The Romance of Romans-Part 85

[Michael]

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.

Comments:

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 to 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.