11/02/2021 – The message: “The gospel is carried to imperfect people by imperfect people. Then those imperfect people are to band together to help one another grow to spiritual maturity.”
By His grace , through prayer and immersion into “messy” while we are in this world. And, again as to why: To fulfill our mission as Christian remnant that engages an evil world that has never been this evil since the flood.
This funny little story I am pulling out verbatim from our Men’s weekly 6:00 am breakfast group fellowship:
“30 days to Understanding the Bible” by Max Anders. I pick it up from Chapter 17 – The Church Era (Acts 1-12):
“The story is told of a man who had been shipwrecked on a desert island for six years. For the entire 2,190 days, he never saw another human being. So, when a cruise ship happened to anchor nearby and send a party ashore, he sat beside himself with joy. At last, he was with people again. All he wanted to so was talk, talk, talk.
The captain of the ship looked down the beach and saw three straw huts. He asked the castaway what the three huts were.
The castaway beamed. “Well, the first one is my church, ” he said with pride. “That’s where I worship. Ane the middle one is my house. That’s where I live.”
The captain asked, “Well, what’s the third hut over there?”
A dark cloud crossed the castaway’s face momentarily as he replied, “Oh, that’s the church I used to go to.”
“We smile, and yet it is only funny because it contains a seed of truth. Getting along with other Christians can be so hard that sometimes, if we had to get along with ourselves, we couldn’t do it.
In spite of it’s obvious imperfections, however, the church is the instrument that God has chosen to carry the message of the gospel to the world. One wonders why a better system could not have been devised. Then one realizes that any system that has people in it is going to be imperfect.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Arghipelago that it was in prison where he learned that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not through classes, and not through political parties either, but right through every human heart.”
Soli Deo Gloria!