No 12

(Its members and leaders)

God deigns to use imperfect, sinful beings such as us to build His glorious church. Can you imagine an absolute perfect and holy being such as our heavenly Father working with us? Well, that’s exactly what He wants to do and Jesus said just before ascending to heaven: “lo, I am with you always, even until the end of the world” (Matt 28 : 20b); isn’t that great? As members and leaders of the Church, we have responsibilities, are accountable to one another and God trusts us implicitly. We have already discussed how the Holy Spirit bestows gifts on us to minister to the other members of the Body and we have also looked at the “one anothers” of the Bible. It’s as if God has let us complete choice in the matters of running His Church and one would think that He is taking a big chance in doing that. He knows exactly what He is doing because no matter how badly we do our job, He builds His church in spite of man and his imperfections : “…the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16: 18b). From a human stand point, we look at the Church today and all we can see is strife, arguing and division but God sees us differently; He sees us through Jesus and He sees us as perfect. The other day, someone asked me the following question : “I wonder if the Church is ready to go to heaven?”; without hesitating, I answered yes!! Why? Because we are perfect; if we are in the Church and I don’t mean the buildings but the Spiritual Church, we are perfect. To put it simply, if we are saved, we are His children and will be with Him for eternity. We are either in the Church or we’re not; there’s no other place to be. “…and there was no place for them” (Rev 20 :11b)