Today I’m going to talk about “Finding A Place To Belong.” God created you and I to be part of a community, to be part of a family. Much of the behavior we see around us, some good some bad, is people searching to find a place to belong. It starts in school, beginning in middle school, peaking in high school and extending into college.
Youth want to have a group they feel they belong to, they sense what is termed “peer pressure.” Peer pressure is the pressure of others, real or perceived, to make you conform to the group. Most of the time peer pressure is perceived. A student wants to fit into a certain group and so they change their behavior to be accepted in the group. There’s nothing wrong with the desire to find a place or group to belong to. However, there are two ways that you can go wrong. The first way is trying to fit in with the wrong group, a group that encourages wrong behavior and beliefs. There are lots of those. The second way you can go wrong is to give up on relating to others altogether, becoming a loner, an outsider.
God has created you to be part of His family, the church. God has created your children, whether teens or younger, to be part of His family in the church. NIV Romans 12:5 So in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. The Bible speaks of God’s family as the body of Christ. Each believer is to be a member of that family, a member of Christ’s body in the church. You as a believer are not your own, you belong to Jesus Christ and you belong to all the other believers in the church.
My hand is a member of my body. Now suppose my hand decided that it no longer wanted to be attached to me. My hand decided that it wanted some space, it didn’t need the rest of my body and so it detached itself and wandered off into a corner. What would happen to my hand? It would shrivel up and die. It couldn’t live apart from the body. The same is true of believers, a believer cannot live apart from the rest of God’s family without beginning to die. In fact, a true believer would never want to live apart from God’s family, the church. Yet today, sadly, many people who call themselves believers are dropping out of the church. Each one has their complaints and reasons, yet they are cutting themselves off from the very life of God in His body.
We see it happen at Life Church. Oh, there are always excuses, often it’s a job or children’s activities or sickness or busyness, but the end result is that the person who leaves the community of God’s family begins to die, their families disintegrate and their faith in God burns lower and lower. Don’t let that happen to you. This morning I am going to talk about how God created you to be part of a church family.
To hear more about this topic, listen to my May 7, 2006 message entitled Finding A Place To Belong