Songs

Rejoice
Battle Belongs
This I Believe
Be Still, My Soul
Here is Love

Sermon

The Heart of Ministry  |  1 Thessalonians 2:7-8

I.  Ministry’s Character (7-8)
II. Ministry’s Content (8)

Big Idea

As Christians, all of us are responsible to be doing ministry. Ministry is done gently and with deep love. The heart of ministry is Gospel proclamation and life sharing.

Quotes

By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. To fail to live out our corporate identity in Christ is analogous to the act of idolatry: we can be Christian and do it, but it is not what Christians should do. The loyalties of the new community supersede even loyalties of biology (Matthew 10:34-37; Mark 3:31-35; Luke 11:27-28). If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.
~ Tim Chester and Steve Timmis

Being a Christian involves believing: ‘If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved’ (Rom. 10:9). But being a Christian is not an individualist or isolationist activity. Believing involves belonging. When the shepherd calls his sheep to him they inevitably come nearer to each other. When you come to Christ you are at the same time drawn nearer to others who have come to him. Being a Christian, by definition, involves belonging to the church—and that, in turn, means belonging to a particular church.
~ Sinclair Ferguson

Where the gospel flourishes, people share their own soul. And where souls are knit together in the cause of Christ, there is power for the long hard ventures of ministry. ~ John Piper