Weekly Pursuit – Week 5 of November
Verse:
Eph. 4:2-3 “With all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, bearing one another in love, being diligent to keep the oneness of the Spirit in the uniting bond of peace.”
Excerpts:
The genuine oneness is the very Spirit who is within us. Every real Christian has this oneness, which is nothing less than the living Lord Himself as the wonderful, all-inclusive life-giving Spirit who is within us (2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Cor. 15:45b). Now what we need today is not to receive or gain this oneness but to endeavor, strive, and struggle to keep, maintain, and preserve the oneness.
Five phrases in Ephesians 4:1-3 give us the practical way to keep the oneness: lowliness, meekness, long-suffering, bearing one another in love, and the uniting bond of peace…. First, we should never set up a high standard for others. To not set up a standard is the real practice of lowliness…. As long as we take something other than Christ as our standard, we do not have lowliness…. Meekness, however, is a matter of attitude…. We all need to be broken…. Only unselfish people have genuine meekness. In order to be meek, we must sacrifice ourselves…. Long-suffering is related to our spoken word. In the church we must be careful concerning our speech and conversation…. A brother may wrong us, but for the Lord’s glory and for the sake of the church life, we should not speak a word about it…. In order to bear one another in love, we need to fight against suspicion and fear in the church life. Instead of these two things, we should have only love…. We should not be over-related or under-related to anyone. The uniting bond of peace is the balanced relatedness in the church. (The Vision, Practice, and Building Up of the Church as the Body of Christ, chap. 13)
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
