Look Alive

  Maybe I’m weird but I always dreamed of having a house with a hidden room.  You know one where you go to the bookcase, pull a certain book and the whole things swings away to reveal a secret hideout.  It can’t be that odd since several famous structures have hidden place. There is an apartment in the Eiffel tower, secret tunnels thought Disney World, the Greenbrier Hotel in Virginia has an entire underground complex to take congress in event of nuclear war.

 

  The newer trend, however, is just the opposite. Rather than hiding something in a building, people are hiding things as a building.  As fear of declining property values force eyesore structure out of an area, clever builders have found a way of alleviating concerns by making the outside look like something else.  Pumping stations are surrounded by a normal looking house, cell towers are tucked away in church steeples, high story buildings that are really oil rigs. The outside appears to be something the inside is not.

  It even happens to churches

"To the angel of the church in Sardis write: He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars, says this: 'I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.  'Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God.

Revelation 3:1-2

  Not the physical structure churches meet in, but the body of believers. We make a show of faith but fail to take that faith out of the building. Our name says something our actions do not.  A casual glance on the surface make us seem to be following the Lord but a peering deep into the interworking show a very different picture.

  It's not enough for a church to have the right name, it must truly be a church of CHRIST.  One where his love is taught, his words are respected and his followers follow him and not the trends of the world.

  We can’t just make the building look like His church; we must make the people on the inside be it as well