Tag: neighbor

Preparing to engage with those outside the Church

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Preparing to engage with those outside the church

[Bible references: Matthew 9:35-38; 13:1-30; 22:34-40; John 3:16]

When talking with someone for the first time, we never know what experiences the person has gone through in which the Spirit of God was already at work. If we take the time to listen, then we can share the Gospel more effectively. Some will be immediately ready to receive the Gospel, and some will need more caring for. In either case, if we remember that our primary directive is to love God and love our neighbor, we must be ready to bear the cost of that love.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … (John 3:16, ESV)”

What costs are we prepared to bear for our neighbor? Are we prepared to bear the cost of loving those within the church so that we can provide a loving, united atmosphere to invite someone from the outside? Are we prepared to bear the cost of friendship with those outside the church so that they can witness what is means for us to have Jesus as our friend? Are we prepared to listen to the concerns of our neighbor so that we can model how God listens to us?

Reflect

What cost are you prepared to pay for the sake of loving your neighbor?

Observe

Read Matthew 13:1-30. How can we be “sowing seed” in all the different “fields” of our community?

Created as parts of a body

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Created as parts of a body

[Bible references: Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:1-16]

We were created to be connected. We have individual identities and desires, but we were created for love by the God of love. As God’s image-bearers, we are intended to love one another just as love is shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. We are told that the world will know us by our love.

Through a process we cannot understand, the Son of God, Jesus, the Christ, appeared in the flesh two thousand years ago. After His resurrection and He “returned to heaven,” He then sent the Holy Spirit who entered into His disciples. His disciples then, as Christ’s ambassadors, became His body, creatures filled with His very Spirit who were then His feet and hands, even His voice, on the earth. And it is through His body that we and others may come to know about Christ. Sometimes we come to know Christ directly through a member of His body or indirectly by what someone recorded for us. And when we respond to His call through the body of Christ, we also become part of that same great body.

We come to Christ in response to His Spirit connecting with our spirit. But the means of that connection is through the Body of Christ. As we understand how even the set of writings, we call the Bible, was written and compiled by that great body, we can grasp the dependence that we have on His body to even to come to Him. That dependence does not end after we respond to Him but enters us into an interdependence with each other: We are dependent on each other to more fully learn how to love God and love neighbor, we are dependent on each other to build each other up.

Reflect

How can you foster the need that the church has for us to be interdependent with each other?

Observe

Read 1 Corinthians 12. If someone tries to be a “part time” church member, how does that affect everyone else?

Relation to Self

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Relation to Self

[Bible references: Psalm 8:5; 104:27-30; Micah 6:8; Matthew 6:26; 10:29-31; Luke 12:24; 18:29-30; John 13:35; Ephesians 1:7; 5: 21-33; Philippinas 2:1-11]

The second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” implies that we love ourselves. God loves us. He cares about us, even to the number of hairs on our head. We are His creatures. That makes us worth something. While the focus in the Greatest Commandments seems to be of us loving God and us loving our neighbor, we need to remember that the love we give flows out of the love we are given. We are neither loved more nor less than anyone else. This complementarity is woven together in Ephesians 5 where husbands are instructed to love their wives as much as they love their own bodies. In fact, we are best able to take care of others if we are healthy ourselves.

Our health includes all dimensions of our being: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual – If you will, our body, soul, and spirit. To be fully healthy, we need to pay attention to all these aspects of our lives. One problem area in the church as a whole is that it has commonly addressed all these aspects in an unbalanced way. It was due to that imbalance that a pastor, Peter Scazzero wrote, “Emotionally, Healthy Spirituality”[1] in response to the results of an unhealthily imbalance in his own life. Even within the field of medicine, there is a recognition of the connection of physical and spiritual health.[2]

Yahweh has created us with particular bodies in particular times and places, but our post-modern culture has added one more type of imbalance. When some of us experience a dysmorphic disorder, our culture encourages us to deny our embodied identity in Christ. Instead of grounding our being in the surety of our identity in Christ, we are encouraged to ground our being in an identity based on a broken self-perception.

