Thoughts on Life

Over the last year or so I’ve been realising how everything in life is related to our relationships, whether we realise it or not. All of our interactions are either constructive or destructive for our relating. That’s why life is so difficult. I thought of saying during a sermon once that life is easy until you have to relate to someone!

It is for this reason that doing our best to get our relationships to work is the most important thing we can do with our lives. Now, getting our relationships to work doesn’t necessarily mean they will be easier, but it does mean we will be more at peace. There is not much we can control in our relationships, but we can control the way we come across, with the help of God’s Spirit within us and with the help of others who love us enough to speak lovingly into our lives.

What we can’t control is how others relate to us. We can try to manipulate our relationships to get people to be nice to us or like us, but when we do this we will always know, deep down, a sense of distance from those people. That distance will be because we are actually trying to use them to make ourselves feel better. Whenever we are doing this we are not loving, and whenever we are not loving, we are not living as God intended and therefore not joyful.

Probably no one has brought this across better in my thinking than Larry Crabb, director of New Way Ministries. Crabb has written numerous books over the years, but the two that have impacted me the most are Understanding People and Inside Out. The first was given to me by a friend in 1987. When he gave it to me I remember feeling offended because it came across like he was giving it to me because I didn’t understand people. So it was like, “Here, maybe this will help.” I felt like my friend thought I had no clue about relating to people when my greatest desire in life was to be Christ-like and my friends were not serious enough about it. I thought he was being arrogant. I may or may not have been right.

Finding Inside Out was a different story. There are very very few times in my life where I can say with confidence that I thought God specifically led me to something. In fact, as I write, I cannot remember any other occasion apart from when I found this book in Keswick Christian bookstore in the centre of Melbourne in late 1988. Flicking through it in the bookstore that day, I experienced the sense that this book was written just for me and that the only way I could describe how I found it was and is that God led me to it.

Over the years I have read both books a number of times, mainly going back to certain sections rather than re-reading from cover to cover. Inside Out in particular spoke directly to everything I was going through in the way I was relating and the way I wanted to relate at the time, and it still does today. One of my greatest desires in life has been to find a group of people to relate to, be committed to and grow with in the way that this book suggests. I am convinced it can bring about the genuine change every human being desires in their heart of hearts. For many years now I have been part of something approaching a group like that and it has been life-changing.

Since Crabb wrote Inside Out, many Christians have benefited from putting its principles into practice. They have found genuine change and life in Christ - the abundant life that Jesus promises.

The more we grow in relating as Christ does, the more fully human we become. It was St Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. The more alive we become, the like Christ we become. The Jesus we see in the Gospels is the most fully human person who has ever lived. He lived the perfect human life. He was the embodiment of God’s design for humanity, and we give glory to God and know the most intimate joy with the God of love the more like Christ we become.

When we look at the way Jesus relates to everyone, it is always with love. Sometimes it is gentle love and sometimes it is extremely tough love. But it is always infinite love, always done with the greater good of the other in mind. It is done with what Tim Keller calls the freedom of self-forgetfulness.

This way of relating is also what changes the world. It is not just something for our inner lives with no other effect than giving us the joy of living. It’s inevitable effect is that gives itself away for others. That is the very nature of love. It cannot be kept unless it is given away. “It leaves you baby if you don’t care for it.”

Relationship changes everything, for good or for ill. If it changes things for ill then it is not really relationship; it is the opposite: the lessening of humanity. Following is how one person describes how relationship changes the world:

“If we, as followers of Christ, are to fulfill His established law then we ought to carry each other’s burdens. If I were to help an elderly woman carry her groceries from her car into her home, the first thing I would need to do is get close to her. If I truly wanted to help her I would have to go to her. I wouldn’t merely stand on her lawn and instruct her from afar on the proper technique for lifting her heavy bags from the vehicle, or chastise her for trying to carry too much or too little, and then stand by hoping she fared well enough to make it safely into her home. No! I would rush to her side, make sure she was sturdy and stable, then pick up and carry groceries on her behalf. Why? Because I am strong, capable, and have been given the ability to do so.”
- Rachel Britz - (http://www.relevantmagazine.com/current/op-ed/worthy-burden-compassion)

There is something uniquely special about grown men being vulnerable with each other in a group. I am fortunate to be in a group where this is not an uncommon occurrence. When you see a man who, if you only saw his physical appearance would probably intimidate you, start to be so honest about his brokenness and about how much he appreciates being in a place where it’s OK to be broken, it touches something deep within you.

It’s one of those almost indescribable moments when you are reminded of what really matters, of what is really important in life. It touches something deeper, something that the superficialities of our life never can. It is a moment when you realise that love is in the house, and it isn’t the warm fuzzy feeling that is probably best described as being ‘nice.’ The word that probably best describes what I am talking about is ‘real.’ It is men being real men.

I can imagine that this is what it would have been like being around Jesus. He always touched something deeper. He opened himself up to people, and people in turn opened themselves up to Him. Jesus can never be accused of being a nice young man who made you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

People like that didn’t get themselves crucified by the Romans. No, Jesus was a real man. The people who followed Him had their deepest needs satisfied; they found rivers of living water welling up within them. Hardened, sea-worn fishermen, along with unscrupulous businessmen, were transformed into the most caring and courageous of men.

At His crucifixion it was a tough, trained-to-kill Roman soldier who was moved to confess that, in effect, this man was the way men are supposed to be. Jesus’ manhood is also shown in so many other ways. His respect for women, His courage in taking on the sin and pain of others, and His being unafraid to express His emotions in the appropriate way.

I wonder if there is a sense that men have it easier in relating to Jesus than women do. For men, Jesus is the ultimate man to emulate. When we talk about being Christlike, we can look to Jesus and follow His example. He is our role model as men.

When we allow the Spirit of God to touch us deeply, when we pull away the masks that our culture says we should put up, and just be, warts and all, in front of our friends, it is then that we grow into the likeness of Christ and become godly men. There a only a few men I have met in my life who I could truly call godly. They are men who draw me to Christ, to be more like Him. They are men who have something that I want. They show me that real men are good men; that real men are vulnerable; and that real men cry when they need to. God make me into a man like that.

I love the idea of the church being a community of the forgiven. The truth which is bandied about - and which I used to see on bumper stickers - of Christians being ‘not perfect, just forgiven’ makes me cringe because it is so often seen as an excuse for our own hypocrisy. At the same time however, there is a freedom and attractiveness about the fact that we can be part of a community that genuinely cares. Larry Crabb calls it the safest place on earth and that’s exactly what the church is called to be.

This is the ideal vision of people of faith - a place where you can be yourself, warts and all, and you are still accepted for who you are because if you have done some bad stuff in your life, then we have too, and chances are it is worse.

A community of care is a place of forgiveness, and forgiveness is healing. I am reminded of U2’s White as Snow in which Bono sings,

‘Once I knew there was a love divine. Then came a time I thought it knew me not. Who can forgive forgiveness when forgiveness is not? Only the lamb, as white as snow’

As individuals, purity is our ultimate destiny, and we will never be satisfied until we’re there. I don’t mean purity just in the sense of sexual behaviour, although that is a crucial part of purity. By purity, I mean a Christlikeness, having the mind of Christ within us day by day. While we’ll never reach that state this side of death, He still came that we might have life and have it to the full. That life has already begun. When we surrender our lives to Christ, asking that His will be done and not our own, it is then that we become a part of, as distinct from ‘apart from’, and we can hopefully experience, in a loving community, a little bit more of what it is to be part of the community of the forgiven.