Proverbs 24:6 ‘for waging war, you need guidance and for victory many advisers.’
Here, we see a picture of Incredible Unity working in God’s Kingdom. The church in the era of Acts was a flourishing church. It functions like buzz groups, carecells in action! It was a church that demonstrated God’s power in best way possible. Without learning to serve together, live together, the church cannot rise up to fulfill its calling. I want to share with you three practical steps to exercise Incredible Unity.
The First practical step is to:
Devote to grow each other’s Spiritual Strength
Ephesians 4:2-3
'Devoting to grow' means you must have ownership over your cell. When you step into Ignyte every Saturday, you got to say, this is my church, this is my family. I am proud to be an IGNYTERS, this is where God has called me to grow! That would mean that this will be your spiritual family where you were grow, laugh, cry and spur one another to grow in your faith. The second thing you must do is to make every Effort to share your life. To keep the unity means we need to include other brothers and sisters into our lives. Many times, we struggle because we don’t want to feel exposed and weak in front of others. But Friends, regardless whether you are afraid of how people look at you, YOU MUST MAKE THE EFFORT. :)
The second practical step to Incredible Unity is to:
V45 – Exercise Love for one another
1st John 3:-16 ‘this is how we know what love is:Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for each other’
When you exercise love for one another, you learn to accept each other’s weakness and encourage each other. we can see people like Matthew (During Watch-night Service) who testify how God changed his life from addiction to freedom. Why? It was not by his own effort, it was because God places the people in the cell to encourage and support him. It was because of the love he experience in the cell that his desire to go through water baptism and to go Spiritual Parenting course grew.
The third practical step is to make:
Make Your Presence Count
You can make your presence count by welcoming new people into the group every week. In Nov 1992, I made a decision to follow Jesus Christ. At that time, I did not know what church is all about. All I knew was since I received Jesus, I knew the next thing i had to do was to come to church. I did not know anyone at all and I was introduced to new-found friends in the church. I wanted to run away because I did not know anyone at all. Over the next few weeks, a few of them (Youths from church) called me to go to church. By that time, I was opening up and I begin to grow in my relationship with God. But you see, though I was saved, many areas in my life were still messed up. I will say things unknowingly and hurt people. I will purposely irritate my leaders to see how ‘Christian’ they are but they were patient and they kept encouraging me. As a result, I became more committed to God and I became an encourager to others too.
Let’s exercise Incredible Unity in IGNYTE!
Genesis 11:6 ‘The Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible.
Love, P.Gary
11:51 AM
(SALVATION)
One of my responsibilities is to do stock take once or twice per week. My job is to verify that the number of goods that are being sent out for the day tallies with the daily order form.
After a few sessions, the person in charge of the store came up to me and asked why I bothered to do the stock take seriously when the delivery man and himself had already checked it. Furthermore, my colleagues who did the verification on other days simply signed the daily order form and did not really check the stock physically.
My reply was simple. I told him that I believe in the spirit of excellence. I believe that my life on earth is filled with many tests for me to grow in my character and ultimately be more Christ like. From there, I managed to open up a platform to talk about my faith.
2 Peter 1:5 - For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge;
You see, it’s important to know what values we are driven by. If we are not driven by Godly values, are we driven by worldly ones? When I was younger in faith, I was overly consumed by what I did not know. As I grew older, I realized that it’s not a matter of how much we know, but how we conscientiously choose to live out what we do know.
Acts 4:13 - When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
It does not take a PhD to live out the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19). We do not even need the title of pastor, leader or spiritual parent in order to lead people to Christ. What we need is to continually be at the right posture in our faith. Knowledge will come along with being hungry for greater intimacy with God. Don’t rely on someone else to get the people around you saved. We must understand that we may be the only Jesus (by the way, Christian means little Christ) that they will ever get to see. Don’t be hindered by thinking that you are too young either.
1 Timothy 4:12 - Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.
Therefore, go and make full use of our church’s upcoming evangelistic event, The Father’s Love as an opportunity for you to play a part in His-Story and extend God’s kingdom!
Cheers,
Brother Kelvin.
10:10 AM
(SALVATION)
