches learn how to be healthy. But it’s
something like your doctor who has responsibility to contribute to your health;
the doctor must be faithful, but the patient must cooperate. That is how God
designed the church, His vineyard; we stay healthy and grow, or die on the
vine!
Growing healthy in the ways of God is not
complicated; obedience and commitment are the primary ingredients. The facts of possibility for growth of an
exponential kind, fast, healthy, and breathtaking are all around us.
Consider E. coli bacteria. The numbers are staggering. If a single E. coli cell can get enough food,
it can reproduce itself every 20 minutes.
In a single day that means 72 cycles of doubling. 1 cell becomes 2 in 20 minutes; 2 cells then
become 4 in another 20 minutes, and so-on.
Repeated 72 times in 24 hours (2x72 power[2])
the result is 2.3 trillion-million cells.
If E. coli was building people that would be enough material for 76
trillion people (roughly 1,000 times the total of earth’s current population) …in
just 24 hours…starting with just one lowly cell.
Now, if God can do that with a deadly virus, just think what He could do
with the life-giving virus
of the Gospel…IF God’s people were sharing it, dividing it,
letting the evidence of things not seen[3]
do its saving work!
Paul showed us God’s kind of math the church needs to change our culture. Apostles, Prophets, Pastors and teachers all exercise
their spiritual gifts, and God’s people grow, mature, and produce kingdom fruit: gentleness, meekness, love, joy, peace,
longsuffering; the fruit of the Spirit.
You chew on
that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
Go to VIDEO
[2] See the
chart of The
Power of 2
[3] Hebrews
11:1
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