Lex Luthor and Christian Fellowship

On a certain episode of Smallville, from season two, Lex Luthor is about to kill a guy. See, the guy was an ex-boyfriend of Lex's girlfriend, and he showed up in town and eventually attacked her. She was in pretty bad condition. Anyway, understandably, Lex was furious. He had found the guy, was gonna kill him, and make it look like he did it in self defense. He could have gotten away with it easy. But.....
in the last second, with the gun pointed to the guys head, he hesitated, and rather than pull the trigger, he knocked him on the head with the gun, knocking him out.
See, his friendship with another person is what saved him from committing murder. Lex would have always known the truth, and if he would have told his girlfriend the truth, she probably would have wanted nothing to do with him at that point. Our friendships are extremely important. Our actions never affect only ourselves, but everyone around us, especially our closest friends. In the same way our actions affect our friends, our friends affect our actions. Having close friends with the same morals and goals as you can save you from evil. This is why fellowship within the Church is so important. Holiness is contagious, but evil is as well.

The Attractiveness of the Church

Why is it that the Church we find in Acts of the Apostles is so attractive? It's full of these guys whose main purpose in life is to serve God. And nothing can get in the way. That's the way it should be. But the water is always purist at the source of the stream. That's why God decided to capture that source for us in scripture, I think. So we'd always have an image of the purity the Church ought to possess. The water will always get muddied, since it exists in the world, but we must seek ways to prevent that. Those who are thirsty will seek the stream, but they may turn back if they find it full of mud. I guess it depends how thirsty they are. We should probably seek to be a Church that attracts those who are not only severely dehydrated, but those whose mouths are slightly dry. Only clean fresh water will attract all.

Just because pure water will attract all, however, we cannot conclude that all will then drink. After all, we see many rejecting the Gospel in the early Church. But the Church always did her part. The problem was not in the Church, but in the souls of the lost. Perhaps they prefered soda pops, or Kool-Aid, or coffee? But that stuff just won't hydrate you as well, and may actually dehydrate.

Well, the Church, and all in the Church, must be blameless, in order to attract all. Once blamelessness has been achieved, then failure on her part simply won't happen. I guess that's my main point here. This principle can be applied not only to the Church as a whole, but to individual Christians, or individual groups of Christians.