specific plan for us to use those as a part of his body. When we aren’t plugged in and involved in the church, our gifts are not being used. It’s an important part of our faith to engage with other believers. Secondly, I want to connect the church back to our first point, the importance of reading the Bible. This is really a big part of why it's important for us to be involved with the church: it helps to keep us reading the Bible. As we discussed earlier, the Bible is key to our goal of “staying in the raft,” and one of the main reasons we need to be a part of a local church, the body of Christ, is to keep us connected to the Bible. This happens in several ways. First, the pastor should be sharing weekly from the Bible. If your pastor is not reading from the Bible every week, then you should look for a different church. The Bible is absolutely the key to our faith and to avoid using it is not acceptable. Listening to someone who has spent hours and hours studying it is one of the primary objectives to attending and being involved in church. Secondly, when we are with fellow Christians, we should be encouraged to study the Bible because we can see how it has influenced and changed their lives. As we go through rough sections on the river, our arms get tired, and we are tempted to take a break from paddling, but this is a costly mistake. When I look across the raft to see my friends, in equal amount of pain, still paddling, it encourages me to dig my paddle back into the water and push on. Likewise, as we go to down the river of life, things pop up and distract us, or maybe we go through a hard time of poor health, it can be tempting to let our daily study of the scriptures fall by the wayside. When we attend church and see how the Bible is helping others, and how it’s encouraging, teaching, and correcting them, we are reminded of its importance. Other times we might get to a part of the Bible that we have a hard time understanding. If we are plugged into the
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