Hope For The Home: A Pure Church

by Bud Lambert

Without question, the American family is in trouble. With each new generation, there is more uncertainty about how to establish and maintain a healthy, functional, intact family. Because more and more children are growing up in divorced families, children don't have the positive role models that are needed to learn how to build strong, secure, intact, loving homes. Healthy models are needed.
The church is to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth ( Matthew 5:13-16). God has given us, the church, the responsibility to model healthy living to the world. But to accomplish this we must strive to be pure and sanctified from the world:
John 17:15-17: I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
2 Corinthians 6:14-18: Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
James 1:27: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
James 4:4: Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.
1 John 2:15: Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
The only hope for the survival of the family is for the church to remain pure and distinct from the world. Are we doing this?