Houses of worship are gathering places for enthusiastic believers. A church as God designed it is a place where the Bible is revered.

Churches are beacons of light in our community, or at least they should be.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindall presents a study in Revelation Chapter 3 in

which we're told about a dying church in Sardis.

As their story unfolds, we discover what happens when churches abandon their true

calling.

Conversely, we learn how to maintain a fire of passion

that keeps our churches bright and alive.

Chuck begins with prayer. How valuable it is our Father that we hear and that we heed what we have heard. How easy for worship at a church to become perfunctory,

the business as usual, Just another Sunday, just another day in the spring of the year.

Just another time to haul our family to church and sit down and listen and drift and leave.

Deliver us from that habit, our father, that leads to deadness,

bring us alive from within and motivate us,

our father, to see truth, to come to terms with truth, to address the lack of that truth in our lives,

and to trust you to guide us into the application, the appropriation of the truth.

We acknowledge you as the Lord of this Assembly and we bow before you together

accountable to you and to one another. Find favor in hearts that today gather for your purpose and glory.

All that we have is yours, Father, you own it all.

So out of your provisions, we return to you

what is rightly yours.

And in doing so, we ourselves first like the ancient Corinthians.

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ who has taught us to pray and to give.

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