Interacting with Church Members
How we interact with fellow teammates really affect the entire team. If you keep bad mouthing each other, it tears the team apart. If you are encouraging each other, trying to help one another, then you are building the team up together!
We are a team when we follow Christ. You become a member of the one team, the body of Christ — the church.
Membership in God’s Family is a Gift Unearned. — How do we respond and interact with other members?
You first watched your parents, and learned from them how to interact with people. The way they treated people or thought about people, you often did too.
This also happens with our spiritual parents, those who have become maturing members of Christ’s body — the church. We learned from them. Sometimes we had good examples, other times, we may have seen human error.
But now, you are that maturing spiritual parent… other infant christians are watching how you interact with each other.
How do you respond to each other? How do you treat each other? How do you talk to each other? How do you talk about another church member?
As members of Christ’s body — the church — how are we interacting with each other? What would people imitate from you?
How much do you do for each other yet maybe with the wrong heart motive?
As disciples of Jesus, we have been given different gifts to steward with the body of Christ. There are different members of the body, there are different functions for each of us; yet, each member functions together to make one functioning body!
There’s all of these different gifts and things we can do as different members of Christ’s body — the church...
1) But what if our heart is in the wrong spot when we do those things?
2) What is this more excellent way Paul is talking about? Out of all of these gifts, what is the more excellent way?
Love.
We can do all of these different things for people… serve people, speak beautiful words to each other, and do great things… but if there is no love… then what we are doing is basically worthless!! [1 Cor 13:1-3]
When Paul wrote this letter [1 Corinthians] to the church in Corinth, he was writing about love among the members of Christ’s body — the church!
[Read: 1 Cor 13:4-13]
As members of Christ’s body — the church — interact together with God’s love above all things we do.
Consider how we interact with each other. In those moments of interacting with each other, reflect back to how Christ has loved us, how Paul describes love among Christian members in 1 Cor 13, and consider how we can be genuinely loving each other as brothers and sisters in Christ -- image bearers of God.