You Need the Support of Your Spiritual Family - Daily Hope with Rick Warren - September 9, 2016

You Need the Support of Your Spiritual Family
By Rick Warren

“God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5 NLT, second edition).

The Bible says, “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5 NLT, second edition).

God wanted more than angels and animals and plants. He wanted a family. The Bible says the whole reason you exist is because God wanted you to become a part of his family, and that family is going to last forever.

Your spiritual family, God’s family, is going to outlast even your physical family. Physical families don’t last. They grow up, they move away, they die. But the spiritual family of God is going to go on and on for eternity.

The Bible says that God never meant for you to go through life alone. In fact, God hates loneliness. When God created man, he put him in the Garden of Eden, a perfect environment, and the first thing God said was, “It is not good for man to be alone.” God wants you to be part of the family of God.

What is God’s family? “That family is the church of the living God, the support and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15b NCV). The Church, the Body of Christ, is not an institution. The Church is not a bureaucracy. The Church is not an organization or a social club. The Church is God’s family. It’s not about rules and regulations and rituals and religion. It’s about relationships. It’s about love.

The Church is “the support and foundation of the truth.” What happens when a building has no support and foundation? It collapses. Those of us in California understand this more than most because we have earthquakes. If you don’t have a good foundation under your building, it’s going to collapse when the earthquake comes.

God says your life is the same way. You’re going to have some earthquakes in your life —financial earthquakes, health earthquakes, emotional earthquakes, relational earthquakes, career earthquakes. When those tough times come along in life and you don’t have a spiritual family to support you, you’re going to collapse.

You cannot fulfill God’s purposes by yourself. God wired us to need each other. We need each other in the family of God.

Playtoday’s audio teaching from Pastor Rick >>

Talk It Over

• What does the idea of adoption mean to you?
• God wants you to have the support of your spiritual family when the earthquakes come. How can you be a support to someone in the family of God who is experiencing tough circumstances right now?
• How will others in the family of God know how to support you when you need it?

For more Daily Hope with Rick Warren, please visit pastorrick.com!

Daily Inspiration for The Purpose Driven Life - Gift Edition

Would you like to help your friends and family live the Purpose Driven Life? One of the best ways to stay focused on God’s plan is to stay in God’s Word, and Pastor Rick Warren has an effective resource that will enable YOU to quickly find Bible verses that are indispensible for living a life of purpose.

We call this resource Daily Inspiration for The Purpose Driven Life. In it, Pastor Rick has taken all the key verses that explain how God created each of us for five purposes and put them into an easy-to-use reference tool that will help anyone study and memorize God’s Word.

When you give a gift to support Daily Hope this month we’ll send you a copy of this beautiful book… and if you choose to make your donation a monthly donation, we’ll send you a special signed copy of Daily Inspiration for The Purpose Driven Life to thank you for joining our Partner in Hope team by giving a scheduled gift each month to support Daily Hope.

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This devotional © 2016 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

You can also listen to Rick Warren on OnePlace.com.