Saturday, November 24, 2012

DAY 229 - What If Your Church Life Doesn't Work? (請按此處收聼廣東話Cantonese podcast click here)


Today's Reading: Matthew 21: 12-22

**For a simple and good way of Daily Devotion method please click this link: Subject Shifting Devotion.pdf.
Please click this link to read Matthew 21: 12-22

Bible Study

     This is a passage full of challenges!
     It isn't the buying, selling and money-changing Jesus is objecting to in itself. If people couldn't do that kind of buying, selling and money-changing, they couldn't offer sacrifice. The sacrificial system had been ordained by God.

     But, if you link this passage with the next one you may be able to understand what Jesus wanted to do. When Jesus came looking for fruit with the fig-tree and found none he solemnly declared that the tree would be barren for ever. Jesus wanted them to know those high priests turned God's temple upside down. It had become a lifeless and fruitless institution and not a place of worshiping God full of life and fruit!

     N.T. Wright says:
   Which institutions in your country have become corrupt, so that they now serve the opposite purpose from that for which they were set up?  Where do you see systems which were supposed to enable people to worship and pray, but which have now turned themselves in the opposite direction to the message of Jesus?  What can you do about it?   

     What if you are in the similar situation, how are you going to do about that?

Let's have a time to be still and give the Holy Spirit space to speak through the passage of scripture we have just read. Offer this time up to Jesus as you listen to him, while listening to "Gabriel's Oboe"




Spiritual Journal


     What I heard from Jesus today is: What if your church life doesn't work?

     What I received from Jesus today is a challenge to us to re-examine our church life. Does our church becomes a similar institution like Jesus time, without life and without fruit? Does our church life becomes the same situation as in that time, without life and without fruit? 

     Jesus is Lord not the church is lord! If we can't come to Jesus everyday and have an intimate personal relationship with Him, the church would become just a place for us to have a meaningless life!

     Today I was with someone not from my church. He shared for a few hours of the painful reasons of why he kept on changing churches. He changed churches three times in the past few years. He gave me lots of examples of how those churches were like the temple in Jesus time, just an institute, a corrupted institute! He said, "I gave my energy, my money and everything to those churches. But, they are the same. Now, I am not going to do anything. Just attending Sunday service!" How sad! Is that his problem or those churches' problem, that's hard to say, not for us to judge. But, this painful sharing happened today. Is there something Jesus want to tell us?

     Does your church life work? How do you know it works? 

Dear Lord Jesus,
Lead us into a real intimate personal relationship with you that our church, our small group and our lives are fruitful.  In Jesus name we pray. Amen.



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