If you don’t already, you should find some way to connect with the Of First Importance blog everyday. Its mission is to “provide a helpful quote to help you remember what’s “of first importance”: the gospel of Jesus Christ. The phrase “of first importance” comes from 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul tells the church in Corinth he delivered what was of first first importance, namely the gospel.

All that to say I found the quotation yesterday very insightful.

“By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. . . . If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.”

• Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (Wheaton, Ill, Crossway Books, 2008), 41.