-Who you surround yourself with defines you
Actual quotation:
"If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it."
— Mark Glamack
-There is much truth in this statement.
Q: Why are relationships so important?
A: God is relational
Ephesians 2:14-22 (New Living Translation)
14 For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. 15 He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. 16 Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.
17 He brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. 18 Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.
A Temple for the Lord
19 So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. 20 Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. 21 We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. 22 Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.
-In general, the intensity of these images cannot be squared with merely attending church on Sunday--even regularly. These images imply far, far deeper involvement in the church.
ƒ
Image #1: Cross-cultural. "A new nation." This implies that--
ƒ We are making close friends with people from groupings, classes, or races who apart from the gospel we’d never know or care to know.
ƒ We are Christian first and white or black or Asian second. We are Christian first and rich or poor or middle class second. We do not let our old class divisions divide us.
ƒ Image #2: Personal accountability. "A family.” This implies that--
ƒ We do not simply 'have meetings' but we share many of the basic activities of life with other believers--eating together, recreation, prayer, spending time, sharing homes and possessions.
ƒ We are letting our whole lives be in contact with whole lives of some other Christians.
You are accountable personally to some others. You have shared enough about your sins, and you spend enough time with others so that people really see whether you are growing in Christ.
ƒ Image #3: Corporate spirituality. "A spiritual temple of the Spirit." This implies that—
We are praying with others and letting them see how you really feel about God. It is together that we are inhabited. Your spirituality is no longer private.
ƒ We experience God with other people with some consistency.
-Who you surround yourself with defines you.
-Help build each other up.
-Follow Christ better with encouragement.
Vs 14-16: "His purpose is to create a new humanity." (Grk. kainon anthropon)
Amazing! Paul is saying that we are called to be a new human race--a new way of being human
beings together, a new social order.
This fits in entirely with the claim that Christians are to be the alternate ‘city of God’ (Matthew5:14-16) and that we are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9) When Peter calls us a 'holy nation' he is saying, literally, that we are a distinct, unique, ’spiritual ethnic.’ A club or association is a group of people united by
one or two commonalities--e.g. a tennis club. But an ’ethnic’ is a culture, a group of people whose have distinct, common ways of doing nearly everything, from moral values to sense of humor. The word ’holy’ means ’distinct,’ and thus Peter is saying that the gospel so changes every part of our lives that it lifts us somewhat out of our original cultures, giving us some critical distance from it and non-believers in it. When we believe the gospel we receive a profound union with others who believe even though they may be radically different from us in
every other way. So, just as Jesus said, Christians are an alternate city in every city, so Peter says we are an alternate nation and culture in every nation and culture.
So we are not simply a ’fellowship’ of warm individual relationships, but a counter-culture in which we help each other become distinctive in everything we do:
-how we use money and possessions,
-how we conduct relationships and family life,
-how we do our work,
-and so on.
Mission
-But if we go back to the 1 Peter passage, our mission is to “declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
*-“we are not to retreat from the world, but live in the world in a different, redemptive, grace-centered way, living by truth and grace”
3. In order to engage the world, we must have a community of like-minded comrades/friends -- ie, the church!
4. The church is the community of the redeemed (live by grace), so we extend that grace to the world (we live as salt and light -- influencing our non-Christian friends with a different way)
Romans 12
A Living Sacrifice to God
1 And so, dear brothers and sisters,[a] I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.[b] 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.Example: Christian Dating vs Secular
-Our Christian faith and our family of believers should affect the way we approach relationships
- dating according to the world is physical (and material) and uses people; dating for the believer does not deny the physical, but understands the proper context for it (marriage)
***What if:***
-single men didn’t just date good-looking women, but “actually assessed
a potential partner’s worth primarily on the basis of her character?”
-single women didn’t just date prosperous men, but “actually assessed
a potential partner’s worth primarily on the basis of her character?”
THEN it would truly be a counter culture, and we would truly be respecting the other Christians that we are in relationship with.
-Also be shining Jesus’ life in the way we live differently
Conclusion
~So, relationships are crazy important.
~Who you surround yourself with defines you.
~We as a Christian community are supposed to be set apart, and different. A counter-culture, if you will.
~We do that in order to shine Jesus’ light to those around us. (Live with Mission)
Note: This lesson was created with much help from McKay Caston and Tim Keller's Gospel Christianity study. All of the really long quotations above were taken directly from the study.
Relationships indicate who and what we are as individuals. So often we see people who choose the wrong friends because they are "acting out" in some way. This, of course, drags them down even further.
So true, Clint! In our discussion after the message, we talked about some of those points.