Part of allowing God to minister in His church is practicing holding our tongues and letting other people speak.  Or did the Word of God come only to you and me?  

 It's entirely possible to practice church discipline in a way that will destroy the church community and sow destruction in all the people involved--for years.  How can we obey God's directions for church discipline without going down that road of destruction?  

 In superficial church community, how could anyone dare to talk about sin?  And how can we deal with sin if everyone is so good at hiding it?  

 Sin does matter, in the individual Christian and in the church.  How do we deal with it?  Look at ourselves first.

Paul makes it clear in his letters to the Corinthians that letting unrepentant sin fester in the church will destroy the individual Christians and the local church itself--the strong medicine he commands is sometimes the only way to restore Christians to true fellowship with God and each other.  

 "It's not about religion, it's about a relationship!"  That cliche may be true (depending on what you mean by "religion"), but we might rework it to deal with a more biblically pressing matter:  "It's not about religion, it's about righteousness!"  What happens when the Israelites pull out all the big religious guns but leave their multitude of sins unatoned?  The same thing that would happen to you or me.  

 If you've been achin' to revisit the story of Achan, here's where it comes in.  However, this issue might prove to be too much for any of you Christians who have been weaned on the lukewarm bottle of extreme tolerance.  

While teaching and the "normal" gifts are important, let God encourage your prayers through all the gifts of your church.  Dreams and visions are not just fru-fru; they can be powerful aids to faith.

 If prayer is one of the primary ways of fellowship with God--and church is about God--then how can we saturate our church services more with prayer?  How can we pray more before the service, during, after, and between?  How can we pray with vision?  This is not a peripheral issue.

 Prayer is one of the most powerful tools God has given us.  It can also be the weakest, most insipid, poorest excuse for wasting a breath.  Well, maybe that's hyperbole, but we do need to continually go back to persistently pestering God in prayer.