I really enjoyed preaching on Sunday on the amazing truth of how the Holy Spirit has given us a new identity as God’s children.
How amazing is it that God hasn’t just saved us from our sin, but he’s adopted us into his family! And there’s nothing that can take this away from us! It’s a source of deep security and profound significance that helps us weather the storms of life.
You can catch up here if you missed it.
Preaching on this great truth stirred something in me that I hadn’t had a chance to share in the sermon. As I chatted with people after the services I felt a renewed warmth and genuine affection for my brothers and sisters.
See, if we’re God’s children, that means we have a unique relationship with our fellow believers. It means that the church really is a family. It’s no small thing to be brothers and sisters in Christ. For many of us, we may have more in common and closer relationships with our spiritual family than we do our biological family.
Our prayer is that City on a Hill would be a loving community - a caring family. And I’m so thankful to see this happening in so many different ways across church.
Starting next week, we’ll be introducing a newly re-vamped Belonging course. We’ll be running it more frequently than ever before, so that people don’t need to wait too long before doing it. We run Belonging because we really care about helping people join our church well, and finding their place to Belong in our church whanau.
In my role as Membership pastor, I get to chat with a lot of new people. And pretty much everyone I talk to speaks of how warmly welcomed they were, not just by staff but by friendly regulars.
One of the things I’ll be doing at Belonging is show a photo of our whole church and say “here is our welcoming team!”
So thank you for everything you do to care for your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and to help welcome those who are new to our community. It’s a beautiful thing when God’s children can both look inward to care deeply for their siblings in Christ, and at the same time look outwards to welcome newcomers in.
Keep it up whanau!
Love, your bro in Christ,
Andy.