Reflections

It is not the fact that we are united in common goals or purposes that makes us a community. Rather, it is the fact that we share a common life in Christ.
~ Jerry Bridges, True Community: The Biblical Practice of Koinonia

God worked in their lives in proportion to the degree of the koinonia, the quality of love between believers. Their favor with God flowed largely from his pleasure of their depth of fellowship.
~ John Franklin

Christianity asserts that we are going to go on forever…Now there are a great many things that wouldn’t be worth bothering about if I was only going to live eighty years or so, but I had better bother about if I am going to go on living forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are getting worse so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable but it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is precisely the correct technical term for it. Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others, but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or to even enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on and on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell.  In each of us there is something growing, which will be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
~ CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

When Jesus commanded, “Make disciples,” he wasn’t simply referring to converts. He wants followers who follow — people who submit to his teachings and his ways. But because we’ve preached a different gospel, a vast throng of people think they are Christian/saved/born again when they really aren’t! We’ve made the test for salvation doctrinal rather than behavioral, ritualizing it with walking the aisle, praying to receive Christ, or signing a doctrinal statement.
~ Bill Hull, 1946- , Author: The Complete Book of Discipleship