Sep 19, 2025 Holding Together What Christ Has Given – Words of Grace Blog – September 19, 2025
To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be devoted to the church.
Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. The first known use of the word “decouple” was in 1938 (according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary). I would have guessed it was one of the newer words to enter our vocabulary. To decouple means to separate things and thus eliminate their interrelationship.
Here’s an unhealthy reality among Christians. Interrelated aspects of Christian discipleship are being decoupled. Stated simplistically for the sake of brevity, we could say that grace and truth, faith and works, holiness and freedom, and love and obedience are among the things often decoupled. When they are, our discipleship suffers, and we become unhealthy Christians.
The decoupling that concerns us in Acts 2 is related to being a Christian who is filled with the Holy Spirit and a Christian who is devoted to the church in its congregational form.
In Acts 2 the narrative moves along in a way that shows that repentance, faith, and confession of Jesus as Lord leads to forgiveness of sin and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the forgiven disciple births devotion to the gathering of the believers for teaching, fellowship, worship by remembering the cross of Christ, and prayer. The Spirit-filled Christian becomes the Christian devoted to the church.
Acts 2 knows nothing of the Christian who has decoupled the filling of the Holy Spirit from being devoted to the church. That’s because the Holy Spirit and the congregation are both gifts from Christ to ensure that the forgiven Christian continues in faith and grows as a disciple.
Rather than decouple the gifts of Christ, we should think in terms of “bundling”. That’s another term that has come into use these days. Christ died and rose again to bring us saving and sustaining gifts in a bundled package. Forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, membership into his body, and a gathered local congregation are the graces that Acts 2 says are ours through repentance and faith. They should be seen as a bundle, not be decoupled from each other.
Held together in their interrelationship, the filling of the Holy Spirit and devotion to the congregation means we are kept in Christ, we grow in Christ, and we glorify Christ in the world. The Holy Spirit keeps and grows us. He uses the congregation to do so.
This Sunday at Grace Community Church we will gather as a congregation forgiven of sin and filled with the Holy Spirit. What grace we have received from Jesus of Nazareth, who is Lord and Christ. I look forward to seeing you Sunday.
-Scott
PS. One of our elders, Michael Kelley, recently posted an instructive article on Christians and the Church. You can find it here.