Food For Thought

HT: Tim Challies

On the Nature of True Christian Friendship

St. Gregory Nazianzen, writing about his friendship with St. Basil the Great:

/Our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings that are to come; we wanted to withdraw from this world before we departed from it. With this end in view we ordered our lives and all our actions. We followed the guidance of God’s law and spurred each other on to virtue. If it is not too boastful to say, we found in each other a standard and rule for discerning right from wrong. Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves, that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kathrynlopez/2015/01/this-is-christian-friendship/#ixzz3NrAXJJ1U

Evidences You Are Living in Gospel Community

From Tim Brister - Evidences your church family is a gospel community: You know you're living in a gospel community when:

• believers practice confession instead of trying to make an impression

• people are defined by a lifestyle of repenting rather than pretending

• you embrace truth at all costs, not agreeing for each others approval

• light exposes & wounds and love covers & heals – both/and not either/or

• people are happy to be holy not content to be comfortable

• you own your mess because of His mercy instead of hiding them because of your shame

• functional saviors & heart idolatry are lovingly confronted & challenged by Christ’s reign & rule

• unbelieving sinners & believing sinners together look away from themselves & look to Jesus

• the pleasure of God in Christ to save you liberates you to passionately serve others

• hospitality is given to those on the margins & those not like you are welcome in your world

• individual preferences take a back seat to community purposes of loving God and neighbor

How do you (we) measure up?

Choose Togetherness

“The bottom line for us all is: Choose togetherness, the radical togetherness of those who know they are inseparably and eternally one in Christ and whose relationship is rooted in praise and prayer together. Choose not to be held back by shyness, embarrassment, social convention or any form of personal inhibition (attitudes anchored not in concern for dignity and good taste, as some make themselves believe, but in a panicky fear of vulnerability). Choose to give and receive love on a basis of humble and mutual openness. Choose to commit yourself to a congregation long term, to identify as fully as you can with its goals and members, to open your life and your home to your fellow believers, and to give help wherever help is needed. In short, choose togetherness, and choose wholehearted, closely bound involvement in the congregation’s worshiping life of prayer and praise as the central element of that togetherness. For this and nothing less than this is the will of God” 

               - J. I. Packer, Praying, 257-58

HT: Sam Storms

Church Shopping

Looking for a new church? Check out What to Look for in a Church? Refining Your Checklist at The Chief End of Man

What a Concept! - Shallow Small Groups

This is funny - but too close to reality for a lot of people and churches.



God save us from shallowness. May God bring about true community in our churches!

Hat Tip: The Blazing Center, Nine Marks

Talking - What a Concept!

Maybe we should just talk to each other! What a concept.  Some thoughts from Bob at Wilderness Fandango:

"Social media has weighted these "conversations" against the local and in favor of the "digital." In other words, a lot of digital voices talking among themselves, agreeing and disagreeing, having their weighty say, while down at the street-level there's relative silence. So it seems to me.

Just musing here, but what if we all just, well, shut up. I mean, we don't really need more books, do we? More and more and more every year? We don't need more marketing? We don't need more promises . . . if you'll only attend the conference, buy the book, sign up for the daily edevotional. What maybe we need is "faith working through love," (Gal. 5:6) which happens relationally, locally, after we put down the book, look up from the smart phone, close the lap top, and actually talk to the person next to us."

That's what church fellowship should be like, or at least include - a place and atmosphere where people can actually talk to each other openly, and not via text messaging or twittter feed. I can't survive without it, and  I bet you can't either.
 

Fellowship With Immortals

Something to think about at church this morning:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

Journey In, Journey Out

"This quote from a sermon by Mike Bullmore is worth meditating upon:

'We need fellowship with others to be alone safely.We need solitude to be with others meaningfully. '"

From : Between Two Worlds: Fellowship and Solitude

Save Me From My Subculture

Are you part of a Christian sub-culture? Know it or not, you probably are.

Darryl Dash prays Save Me From My Subculture

I’ve come to realize that it’s really hard not to become part of some kind of subculture. The problem is that many of the clichés become accurate. I’ve noticed lately that it takes someone else to point out my own tribe, because I sometimes don’t even recognize the quirks of my particular group. I don’t mind being idiosyncratic as much as I mind being oblivious.

It’s why I am appreciating my friends who are not part of my subculture. I need to make a point of having lunch with them and enduring their gentle mocking when they see the quirks of my tribe, just as I’ll gently mock them right back.

To my friends from other tribes – you know who you are – thank you.

It’s also why I need to read widely so I don’t get trapped in just one way of thinking. And it’s why I continue to enjoy being part of a denomination that isn’t comprised of people just like me.

I don’t have to like everything about the other subcultures, but I sure need them to save me from my own.

The first commentator on his post said "Just be prepared for the loneliness." Ouch!