I received this from an Christian organization based in India, and thought I would share. Maybe something we need to be reminded of from time to time.

Blessings,

Sunil Daniel, Colorado Horeb MTC

WORD FOR THE WEEK  26 August 2007
Christian Fellowship Church, Bangalore, India.
http://www.poonen.org/zac http://www.cfcindia.com
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           Learn To Value Your Local Church

                       Zac Poonen

The Lord is in the midst of His church, which is His body on
earth.  We show our appreciation for the Lord  by valuing
His body.  If you don’t appreciate and value the local
church, it is you who will be the loser.  God has mightily
blessed those who have valued their local church and who
have been thankful for what they have received from the
church.

I can  testify to this personally  during the time my
children have grown up in the midst of  the young  brothers
in  our local church.   I don’t have words to express my
thankfulness to God for that  privilege.  Those young
brothers were not perfect.  They had many weaknesses.  But
in spite of all that , my sons were all helped by them,
because those brothers were sincere.  Parents alone cannot
do the job.  We need  the brothers and sisters in the
church to help us in bringing up our children.  Let us  learn
to appreciate the tremendous protection that we and our
children have  in the church.

The young people will never realize how much the church has
protected them from accident, danger and sin.  Only when
they stand before the Lord will they  realize how the strict
standards  in the church kept them from going astray in to
the world and destroying  themselves.  In that day  they
will see how something  they heard in the church many years
earlier protected  them from danger much later.  The Lord
will also show us  in that day how many dangers our children
were saved and protected from because of what they heard in
the church.

Yet, inspite of these and many other blessings, how little
all of us have appreciated and valued the local church.

Do you want to progress to the point where you become a
blessing to others?  Then,  first of all, learn  to be
thankful to the Lord for what He has done for you and for
the local church He has given you.  Don’t take the local
church for granted.  Many of us are like  children who
realize the real worth of their parents only after their
parents are dead.

Why is it that you find it difficult to value you the
brothers and sisters in your local church?  May be you say
that you see many faults in them.  When people have a
problem with their eyes, sometimes, they see spots in front
of their eyes all the time.  It can be  the same spiritually
too.  In the eyes of some people, every brother’s  and
sister’s face is spotted.  If that is so with you, the
problem may not be with those other brothers and sisters,
because those spots are in your own eyes.  Your vision will
never become clear until Jesus heals your eyes.

Jesus valued the loyalty of His disciples very highly.  Once
He told His disciples that even though all  of them were
going to forsake Him, yet He would not be alone, because His
Father was going to be with Him (John 16:32).  He did not
need those disciples.  Yet He  told them in Luke 22:28 that
He was thankful that they had stood by Him.   He was the
Lord of glory.  He did  not need anybody to stand by Him.
But even though, He did not need their support, He
appreciated their loyalty.  He was saying to hem, as it were
“You have come out of this old Jewish system and given up
the old wineskin.  You have seen the difference between the
spirit of the Bride and the spirit of the harlot and you
have come out and stood by me, willing to ay any  price”.

I hope the Lord will be able to say to us too in the final
day that we stood by Him and were not ashamed of Him, that
we loved the local church He placed us in and gave ourselves
for it,  that we were not  critical of the church like many
others were.

May the Lord teach us to be thankful for one another in the
local church now, before it is too late.
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