Hebrews 10: 25 “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another-and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (NIV)
During the past few years I’ve talked with friends who told me that their home church just “doesn’t feel like their church anymore”. There are a number of reasons leading up to this; some of them walked away with levels of disillusionment due to some sort of disagreement within the church or between themselves and different leadership areas within the church, or the worship and word changed in ways they can’t identify with, or the person themselves feel that they are changing and can’t relate to the home church any longer… I can well understand much of what they are going through having left a church in near complete disillusionment to be without a home church for several years. It is a painful and numbing process.
I recommend that anyone leaving a church body not to wait too long to begin an intense search for where God is leading you; we really don’t have all that much time to waste on the sidelines of our faith. We don’t want to spend some of our prime time to be a blessing and to be blessed wasting away in the wilderness. We need other Christians around us for encouragement or as Hebrews 10: 24 says “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”
Searching is not a bad thing to do as long as we keep in mind that we are looking for direction from the Holy Spirit. In fact, if we are not searching for that direction we could very well stop growing and stagnate to become lukewarm. Consider two lines on a graph, one being a state of contentment for where we are spiritually and the other our need for community and growth. While our contentment is riding high and our need for the body is running low we are in danger of being lukewarm. Over time our contentment will lag and our need for growth will increase and at some point they will intersect. It is then that we are spurred to search, to strive to belong, and our crying out for the Spirit will intensify. Then we can be led and then we can be open to the revelation that God has a purpose and place for us.
1 Corinthians 12: 18: “But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.” (NIV)
Let the Spirit set us in the body as He will, let us keep searching and striving to know His will.
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