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Thoughts on Church

Today the various members of Cornerstone and FDVE (the Spanish speaking church that meets at Cornerstone) showed up to clean God’s house. We washed windows, picked up trash, vacuumed and generally made the place clean and looking better for tomorrows worship. We speak of this building as God’s house because it is a single use building. Everything we do here, we do to the glory of God. The people that come here during the week are the church and se we say that the church meets at God’s house. For shorthand, we say that this building is our church building.

It is good to see the people of God taking care of the church building. It is good to see people value to place where we come to worship and learn. One thing that the West has is church buildings. There are close to 300,000 buildings in America that are used for worship. There are many, many cathedrals and churches buildings in Europe also. Many here and there are dead churches or spiritually empty buildings. Christians have to make sure they do not turn their church building into a edifice that has no spiritual life. Europe has cathedrals that reach to the heavens, but there is not spiritual life in them. America has some large churches that have become nothing more than country clubs. The building is not the church, and if the church that meets there is spiritually dead, the building won’t help.

And so it is good for the people of God to come on a Saturday and clean and maintain the house of God, the church. The fact that people come to help and donate time shows their view of the church. These people love God and they love the people of God and they love the place where the church meets because it reflects the people of God. As people drive by our building, if it is dilapidated and overgrown, they will believe that we are a dead church, but if it is clean, broken windows are fixed, grass in the yard is trimmed and trash outside is picked up, people will know that this things of God matter to the people of God. In a way this is a witness to the people in the neighborhood. They see our outward care and love for the things of God and they might want to come in and see what we are about.

We also clean the church because the people of God are here all the time. When I was growing up, I was told, “be in church whenever the doors are open.” This was a great idea to grow up with. In my youth, as long as I was living in my parent’s house, we went to church. Come hell or high water, we went to church: Sunday morning, Sunday evening and a couple of times during the week. Why? Because that is what the people of God do. They meet together and worship, learn and conduct the business of the church. It is wrong to believe that a person can love God and follow Christ and never or rarely go to church. Christians need to be in church often and participate in the activities of the church. As A reformed podcast that I listen to says, “If you call yourself a Christian, your butt better be in a pew on Sunday.”

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