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Lutheran Life 7 Christians are baptized into a people, a kingdom, a body, a huge global family of Christians. To be a Christian is to be a member of a larger group. THe lord's prayer Consider how Jesus teaches us to pray in the Lord's Prayer. The first words are "Our Father." If Jesus' only goal for your faith was merely for you to have a personal relationship with Him and God the Father, and if personal intimacy with God was the main point of His teachings on prayer, wouldn't He have taught you to pray, "My Father"? But He didn't do that in His Sermon on the Mount, and He still doesn't today. communiTy By definiTion Your relationship to your heavenly Father is inextricably linked to your relationship to your brothers and sisters in Christ, your fellow believers. If you have Christ as King, you are part of a kingdom. If you have God as Father, you have brothers and sisters. You have that relationship to other Christians simply by virtue of being a Christian yourself. BroTHers and sisTers in cHrisT There is no use trying to be connected to God without being connected to the rest of His family. If, when you were a child, your parents had another child, you couldn't decide whether you wanted to be a sibling. You could only decide how good of a sibling to be. That's the case in the family of God. All Christians are a group; the challenge for each individual Christian is how to acknowledge, express, and realize that fact. w Adapted from Connected to Christ: Why Membership Matters, pages 9–12 © 2017 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved. WHY CHRISTIANS PRAY FOR ONE ANOTHER

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