Many times we lose the battle with the enemy because the friendships we have outside are stronger than those in church. We have to turn the situation around by first actively build strong friendships in your carecell, after which we turn our focus to the world outside! Because if you want to encounter and grow in God like never before, your friends in the cell has to be the ones who will be your 'advisers'. However, to have friends is not enough - we must have Incredible Unity.

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

1^st 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.

This year, 2008, I believe God has planted new beginnings in our lives. We are going to grow in many areas and one of the them is incredible unity. We don’t need to wait for camp to get to know each other, we can start where we are now. Some of you may feel just like me when I first came to church, I encourage you to allow the love of the family to touch you.

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