As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“The Gospel Coalition and Together For the Gospel…. In both cases, baptismal differences are not regarded as barriers to participation, whereas differences over manhood and womanhood are. What might account for this difference (and others like it)?” - Christ Over All
Read the series.
Biblical fellowship is a two-sided coin, or a two-edged sword, or a two-way street, or something. (The title of this post strongly implies that I don’t know anything at all about baseball.)
Read the series.
Last time we considered a passage from Ephesians 5 that provided some basic principles to underlie our exercise of fellowship. This time I’d like to consider a different Pauline passage, one that helps us recognize when we’re succeeding.
In the opening paragraph of Philippians 2, Paul exhorts the church to live out their unity in Christ in several specific ways—
Read the series.
It’s time to look a little more closely at what we’re actually doing as we minister our gifts to one another in the church.
A passage I find helpful in this regard is the opening paragraph of Ephesians 5, which is just one sentence with two main verbs that point us to how we conduct our relationships in the church.
Last time we noted that from the beginning we’ve been designed for fellowship, for interpersonal relationships—and that for our time in history, the church is a significant part of God’s plan for that. He even commands us to keep at it.
OK, if God says I’m supposed to fellowship, then I will.
As this year began I started a series on spiritual growth, which I called “On Building Spiritual Muscle.” The series focused on the key spiritual exercises that the Bible prescribes for spiritual health, exercises that Christians have generally called “the means of grace”: Scripture, prayer, and fellowship. The next series, “On Devotions,” focused on the first two of those means of grace, and particularly on our private practice of them.
“Over the past 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of a growing cooperation of churches in China that faces lower-level persecution. By ‘lower-level’ persecution, I mean that the authorities have…relaxed their hold on churches in comparison to a previous era.” - 9 Marks
“I’d like to try and bring light rather than heat to the question of cooperation between churches in these polarized times. How do we decide when and to what extent to cooperate with churches that are more or less like-minded?” - 9 Marks
“The Internet leads to ‘context collapse.’ It places into a space that is intrinsically faceless and lacks geographic borders. That space generalizes language and thought, ignores the very real differences between people and places, and pushes us toward highly generic ways of speaking and thinking.” - 9 Marks
Discussion