Life in 3G pt. 1

            What I want to share with you today is all about what God has for you. This isn’t about what God wants from you; this is about what God wants for you as his children. See God has allowed us to meet in this place, and has allowed us to gather here as a family. A place where you can belong, a place that you can call home, a place where you’re loved, and accepted just as you are. It’s a blessing that God gives us this, and at the core of this gift that he gives to us is the truth that we find in scripture that we are family. The Bible has created us as family, a family through Christ; we’ve been created as a part of God’s family. Ephesians 1 verse 5, Paul says this “His unchanging plan has always been able to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ.” From the very beginning of time God had planned to adopt us into his family. And that is a beautiful picture when you think about it. A picture of God saying I choose you; I want you to be mine. 1^st Peter 1:3 says this “God has given us the privilege of being born again so that we are now members of God’s own Family. You know when you were born you were born into a physical family, and when you were born spiritually you were born into a spiritual family. And since you and I were created for eternity what that tells me is that our spiritual family is going to far outlast our physical family. Think about it physical families last while we’re here on earth, some of them unfortunately don’t even make it that long. But our spiritual families have been created to last forever. For eternity! Now some of you are like getting terror in your eyes as your thinking about that person that might be in heaven that drives you crazy. Your thinking oh no they’re going to be there, oh no or oh dear! Well heaven is a big place so you can go find another place to worship God and they’ll be sanctified and delivered by the time they get there. But we’re going to spend eternity together, as God’s family. Ephesians 2:19 “You are members of God’s very own family…and you belong in God’s household with every other Christian.” It’s where you belong. You know I believe that down deep in the heart of man we are all created with this longing to belong. In Romans 12:5 it says “In Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” See all through these scriptures were seeing that it’s not just about believing but it’s also about belonging. We are called to belong not just to believe. When people say I believe in Jesus, I’m like awesome, but God has so much more for you than that. He wants you to find your place of belonging. The church isn’t an organization, the church isn’t an institution, the church isn’t a campus; the church is a family. The church is not a building that you go into, it’s a family that you belong to. See I think for some of us we hear the word family and we have all sorts of different emotions going on, because that means something different to all of us. Some of us grew up in great families, others of us grew up in pretty good families, and some grew up in not so good families. What we need to know is that there are no perfect families. Nobody had a perfect family; nobody’s got a perfect family. And our spiritual family is not perfect either. We’re not perfect. You know someone once said that if you find the perfect church don’t join it because you will mess it up. See we’re not perfect, we’re not perfect students. We’re just a bunch of imperfect students trying to love God the best we can and love each other in our own way. You know since we as a spiritual family were not perfect. There are going to be times that your brothers and sisters in Christ do things that just…get…on…your…nerves. They just annoy you. They may do something that lets you down; it’s going to happen I promise you that. But doesn’t that happen as well in your spiritual family. Don’t you have relatives or siblings that just get on your nerves? I’m sure my sister and brother would probably say that I get on their nerves as much as they get on mine. It’s almost like its part of my duty to annoy my younger brother and sister. But just because in a family you have struggles or you upset each other every once in a while, you don’t quit family, you don’t say well you annoy me so I’m just going to pack up my stuff and go live with the neighbors. Now here’s the point, spiritually speaking just because somebody in your spiritual family upsets you, lets you down, or doesn’t do what you think they need to do, it’s no reason to go leave the family, it’s no reason to quit family. You stick it out you work it out, you don’t walk out. We work together in this, because we’re a family. I believe the picture that God wants is a picture of a healthy family. When you think of a healthy family you think of, how a healthy family has all generations Grandparents, parents, teens, single adults, etc. And you think of the older generation helping out the other generations. Just like it works in a normal family the same should be true for our spiritual family as well. So the main idea here is that we all gather as one body in Christ. We all meet here on Thursday mornings not because we have nothing better to do (or at least I hope that’s not the reason) No we gather here because we all love God. See gathering is all about a Relationship with God and God’s family.