Pueblo Escogido

This Sunday went very well, so thanks so much for your prayers and support.  I really felt God's peace and presence with me and instead of being self-conscious and preoccupied about whether or not I was pronouncing words right, I just let go and God did his thing.  It continues to amaze me how things go 100 times better whenever I rely on God instead of myself.  The message on Sunday focused on missions and disciple-making and how it should be the purpose of everybody and not just a select few.  It was really cool because I got to use the verse that inspired the name of my church.  "Pueblo Escogido" means chosen people and 1 Peter 2: 9 says, "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."   They are a chosen people to declare the praises of God to share what God has done in their lives with others.  To reproduce the life they have in Christ in someone else.  This chapter also talks about Jesus as the living stone and how we, his believers, are the stones used to build the temple.  There's also a verse in Ephesians 2:20 that describes us as being a temple of God as well as in 1 Corinthians 3:16.  I think its very important that churches remember that the people are the church, not the building.  I got to use somethng I learned at UNC in the sermon.  My favorite class of all time was New Testament Archaeology.   My professor for that class is amazing she is a Dead Sea Scrolls expert and has led and been a part of many excavations in Israel and Greece.  I remember she showed us in class one day a picture of one of the earliest sites of the early church.  And I was stunned to see that there was no building, and no indication that there was ever a building there.  It was just an open-air field, dirt and sky.  The early church was just a group of people.  It really saddens me to see how some people care more for the building of the church than for the people inside of it, because God doesn't live in a building, he lives inside of His believers.