Two Essential Components Of A Christian Life
Two things I want to share with you have become critical for my walk with Christ as I mature in His knowledge and love. These things have helped me, and I am confident they will never be absent from my life; they are gifts from Jesus to me.
Let’s start with the first essential component of our christian life: The Scriptures. The Holy book that God gave us after having created everything. As I often share with family and friends, when I want to emphasize the importance of knowing the Bible to understand how to live joyfully, I think about any creator who creates something. Creators often desire that people use their object properly and respectfully, and in most cases, the creator is pleased to communicate how to handle their object. Think, for example, of home appliances. These are always accompanied with a manual detailing how they must be used. The wisest of people ensure to open and study it before turning the tool on!
I know what you are thinking: we are not objects. Exactly! We are far more complicated and more precious. We, too, have a Creator who knows everything about us, much more than we can understand or imagine. Therefore, we need to read the manual about ourselves that He wrote for us. It’s a manual of life, a manual of relationships, a manual of how to handle problems in everyday life. We should not underestimate the importance of it because the Author writes it for our bodies, souls and spirits.
Many verses in the Bible explain the idea that He created us, and no one can understand, describe and teach us better than God Himself. He is a perfect Father and Teacher who, with love and careful consideration, has shown us how to “function”. Here are some of these verses.
Psalm 139:13, ESV
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The second essential component of our christian life is The Body of Christ. The church is composed of people who are “set apart”. We know that when Jesus came to earth, He established a communal life with His disciples: travelling together, eating, drinking, sleeping, and doing everything as a unit all the time. After He departed from His disciples, His friends understood the importance of communal life and carried it on. We are commanded to be like Jesus in this practice too. They didn’t have this lifestyle simply because it was handy. They adopted this lifestyle because God knows what we need to be like Him and do His will.
1 John 2:6, ESV
Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
Society constantly tries to get us to conform to the lies of this world. The key to overcoming this is not to resist individually but collectively as the Body of Christ, because we have been created for fellowship with one another. We need friends who, in the same way, are committed to following Jesus. As the Body of Christ, we Christians need one another. Christians shouldn’t just attend church once or twice a week, but every Child of God requires a healthy community of friends for the same reason we need Scriptures: to understand God and to sharpen one another. The Body of Christ is essential and not optional, and the Bible is full of good reasons and explanations. Here is one of them:
Ephesians 3:17-19, ESV
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You may wonder why I underline these two aspects of my journey with God. Indeed, there must be more than just theory that would inspire someone to point them out so specifically? Yes, there is.
By the grace of God, I got to read the Bible many times and memorize many passages of it. Again by the grace of God, I lived and worked together with believers for more than a year. We all experienced the depth of the wickedness of our ways and hearts. It became blatantly clear to me that we genuinely need God and the tools He provided for us – Scripture and Body of Christ – in all stages of our Christian life, as the work in us is not finished until the day we will meet the Lord.
Jeremiah 17:9-10, ESV
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart
and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”
I was confused about life. After numerous prayer requests, the enemy sent different people into my life, gave me false visions, deceived me in taking bible verses out of context and encouraged me to take great leaps of ‘faith’. Unfortunately, my leaps of ‘faith’ were in some things that were false, and I unfortunately held on to those deceptions. Can you imagine? I never thought this could happen to me… but it did! When I finally surrendered to God, after years of following my own direction, tired of trying to understand His will and my past, I started to read the Bible with no idols in my heart or expectations for my future… and I began to get answers.
Around the same time, I noticed that the Body of Christ, the five young ladies living with me, had been saying the same thing for a long time to me. I didn’t want to listen to them for many reasons, but they were aligned with one another and in line with the Word of God. They had the same opinion, and so the enemy in me was utterly defeated: I came to a point where I had to admit I was the only one with a different truth, and because it wasn’t aligned with the Scripture and the Body, I had to say, “I cannot trust myself”, even if I have seemingly big things on my side, such as dreams and verses! Praise the Lord, who is stronger!
Proverbs 3:5-6, ESV
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
We often don’t know, but we have many “strongholds and arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God” in our minds. We need God to help us with excuses that keep us from good and Biblical practice, such as reading the Bible daily or attending a church near home. Unfortunately, it is not rare that people have problems with communities or with the concept of attending a church regularly. As for studying Scripture daily, we find many reasons not to obey God’s commandments in ourselves and others. I pray this big lesson blesses you today. May God speak to you with this simple article and cause you to grow in grace and strength in the name of Jesus.
If this article speaks to you, say this prayer with me as I round up;
Father God, thank You for this opportunity to share Your heart for Your church. We know that You want us free and rooted in Your truth and love, and we thank You for Your goodness expressed in the Holy Bible and Your Body around us. Thank you for being so patient in reaching us repeatedly and clarifying everything we need to understand. The enemy doesn’t want us to know You; he is blocking us from Your blessings, but we know Your presence is more powerful and Your hand stronger than anybody else. We pray that You destroy every lie in our mind and build a desire for the Scripture and trust and love for Your Body. Thank You for these two precious gifts. Bless us increasingly with them, and cause us to grow in Your knowledge and grace. Thank You, God; we pray in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.
