PASTOR BOLA BELLO
“Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever: he will be our guide even unto death.”
Psalms 48:12-14;
“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”
Genesis 3:21;
The beauty of the church is promised to come out the ashes. Nowadays, we would discover that there are many different structures of the Church. We have even erroneously come into a conclusion of taking the church for a building. The physical structure does not determine the beauty of the Church. God is taking the church somewhere.
Our vocation as Christians is to work with Grace, Faith and Patience to come out victoriously from temptations. It takes an abnormal person, by the reckoning of the world, to walk by Faith. We see the First Church (Adam and Eve) in the garden as a Church that God nursed and loved yet they showed defiance to God’s instruction. Adam believed a better hope to come and this made him to eat the fruit.
Jesus Christ is the expression of the fullness of the image of God. The first Adam came and took part of the sin of Eve, while the second Adam (Jesus) came and sacrificed himself for the sins of man. We should not look upon ourselves as abandoned and hopeless. Satan does not have a power to wreck the Church, he can only mute the Church.
“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:6-9;
We must come to the placing of being able to stand to die for the truth. Our beauty as a Christian is relative to the beauty of our inner man. The question is “do we have a testimony of Christ through my attitude, speech and action towards other people?”
Before Adam, sin had been in the world , but there was no forgiveness for sin. But, after Adam fell, God forgave him. The glory and honour that man was crowned with was not in material prosperity, rather it was in the redemption that God packaged for man. It is a mystery. The forgiveness was demonstrated. Satan assumed that he could cause the total destruction of man, based on his wrong assumption that God does not forgive. God disproved this when Jesus stepped into the garden, came into the scene and covered the nakedness of Adam and Eve.
There is still something important that God is looking in the church and until we present this, the Church cannot be glorified. The Church in the wilderness (Israelites) was judged for their barrenness just like Jesus cursed the fig tree. The present Church will have to bear fruits so that God will not damn us.
Romans 5:12-15;
If we cannot say no to sin now, we would have problems denying its pleasure next time. The Grace of God is not a license to sin, it equips us to avoid it.