We build our lives around priorities. Building your life around the church means making it the kind of priority that secondary concerns flow around, not over. Unfortunately for some, concerns like the Sunday football game, hunting season, skiing, sleeping in, or enjoying beautiful weather are concerns that run over their involvement in the church.
Membership in the church must not be spectatorship.
Harris quotes Spurgeon,
Do not go where it is all fine music and grand talk and beautiful architecture; those things will neither fill anybody's stomach, nor feed his soul. Go where the gospel is preached, the gospel that really feeds your soul, and go often.
Commenting on questions to ask of potential churches to join, Harris lists number nine as, "Is this a church that is willing to kick me out? He then follows up with this remark,
Why should you be excited about the potential of being expelled from a church? I gain a wonderful sense of protection in knowing that if I committed a scandalous sin and showed no repentance, my church wouldn't put up with it. They would plead with me to change. They would patiently confront me with God's Word. And eventually, if I refused to change, they would lovingly kick me out."
Speaking of the importance of listening well during the teaching and preaching of the church worship time, Harris recounts wise counsel from C.J. Mahaney:
I will be held accountable for what I have heard regardless of whether it moved me emotionally. God's truth is God's truth. It doesn't matter if it was delivered with pizzazz or introduced with a tearjerker illustration. If I have heard God's truth, than I am called to obey it. Period.
Get the book and live what it teaches.
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