By Rick Warren
God wanted more than angels and animals and plants. He wanted a family. The Bible says the whole reason you exist is because God wanted you to become a part of his family and that family is going to last forever.
Your spiritual family, God’s family, is going to outlast even your physical family. Physical families don’t last. They grow up, they move away, they die. But the spiritual family of God is going to go on and on for eternity.
The Bible says that God never meant for you to go through life alone. In fact, God hates loneliness. When God created man, he put him in the Garden of Eden, a perfect environment, and the first thing God said was, “It is not good for man to be alone.” God wants you to be part of the family of God.
What is God’s family? “That family is the church of the living God, the support and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15 NCV). The church, the body of Christ, is not an institution. The church is not a bureaucracy. The church is not an organization or a social club. The church is God’s family. It’s not about rules and regulations and rituals and religion. It’s about relationships. It’s about love.
The church is “the support and foundation of the truth.” What happens when a building has no support and foundation? It collapses. Those of us in California understand this more than most because we have earthquakes. If you don’t have a good foundation under your building, it’s going to collapse when the earthquake comes.
God says your life is the same way. You’re going to experience some earthquakes in your life—financial earthquakes, health earthquakes, emotional earthquakes, relational earthquakes, career earthquakes. When those tough times come along, you’re going to collapse if you don’t have a spiritual family to support you.
Think and Pray
You cannot fulfill God’s purposes by yourself. God wired us to need each other in the family of God. CBMC can help by connecting you to a family of Christian men. Find the team that meets nearest you and join us next week!
Jesus, I know that there is strength in numbers and that I need others to spur me on toward love and good deeds. Please point me toward the support base who will help me to stand firm and press forward, even when life gets hard. Amen
Rick Warren is author of the New York Times bestseller The Purpose Driven Life and The Purpose Driven Church, which was named one of the 100 Christian books that changed the 20th Century.
