Made To Be In God's Family Series

Living a Purpose Driven Life part 3

(Made to be in God’s Family)

Brian A. Moon

(Based on the book The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren)

At the annual family-reunion picnic, a young bride led her husband over to an old woman busily crocheting in a rocker. "Granny," she said, touching the old woman’s hand affectionately, "this is my new husband." The woman eyed him critically for a long moment, then asked abruptly, "Do you desire children?" Startled by her bluntness, the young man blushed and stammered, "Well-uh-yes, I do very much."

"Well," she said, looking scornfully at the large tribe gathered around the six picnic tables, "try to control it!"

Families are great things! Many of us have experienced those wonderful mid-summer family reunions where you get your cheeks pinched and are forced to play nicely with these kids that you are supposedly related to… But seriously families are great and all of us no matter if our family is just a mom and some brothers or sisters or mom and a dad and a dog, our families are something that we all treasure and value. We are in the middle of a 40 Days of Purpose series that is looking into what the purpose of life is really all about. It has been amazing so far to see and hear some of the stories of how we all are finding our God given purposes in life. Last week we learned that the first purpose of our lives is to know and love God or worship God; we were made for his pleasure! This week we are diving into the second purpose of your life and that is: “You were Made to be in God’s Family!”

The Bible says, “His (God’s) unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 1:5 NLT

Underline “adopt us into his own family”

God wanted a family, and the entire Bible is the story of God creating, saving, and protecting his children. He made us, he sent Jesus his Son to save us, and if you accept Jesus into your life he has promised to protect us. We were made for God’s eternal family. Or to say that another way, you were made to last forever in God’s family! This is a big deal, think of all the trouble God went to make us a part of his family and this is the key to this second purpose of your life, the Bible says:

“Love your spiritual family.” 1 Peter 2:17 MSG

God wants us to be about loving our spiritual brothers and sisters. God wants us to practice loving each other. This life is the dress rehearsal for the real production, which will happen for the rest of FOREVER, and God wants us to learn how to get along and practice loving each other now. The Bible says God is love and he wants us to be more like him so he gives us the purpose of loving our spiritual family.

The word that is used for this loving our spiritual families is fellowship. Fellowship is more than just chit-chat and small talk. Real, authentic, Biblical fellowship is learning to love and serve each other.

The Bible says, “The person who loves God must also love other believers.” 1 John 4:21 GW

So how do we do that? How do we learn to love each other? Well before you can even begin you must realize this one truth… the people in this room are your spiritual family! The church is more than a building, it is more than this meeting once a week on Sunday Nights, it is a family. We will never learn to love our spiritual family until we put some faces with this, until we get a little uncomfortable because we have some issues with others in this room.

It is a lot harder to love someone when you put a face with it so look around the room right now and meet your family. Now that you have met your family we can get down to leaning more about authentic fellowship together! There are 4 levels of fellowship that we are going to go into and the first level is:

Choosing to belong

The most basic level is something I hope all of you in this room are doing and that is simply choosing to come and get connected to this group. Many people today think that they can be a Christian and not be a part of a church. To some degree that is true, coming to church does not mean that you are a Christian, but God made us for each other, we need each other and we need to be connected to a group of believers.