How important is being part of a local church for a Christian?

Transcript

I cannot stress how vitally important it is for the believer to be part of a local church. A refrain all through the book of Acts comes to mind where the writer of Acts, Luke says, “The Lord added to the number.” And he's talking about the born-again saved believers, whose lives had become so amazingly in close fellowship and communion. And that's the church.

We think of Paul and all the plural “you’s” in the Bible. When he talks about “you all,” he's talking in the plural and he's thinking of the whole church. He thinks of the church as a body that is knit together and it cannot be without its parts and all of it is an amazing complex unity that works together. He talks about Ephesians 2, the church as a spiritual temple. Now, if we have a spiritual temple and we have parts of it missing out, how will that structure be? It will be more of a ruin than a spiritual temple. And so that's how important church is, where we get nourishment. We are not sufficient enough ourselves to sit with the Bible and understand everything, and God knew it. And it was his design that there should be gifted men, who will teach and equip. We are called sheep. We belong together. We are not called leopards, who go out and hunt alone. So we are called to be together in the protection and the loving leadership of gifted men and the mutual encouragement of one another,  the discernment of other believers, who were wiser and who have learned so many important lessons, the prayers of the saints, the ordinances done in a biblical way. All of this is God ordained and it's the wonderful design of God to be safe, to be growing, and to be part of this amazing mission.

That God calls us to be salt and light and a witness on the earth, and we cut ourselves off from all of that if we say that I do not want the local church and so we cut ourselves from one of the most vital ways that God wants to grow us in the christian life.

And, that's how important church is for the believer