This action replaces Yahweh’s authority with our own, centering our lives in our limited knowledge which is subject to fleeting emotions. This post-modern diminished focus on Yahweh’s authority strips the determination of truth from an all-knowing God and places the determination of truth on our incomplete (and sinfully corrupted) knowledge.[3] However, our primary identity should be based on our identity in Christ with all sub-identities being subject to that.

When we engage in other relationships both within and without the church, we need to be honest about who we are. None of us has it all figured out. We all fall short of what Yahweh intends for us to be. We all lack wisdom and knowledge and all of us are in rebellion. All of us, whether we claim we are children of Yahweh or not, are daily working our way to or from Yahweh. We all imperfectly “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.” We all need forgiveness.

In the end, Yahweh will be the dispenser of wrath to those who remain in rebellion against him, but it is his love that draws us to Him, and it is by His love that people will know we belong to him. The love and mercy we receive from Yahweh may be unearned, but we are loved, and therefore, we need to learn to love ourselves as well. From the security of that love, the love which Christ had towards us when were unlovable, we can then reach out in love with those with whom we disagree or find offensive. As we learn to fully receive the love of God, we will strengthen our ability to love others.

[1] Scazzero, Peter. “Emotionally, Healthy Spirituality”  Zondervan, 2017

[2] Cook, Alison. “The Most Important Gift” Alisoncookphd.com www.alisoncookphd.com/the-most-important-gift and “Saying Yes To Yourself” 2 Dec 2020 www.alisoncookphd.com/saying-yes-to-yourself/

[3] Groothuis, Douglas. “Postmodernism on Race and Gender: An Evangelical Response” Asbury Seminary, place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1317&context=asburyjournal

Reflect

Various businesses use our various media to try to make us dissatisfied with our bodies to create desires to buy services or products to make our bodies “more acceptable.” Our social media enhances that effort. While It is good to be

Observe

Read Psalm 8:5; 104:27-30; Matthew 6:26; 10:29-31; 12:11-12; Luke 12:24. If God cares about your needs, how should you care for yourself?

Ministry of Reconciliation

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 16 – Fixing our eyes

Ministry of Reconciliation

[Bible references: Matthew 10; Mark 1:40-45; 5:1-20; Acts 2:42-47; 3:20-26; 17:16-34; Romans 8:18-39; 12; 2 Corinthians 5:18-20; Ephesians 4:1-16; 6:18-20; Philippians 3:25-21; 1 Thessalonians 5:11-28; John 13:34-35; Revelation 21:1-2]

When Jesus came the first time, people were looking for a Messiah to overthrow the Roman government, but Jesus’ message was to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sin. That is the message we need to respond to and the message we need to bring to others. The gospel is the good news of forgiveness that we can receive if we respond by repentance. The gospel is the good news of God’s Kingdom come to earth to transform us as well as all of creation so that heaven and earth can be fully joined as God had intended from the beginning.

Once we have become transformed, we are able to invite others to repent and accept the grace of God in transforming their lives as well and then join us in the work of discipleship and restoring the world beginning with the call to reconciliation, that is to engage in the work of evangelism. Some people are better equipped to do evangelism than others, but that does not leave the rest of us with no part in the work.

Evangelism, like other aspects in the life of the church, is a work of the body of the church. It is also a work of the Spirit. Evangelism involves persuading, proclaiming, and teaching the gospel and is a call for others to come to Christ, His Body, and to discipleship. We do not convert people to Christ, which is the work of the Spirit; but we are called to join Spirit in His work in the world. The church is called to be the church and display the gospel at work; the gospel which calls us to be transformed, calls us unity with others in the body of Christ and calls us to join Christ’s work of reconciliation and restoration.

That means that we all have a part to play in the body of Christ, to help build one another up so that we may all become mature members of the body of Christ, displaying the love of the transcendent God towards each other. If we are each transformed by Christ, then we should be able to “give a reason for the hope” we have. A hope that we can hold onto even as we live amid a church that is transformed and yet broken by sin.

The call to discipleship is a call to reconcile all the parts of our lives to the Lordship of Christ. This includes not only all our relationships, particularly with those in the body of Christ, but all of our stewardship responsibilities for all of creation. The evangel, the good news, is not just that our personal relationship with God can be restored, but that all of creation will be restored.

