By Rick Warren — September 18, 2018
”God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5 NLT).
Your spiritual family, God’s family, is going to outlast even your physical family. Physical families don’t last. They grow up, they move away, they die. But the spiritual family of God is going to go on and on for eternity.
The Bible says that God never meant for you to go through life alone. In fact, God hates loneliness. When God created man, he put him in the Garden of Eden, a perfect environment, and the first thing God said was, “It is not good for man to be alone.” God wants you to be part of the family of God.
What is God’s family? “That family is the church of the living God, the support and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15 NCV). The church, the body of Christ, is not an institution. The church is not a bureaucracy. The church is not an organization or a social club. The church is God’s family. It’s not about rules and regulations and rituals and religion. It’s about relationships. It’s about love.
The church is “the support and foundation of the truth.” What happens when a building has no support and foundation? It collapses. Those of us in California understand this more than most because we have earthquakes. If you don’t have a good foundation under your building, it’s going to collapse when the earthquake comes.
God says your life is the same way. You’re going to experience some earthquakes in your life—financial earthquakes, health earthquakes, emotional earthquakes, relational earthquakes, career earthquakes. When those tough times come along, you’re going to collapse if you don’t have a spiritual family to support you.
You cannot fulfill God’s purposes by yourself. God wired us to need each other. We need each other in the family of God.
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