God's presence visibly and invisibly

 I was thinking about what signs there are of God's presence among His children, what signs verify the concept of  "with-God living".  In these months of isolation because of the pandemic and able to attend church only through live streaming and/or television, I have become more aware than ever before of the supernatural nature of sensing God's presence in corporate worship.  Even though I was unable to be physically present with other believers, our common effort to worship and praise God, all of us at the same time, is an invisible sign of God's presence to me individually.  That is true even more so when I am able to be present in person.  Our unity of spirit is that sign of the presence of God.

The same is true for my experience with another group of believers, the women in my Sunday School class.  We have genuine love for one another even though we are varied in our life experiences.  They quickly accepted me when I joined the class and have shown love and appreciation to me over the years since then.  We are united in our enjoyment of studying the Bible together and we are united in our desire to glorify God in how we live.  During the pandemic we have not been able to meet together but we have continued to study the Word of God virtually together and knowing we are all studying the same thing is comforting in a sense.  To me, that is a sign of God's presence among us.

One Bread, one body

I Corinthians 1-:17 Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body for we are all partakers of the one bread.

In this book of I Corinthians Paul gives some compelling arguments for unity among believers.  As I have been reading through this book this year, the example he gives of the bread and the body has been the most impressive to me.  I had never spent much time thinking about the example before, but this year it struck me.  In the gospels, Jesus called Himself the Bread of Life.  Everyone recognized the values of bread for life, and every culture has its own bread of bread substitute (such as rice for Chinese or yams for West Africans).  Bread is a food that unites a culture and so it is with the Christian “culture.”  Our bread, our one main uniting factor and the basic item in our sustenance is The Bread of Life.  We are all partakers of it.  We are one body sustained by one Bread.