What's Missing From Our Ch__ch?

Let me begin he message this morning with a reading of God’s Holy Word as this is the very foundation of today’s message. Please stand with me.

1 Corinthians 12: 12-20 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

14Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. 15If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 16And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

As you have noticed our bulletins this morning are a little different. There are a few things missing in our bulletin. First of all there is an absence of color. Today they are plain ol’ Black and white nothing really flashy, no color, and no pretty picture on the front.

And as we take a closer look at our bulletin, we notice that there is more missing than just the color and a pretty picture. Notice that in each place within our bulletin where we read the word church that it is missing two vitally important letters and those letters are of course, UR.

Many of you may have seen this on church signs trying to get people in the doors of their church. This is not my intention this morning. Yes, I would love to get more people inside our church. I would love to see our sanctuary to full capacity. But this isn’t the message that God has placed on my heart for us today.

Illustration: Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, tells about the Roman aqueduct at Segovia, in his native Spain. It was built in 109 A.D. For 1800 years, it carried cool water from the mountains to the hot and thirsty city. Nearly sixty generations drank from its flow. Then came another generation, a recent one, who said, “This aqueduct is so great a marvel that it ought to be preserved for our children, as a museum piece. So they decided to retire the aqueduct from service.

They hired contractors to lay modern iron pipes. They gave the ancient bricks and mortar a rest. And the aqueduct began to fall apart. The sun beating on the dry mortar caused it to crumble. The bricks and stone sagged and threatened to fall. What ages of service could not destroy - idleness disintegrated.

- All of us are familiar with those things that rob us of spiritual growth. Who would not recognize the power of apathy and neglect to our spiritual condition or the destruction caused by our lack of worship attendance and participation?

But there is an even greater enemy out there than all of these. In fact, it has done more to diminish and in some situations to destroy the life of many churches than any other trick of the enemy. It is called idleness.

We were created to serve, to be useful, and to contribute.

If you are a Christian this morning and not serving God through the gifts He has given you, you are an easy target for idleness – you are already in the sights of the enemy.

You want to find fulfillment as a Christian? Then serve! You want to keep your spiritual life growing and moving forward? Then find where God can use you in His church and serve! Serving is the greatest deterrent in becoming a dead church, because when we serve we take action and move forward.

We are at the end of our fiscal year here at LCC and with that comes new beginnings; new beginnings and new opportunities for each of us in the area of serving.

Today I want each of us to see our church body as a…….

I.Unified Body.

A.Let me first say that, no one here is more important than another. Our goal as a church is to not only connect our own lives to God’s Love and Forgiveness but to reach others and bring them alongside us as we do so. And we cannot do that by ourselves!