Rules Without Relationship = Rebellion (Trust)
Over the past several months as we have actually moved out from our local home church and are seeking to establish a work in the North East are of Kansas City, I have found that the issue of Trust is an amazing factor is beginning a church plant.
You can call it trust, you can call it faith, we must have faith in God and trust other believers and all of these things take place in the context of “Relationship.”
Relationship would probably be one of my soap boxes, it’s something that I believe has been lost with our self-serving culture. What I don’t mean is relationships in searching out felt needs, but something little payed attention to, yet often something that is defining in everyone’s life. All of the media, and institutionalization of education, organizations ie the local ‘church’ often has people wondering if there is more to gathering with a group of people that simply the gathering itself. Is there something missing in what’s described in God’s word as the Body & Bride of Christ when there is little true deeply held relationships.
One thing we can know for certain is the fact that men’s hearts are often wicked and although we seem, and attempt to have good motives, God motives, the motives of men’s hearts tend toward idolatry often in so many ways. It has been here that we find our greatest need in relationship with others. So many times our own personal pride blinds us from our weak moments, from our most frail or self-exalting times and it is only others who can see these exhalations. Thank goodness for our wives!!! What a needed partner to cultivate humility in ones life.
These past few months have been great opportunities for motive checking along the way, idolatry checks. During the past few weeks there has been a kind of coming together and friendship between brothers that I see just starting to form at a level that often is only known through hardship. There is plenty more to learn and to grow in, and from with these brothers, yet at the same time I see a transparency coming, and a new love forming that I believe is indicative of what it really means to love your brother, and for others to know we are disciples or followers of Jesus by the way we are loving one another.
It is here in relationship that you see men more closely following the commands of Christ and fulfilling scripture in a way that most people who often simply attend Church never know. There is a deep abiding love which moves beyond the natural and enters the supernatural because it’s a love that is God’s love and not the love of man. We have only begun I believe to see the infancy stages of this kind of brotherly love but has been refreshing, authentic, and real for me at least.
I think people often long for a sort of ‘real’ experience in Christianity, that brings their faith beyond words and from the pages of God’s word into the lives they are living. This is only done in the context of community & relationship and it seems to be one of those things that you don’t know you’re missing until you begin to experience it.
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Does anyone see “relationship” in this? This indicates the relationship between both God and Men are inter-linked! Loving God and Loving your neighbor! When I was a new Christian several years back I watch a parenting video I believe by Gary Smalley which had this phrase when considering the raising up of children; “Rules without relationship = Rebellion“..
You see this is biblical, our relationship with God was severed in the garden, and it was Christ the GOD/Man who paid for our relationship to God to be reconciled.
In this small saying there’s something though very subtle makes all the difference in the world. We see that relationships, and genuine caring for your children, over mere rules laid out for them, has with in it sincerity and love as an assumed context.
This sincerity in relationship comes from Christ who in the ultimate way of sincerity and truth poured out His life for ours. Christ authentic sacrifice paid the penalty for our sins and therefore we, in our dying to self in relationship with others demonstrate this sort of Christ like love to those who are in need.
This isn’t something that’s merely said however, “I love you,” with words, but this is something demonstrated in coming along side of someone else in their time of trial, grief, pain, heartache. This coming along side of people is lost in our time management. We have knelt down at the alter of our day-timers. We have but forsaken the needy, the poor, the spiritually thirsty for, our schedules. The good Samaritan is often our story but we not being the Samaritan nor good. We pass by those who need, or keep relationships at such a distance as not to find out, therefore not having to deal with them. If we get to know people intimately we see the vast overwhelming cavern of need in the lives of men and women and we forget we must die to our selves so that Christ may live in us.
This is so essential, not only for children, but for adults, for churches and church discipline. There is something to bringing down church discipline in the context of relationships vs. bringing down church discipline in the context of being ultimate strangers to one another. In relationship because of a dotted line on an org chart vs. in relationship because someone is and has truly been caring for my soul. There is something to a reproof and a rebuke in the context of loving relationships, it’s quite another thing to be reproved by someone whom you know very little about and trust very little. Trust is something that is gained over time and in real relationship, not something gained over time as a real acquaintance. Though our relationships with one another should never be elevated over our relationship with God our father, nor should we bend the knee to please men in this way, we can never get beyond the fact that these relationships are vital, and important, and just one of the many tools God uses to conform us to the Image of Christ.
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