The Bible Study Podcast, episode 497. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues a study on Christian

maturity and community. Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

We're in the middle of study on Christian maturity. We've done three lessons so far.

They have been Bible study, fear, and prayer. And today we're going to talk about community.

Now, it's very simple to find verses in the Bible that say that we should be in community.

I think of verses like Hebrews 10 verses 23 through 25.

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful, and let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.

Do not give up meeting together,

as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day approaching. And there are many, many verses like that. There are many places in the Bible where

it talks about the church or the fellowship or the body of Christ or all of these sort of things. So I'm going to assume that

you know this, but let me just not gloss over that. I love the fact that you're listening

in the Bible study podcast. I trust that you are also in a faith community, that you also

have found a church where you can go

and be encouraged and be a source of encouragement for others. We are called to do that. So let's just

put that out first of all and be really clear about that. And then I want to look at some of the places

that give us some insight why that is.

And one of the places that we really look at when we want to look at Christian community is

Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 are a great place to learn about living in Christian community.

Now, I should say the reason why they are is the Corinthian Church had some problems with

community. They had some problems where they had people who had one gift and they thought

it was better than the people had that gift. So they were looking down on each other. They were

having some people show up late for service and other people that already gotten drunk.

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