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Key Bible Verse: Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? … Any fellowship together in the Spirit? (Philippians 2:1). Bonus Reading: Acts 2:43-47

The Holy Spirit is the pillar at the center of our togetherness as a community of faith. We long to be one with Christ, but the Spirit is the person of the Trinity we depend on to bring us together to act and worship in oneness.

I've never felt the center of God's community so powerfully as when I visited the catacombs of Saint Sebastian in Rome. Some 525 miles of these catacombs—sunless, subterranean tubes—lace the ground beneath the city of Rome. These narrow, soft-lava passageways housed the underground community of Christians during the persecutions of Nero and later emperors. But they served as more than hideaways. They became the places where Christians gathered to cheer on their martyrs, to hold each other up in their most desperate hours. These catacombs furnished the arena of the Spirit's most important kind of community. In this space ordinary souls, who never thought of themselves as valiant, suddenly found themselves in the community of the Spirit, who forged them into a union able to endure life's hard times.

The Holy Spirit still forms the center of our best community and inflames us with a common identity and passion.

—Calvin Miller in Loving God Up Close

My Response: I'm most aware of the Spirit's presence in my church family when …

Thought to Apply: The gathered church is the place of God's own personal presence [through] the Spirit, by whom God has now revisited His people.—GORDON FEE

Adapted from Loving God Up Close (Warner Faith, 2003) by permission.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Father, I ask for Your Spirit to motivate and enable change in my life that makes me more like Jesus.

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