What is worship? What is it that God has bought his church for with his own blood? Cf. Acts 20:28? While it’s not detailed for us exhaustively here, may I suggest to you that these verses contain perhaps the largest answer to that question?! God has done all he’s done so that the church in every generation and in every place through the good and the bad would be simply living out the Faith it’s been delivered. God has done the most remarkable things ever seen in creation in his (God the Son’s) life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension. The church has always been given sight to see this fact in God through the Scriptures. He has done phenomenal miracles in bringing each of us- by his mercies- into the Faith to love and to serve him. But he himself needs nothing from us! These verses show us his church in action. He bought us to conform us. To transform us. Eleven chapters in Romans teach us about who we are, how we came to be, and who God is. This chapter begins a determined focus in Paul’s theology to call us all to live all of our theology out. The church (believers joining together somewhere) in its day to day/week to week/year to year/millennia to millennia is how God has transformed his people (individually) into the image of Christ now for nearly two-thousand years. Pause and think on that in how it should relate to this week in your life. From the start, it’s in his churches that God has lavished his grace upon his people according to Ephesians 1:8. This is the Way; it’s just how he’s chosen to do it. Christianity is not an individual sport. It’s a team sport. Christ is the coach. It’s in our churches- as part of the church universal or militant- that we’re each called to live out our lives. I pray with all my heart that I can open up this passage a little bit with you today to spur you on to this reasonable service that we’re exhorted here to render to each other…as unto God himself, by his power, and for his glory.

God bless!!!

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