You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters.Love each other deeply with all your heart. 1 Peter 1:22 NLT
Does America need the church? Do Americans need the church? Yes, yes, and yes! Why? In the first place, as Alexis de Tocqueville, a French nobleman who visited America in the early 19th century saw: the members of a voluntary association like the church exercise control over one another’s more rapacious desires. We don’t want to offend our fellow association members with behavior we all agree is egregious.
Oh, but that only scratches the surface of what the church, at heart, is. Just as a converted person has become a divinely empowered human, so the church is a divinely-empowered association. It not only exercises a restraining influence, it also contains a transforming power, the power of love. We don’t want to offend each other, but more than that, we want to build each other up. We want to be strong in the faith as a way of encouraging others who may be struggling. Years ago, a student said to me. “I look at you and say, ‘Well, if Oswalt can go on believing, I guess I can too.’” Those words have borne me up in dark times. I knew I dared not falter because I had responsibility for my fellow believers who were watching, and whose faith was on the line.
Within the fellowship of the church there is power to transform our characters and cleanse our desires. It is as we nurture our regenerated desires with the help and guidance of like-minded brothers and sisters that we are actually saved. There are persons who cannot get out for a church meeting. For them televised or on-line services are a blessing. But those who can get out, must get out. We need one another. It is a cliché, but cliches are true: take a coal out of the fire and it will go out. In the same way, take a believer out of a face-to-face fellowship with like-minded believers and faith will wither and die Precisely because this is era of burgeoning isolation and alienation, we need a group of people of whom we can say, “Those are my people, they know my name.”
Called To Be Transformed 