The Family of God

Now that we’ve all celebrated Thanksgiving and are looking ahead to Christmas, it’s important to stop and think a bit about family.

Whether your holiday has been filled with folks traveling to your home, or you yourself did the traveling to visit friends and family, or if you don’t have much family to connect with anymore and loneliness was a struggle this year:

It’s more important at the holidays than any other time of year to remember that the church is first and foremost the Family of God, underneath God the Father and the Lord (and brother! Rom. 8.29) Jesus Christ.

In the church, we are are all brothers and sisters.

The idea that the church is God’s beloved family is central to the Bible’s message. As Paul famously explains in Romans 8.29:

“Those whom he called he also predestined to share the same form of the image of His Son, so that his Son might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.”

Did you catch the purpose of God’s calling? God’s purpose has always been to create a family of brothers and sisters around his beloved Son Jesus Christ. The church is, and was designed to be, God’s family!

And, interestingly, there are a few passages in the Bible where it hints that when Jesus returns, God himself will hold a great banquet in which we all, sitting around a table, share in a meal. This feast, of course, is enacted each time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Every time we gather within our own families during the holidays to share a meal, we are catching a glimpse of that much larger feast which is even now being prepared for the whole people of God.

Come join us next Sunday at Ooltewah United Methodist Church as we learn week by week what it means to be a part of God’s family!