Do you feel one within your church body?  Is your love for each other so evident that the world immediately knows that your church family belongs to God?  Do your church members regularly reach beyond their own self concern, making sure of the safety, security and well being of your wife, husband and kids?  Are they intimately aware of your talents, your trials and your testimony such that you are seamlessly orchestrated in church efforts to reach the lost around you?  Have you even received one phone call from them this year?

Honesty and truth as disciples is what we were promised in order to set us free from deception.  Why then do we persist in the charade where our church body is concerned?  Have we so committed ourselves to serving the ritual and the business that we have rooted out the foundations of love, family and honest care for our brethren?  Why then do we perpetuate this farce, having abandoned hope that somehow it will be reconciled or made right?  This is not what God intended, this sham, this mediocre facsimile of a Holy Spirit united body made one by His Glory.  What else is there, where else might we go?

My acrimony is not meant simply for criticism.  I yearn for the joy of the Lord in my Church Family harder than an addict craves that next fix.  They will not listen, for I am but a simple man begging for a return to God’s intention, devoid of credential beyond my salvation.  We are wasting our greatest opportunity in a harvest ripe environment where people have been abandoned to the ravages of a world without mercy and a church intent upon apostasy and ritualistic commercialism.  Lord please let me see them who are pent on true sacrifice in my church.  Am I perhaps blinded by my own lack of holy discernment?  Do I speak untruth?  Am I upset for nothing, missing the reality that is the sacrificial, Holy, temperate and set-aside body of Christ?

Save us Father.  Cleanse us of all unrighteousness and worldly dominion.  Make us Holy as the death of Your Son intended we’d become.  Feed us the fulfilling bread of Your Holy Word, the Body of Christ, broken so that we might be nourished and free.  Wash our minds, hearts and motivations so that they are indistinguishable from Your Will for our lives as saints of God.  Let us remain free of the temptation to make a church in our own image when it was intended as reflection and reminder of Your Glory.  Show us true Holy Spirit baptism and sanctification by fire.  Make us one in the kiln of your merciful discipline.  Please don’t leave us in our present structure a mere fraction of the wonderful body we were meant to become.  Teach us to  pray together, stay together and work together tirelessly for Your Harvest.  In Jesus’ Holy Name I pray.