by Jerry Senn
This weekend our family will meet for our 22nd annual reunion in the Smoky Mountains, near Townsend, Tennessee. There will be folks from around the country who share a family heritage and a host of precious memories of days past. I’m always excited when this happens and always come away feeling loved and renewed in our family bonds. And, the worship times are especially inspiring.
I mention this because there’s a commonality with what happens each week when the Brevard spiritual family gathers for fellowship and worship. I hope you’re also excited we have those gatherings and come away with a closer bond of loving fellowship and partnership in Christ’s Body. Some of my most meaningful memories are of those assemblies I’ve been part of, beginning in my earliest days on earth.
Maybe we could be encouraged to think of our gatherings as a church family as a weekly “family reunion” rather than merely something we do as a religious routine each week. In fact we are the “family” because of what Christ did for us on the cross. He reconciled us to the Father by shedding His own blood. Bonds of love should be renewed in these reunions.
Think about these words of Paul:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14-19, ESV).
Amen!