Welcome to the in touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday August 15th.

The New Testament refers to the church as the body of Christ.

That makes it much more than just a Sunday morning meeting.

Today's podcast helps you get a better understanding of your role in God's family.

Many professing Christians say that they don't really and truly need to be a part of a church

because they can live their Christian life fine without a church. In fact they

will even tell you that they're churches that have conflict with each other, which we understand.

They'll say that there are many people in the churches who have conflict with one another,

and they'll even tell you that they know some people who are professing Christians

and what they say is not the way they live. Now we would not deny any of that that all of those things are true.

And I do understand why people sometimes on the outside look in and say,

well, you know what I think I can do just as well without you all?

Well, I can understand why you would say that but what you have to ask is this

what is the opinion of Almighty God about his church?

So the question is this

What is God's purpose for saying, forsake not the assembling of yourselves together? That is, we are to assemble ourselves together, we are to worship as a body.

Well, look at what the church does, for example, the first thing we are to do in that is we meet together and we worship. We sing and we praise the Lord and

give him thanks for the good things that he's done for us. We pray and recall

his blessings in our life, make our request, we give of our finances and obedience to him, and so,

and what do we do?

We fellowship with each other.

A second thing is this, he wanted us to assemble together because he wants us to have instruction in the word of

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