MERRY TUESDAY BY PARRIS BAILEY-
“To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious” 1 Pet 2:4
Staying connected to the body of Christ is huge to me. For me it started way back after I met the Lord on the lakefront of New Orleans, I suddenly found myself living with a community of Believers. For four years we were surrounded with a community 24/7 and yes at times I wanted to punch a wall. After four years we moved to New Orleans and continued to live with people helping us to start the church. When I Walk into Victory, I feel it’s a part of my DNA.
We are indeed living stones. Once dead but made alive by Christ.
Maclaren says, “that if we draw near to Jesus Christ, life from Him will pass into our hearts and minds, which life will show itself in kindred fashion to what it wore in Jesus Christ, and will shape us into the likeness of Him from whom we draw our life, because to Him we have come. You draw life from Jesus Christ if you keep close to Him, and that life makes you, in derived and subordinate fashion, but in a very real and profound sense, what Jesus Christ was in the world. As ‘living stones’ they, too, share in the life which flows from Him. Touch Him, and His quick Spirit passes into our hearts. Rest upon that foundation-stone and up from it, if I may so say, there is drawn, by strange capillary attraction, all the graces and powers of the Savior’s own life. The building which is reared upon the Foundation is cemented to the Foundation by the communication of the life itself, and, coming to the living Rock, we, too, become alive. Let us keep ourselves near to Him, for, disconnected, the wire cannot carry the current, and is only a bit of copper, with no virtue in it, no power. Attach it once more to the battery and the mysterious energy flashes through it immediately. ‘To Whom coming,’ because He lives, ‘ye shall live also.’”
I love being with the body of Christ in corporate fellowship! Such amazing things happen in that place of joy. Redemption does its work in us over and over again because Christ comes when we are in one accord. Staying at home alone and trying to survive on my own is not appealing to me and I know myself far to well that in time I would despair. When I’m with my brothers and sisters I sense heaven coming down and that’s when I feel I’ve come home at last.