Romans Chapter 12 cont'd
God has given to all of us a sphere of life and ministry in which to function for which we also have been given the corresponding necessary amount of faith. Our physical body is one and yet it has many members, each having a different function. So the body of Christ is one and we, each of us, are one of its many members. But even though we have various roles to play, we are organically joined both to him and to one another.
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Toward A More Healthy Community
In his book, Connecting, Dr. Larry Crabb distills years of counseling experience, biblical research, intensive work of putting thoughts into words and a whole lot of life lived to help us consider the essence of healthy interpersonal relationships. He steers us away from extreme but popularized views of how people are thought to overcome their personal and relational problems and holds out to us a few simply profound and profoundly simple, yet too often overlooked, keys to this kind of health and holiness…a pattern leading to maturity in Christ.
The two extreme views are what he refers to as 1) the moralistic model and 2) the therapy model. The first focuses on challenging people (often with hardly any empathy or compassion) that they simply need to begin to make better choices by trying harder to obey God and the Bible. The second focuses on trying, in various ways, to help people uncover the dynamic (sub-conscious) pains of injustice they have suffered and reacted to. Larry acknowledges that we all certainly have made bad choices and that we have suffered injustices, but he posits the notion that most of us won’t ultimately overcome either kinds of problems unless we “connect” with others in a healthy relational circle…a community in Christ. We need to have our wills renewed by the Holy Spirit and our broken hearts healed by Christ, but do these kinds of things actually happen regularly without a vital connection to friends in Christ who can track with us through life's journey? Larry says, “No!”...through his astute observations and many years of helping people as a professional counselor.
Furthermore, he goes on to describe the three essential elements of the kind of Christ-centered interpersonal connections that we long to experience in our communities of faith. First of all, believers need connection with some others (even a few make us extremely wealthy) who genuinely delight in who they are without reference to their failures or battles. Second, we need to realize that we all have something “powerful” (the Spirit’s presence) in us that is able to speak profoundly to the “good” that is truly present (maybe hidden or buried) in a hurting or struggling friend in Christ and call that good up and out. Third, (and the order here is very important) we are called to gently and lovingly, and in a timely manner, expose the sin or the pain in one another that we may be blind to or in denial of. All three elements are essential for well-rounded friendships.
These three elements of healthy relationships create a context for spiritual growth and I am convinced that unless we seek after and find this quality of connectedness, then we will be very limited in our communities to affect the kind of personal transformation we tend to admire, but often fail to achieve. This is a normative and mighty way that the Spirit of God has always worked in and through the friends of Jesus Christ.
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