Service Station

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
(Romans 12:1)

Immediately following verses 1 and 2 of Romans 12, Paul begins to describe the fruits of the gospel, the indicatives and imperatives of Christian service. If you will not even regularly attend a church service how can you say you are truly serving the Lord? How can you with one breath say He is the most important thing in your life, and then with the next breath yearn to do other, lesser things than to go to or stay in church even one day of the week? How can you say you serve God if you won’t even serve in the church? The truth about church here is really a simple thing to see: if you don’t even want to go, it is indicative of your spiritual condition.

We go to the gas station to get our tanks filled up, and church is the spiritual filling station. Now being filled up in the context of community is how we are filled with the Spirit, this is what Paul is pointing out in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5. Individuals indeed fill the church but together as a filled up unity they are fit for battle, not as toy soldiers fit for failure.

Where are you going to trim your wick and get your oil, always on your own terms? Not so: we must let our light shine, and we shine together through the local church as a beacon. Sure enough we do that individually out in the world, but come on now, do you really think you can fool anyone else but yourself into believing that you are letting your light shine when you stay in your cave on Sunday mornings?

Even if you venture out, are you really doing that so as to let your light shine out to those who aren’t in church, or are you just joining them in their misery? Perhaps you don’t see it as misery; you like it better than being in an old stuffy building or home with a bunch of other people. That is a selfish service, a one stop one man service station, but let me tell you that kind gets no customers and will soon run out of gas.

You may think you are full of God, but you are reading the gauges wrong.

“Living For Today With An Eye For Tomorrow”©