Kingdom Faith - Being the Church

So just to set the scene for a moment, we're going to be unpacking over the next few months, what does it really mean to be the church? What does it look like to be the church, to be the body of Christ? Lots of churches can, you know, even us, you know, we can focus on, oh, let's build a church.

Let's do this.

Let's do that.

Let's do the other.

And you can do lots of things that you think, where's that in the Bible? Or is that really biblical? And this isn't about us trying to build a great church or a big church.

Actually, this is going to be about being a biblical church.

What does it look like to be a biblical church? So I think over the next few months, as we delve into the word a bit more and what that looks like, I think all of us are going to be tremendously encouraged to But also, we're going to be challenged as well.

Because when you start laying your life over the Bible, you see the ways in which, yes, I think like that.

I live like that.

But then there's other things you realise.

It's like, I think there needs to be a bit of a change in my thinking or the way I perceive or see things or what's going on in my heart.

And because...

There's three elements to being a church.

There's the spiritual, there's the relational, and then there's the missional.

And we're going to look at that a little bit this morning.

We're not going to go into loads of detail about stuff today.

We're going to unpack all this over the next few weeks, two or three months.

Often when we're speaking and preaching and teaching, often it can be very much to you, the individual, or to me, the individual.

And when we look through the New Testament, or actually you look through how God works through the whole Bible, he might have spoken to individuals to lead people, but often what he says is to the people.

It's not just to an individual.

And we see that in the New Testament with the church and a lot of what Paul the Apostle writes.

When the word you comes up, in the Greek, most of it is not in the singular, you the individual, It's in the plural, you as a body.

And often we take things very individually and we are in a Western culture which is very individualistic.

And sometimes we're challenged with the plural you, what does it look like to be the body? to live for one another, to love one another, to lay our lives down for one another.

And that can be quite a challenge to maybe sometimes our comfort or what we're happy with.