“the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever” (Psalm 19:9a)

Don’t we crave to be amazed and feel 100% clean in our conscience as we experience that amazement?

That’s what happens when we feast on the glory of God in His Word and in prayer together as believers and in our personal times alone with God. That’s what happens as we consider His greatness in everything around us and see how majestic He is. God seeks us out, deals with our sin, loves us thoroughly and perfectly, and draws us into effective and joyful living all because and through the death and life of Jesus Christ!

God, the One Who made us and sustains our every breath, this very same God gives us renewal as a community in each region. God draws us to an awareness that He alone can restore broken relationships and re-awaken our mutual fear of and amazement with God.

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer” (Ps 19:14).

What does this look like for us as believers in local community-building? What does it look like for us to come together in small poolings of believers from neighborhood to neighborhood and come before the Lord, saying:
“Let the words of [our mouths] and the meditations of [our hearts] be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, [our] Rock and [our] Redeemer.”

Men and women living in regular gentleness and honesty around each other frequently… that’s amazing… clean… pointing to the glory of Christ. That shows our gratitude to God for His salvation in Christ. We’d prevent so many patterns of sin and dark escaping of responsibility if we lived in raw honestly between believing men and women, if we sought the Lord together in community, and if we spent our time loving each other and our neighbors together. We long for friendship, when we have it available all around us in our siblings in Christ and our actual neighbors.

Let’s pool together and seek spontaneous and planned gatherings of ourselves together in natural community, seeking to have friendships be less about “being cool” and more about Christ. When this is the case, we find ourselves in close friendships with people we’d never pursue as easily in our Christian popularity culture. God in Christ seeks out each of us and through each of us seeks out those we encounter every day. Let’s not be afraid of relationships. They take hard work, but it’s a labor of love that reaps dividends. We discover so much about the greatness of our God as we labor to show love to those we live near and run into day-in and day-out.

As we live out our faith in this raw and real way, we encounter the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. We realize His love for us and for those we’re loving. We soften and sweeten and blend into His will for His people instead of bristling against it. This is the amazing will of God, heart of God, and activity of God. This God amazes us, and as we stay active in His activity, we come to experience increased clean-hearted thoughts and emotions. We more and more naturally desire the good of others and above all the glory of God.

Amazed by our God. Feeling the cleaning grace of Christ’s death for us and life in and through us.

– Torrey