It is for the sake of love that God suffered for us that he might redeem us. The greatest commandments that He gave to his image-bearers, were about love: loving God and loving our neighbor. The good news is about that love – a love that reaches out to us and through us amidst all our brokenness. a love expressed in word and deed.

The remaining parts of this book are about the breadth of expressing that love. Certainly, if we love someone who does has not heard the gospel, it would be loving to share that news with them. And if we are truly loving that other, the words of that news should be happening amid all we do to show that love in our deeds as well as in our words. It may be that the deeds of love will help open-up hearts to hear about that love; a love that reflects God’s prodigal love for each of us, a love that desires to take care of all that God has given us – God’s creation and God’s creatures, God’s image-bearers, and the gifts he has given each one of us. God’s extravagant love should be reflected in the way we love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and the way we love our neighbor as ourselves.

God’s image-bearers, the ones who call him Lord and Father, are God’s chosen vehicles to proclaim and demonstrate his love as his ambassadors. God’s proclamation and demonstration of love is not constrained by our different personalities and circumstances, for our limitations are not his limitations but rather our weaknesses are His strength, and our little demonstrations of love are the reflections of His powerful love to us and to the world.

Within ourselves, we may be small and insignificant, but we are not just isolated individuals. We are part of Christ’s body, physical manifestations of Christ

  • Past, present, and future
  • Around the world
  • In all our different ways with whatever resources Christ has given us
  • In whatever place and time he chose for us, with whatever strengths and weaknesses we have

We are the creatures whom God has empowered to rule the earth as his gardener-priests. That empowerment has not changed even though we are broken people living in a broken world. The charge he had given us still remains. Therefore, within our brokenness we need to take whatever Christ has given us and proclaim and demonstrate God’s unsurpassed, overwhelming love to the world, a love that not only wants to reconcile all people but literally all the world to Himself … to reunite heaven and earth.

 The challenge we have as God’s ambassadors, is for us to be proclaiming and living the gospel amid the cultures that are sometimes indifferent and sometimes hostile. Therefore, in our tasks, if we are to be effective ambassadors then we must be, “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” as we try to discern how to effectively persuade others to follow Jesus. Of course, keeping in mind that it is not we who ultimately persuade others to follow Christ, rather that is the work of the Holy Spirit. But how can we participate with the Holy Spirit?

Different people are persuaded by different means. Sometimes, people are persuaded by logic as we could see in the life of the apostle Paul. Sometimes people are persuaded by personal relationships and are drawn by a personality that looks attractive as we could see in the lives of people who were drawn to Jesus. Sometimes people are persuaded by seeing something different in the life another.

With that in mind, then how do we put ourselves in the place where we are most effective? The answer is: the church. The church is the body of Christ whose members are called to build up one another and to demonstrate a love for one another such that others will recognize us as belonging to Christ. When the church gathers to worship and express it’s love to God, that same desire should lead to expressions of love to one another which pour out into love of neighbor as the church scatters during the week. That desire to love should then draw us to desire to learn how to love in the best way possible. Love leads to love. The love of God leads us to love, love of one another and a love of the world that God loves.

Exactly how that love will flow depends on the particulars of each individual in their particular circumstances. We are all born with different personalities and different bodies, and are equipped differently according to the Holy Spirit, and find ourselves in different cultures within the church and within our communities. Some individuals will find themselves in a very individual ministry and some will be called to a broader ministry to the world. Also, different church communities will even find different approaches in how they interact with the cultures around them.[1]

[1] Finn, Nathan A, Whitfield, Keith S. “Spirituality for the Sent” Chapter 5 Missional Spirituality and Cultural Engagement IVP Academic 2017

Reflect

Discipleship is a process of “being transformed” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Ultimately it is something that happens to us – but it is something we can co-operate with by engaging is spiritual disciplines. What kinds of changes need to happen in our lives that would make it natural to invite someone else into discipleship?

Observe

Read Romans 12. How do we help those around us to be reconciled to each other and to God?