And, generally speaking, we have earned it.
We fight, split, compare, compete, ignore and wrestle. All words we could paste on sibling rivalry.
The beauty of siblings, in God's sequencing, is that they grow up and come together. Mature siblings mend their differences, embrace new family and stand in unity amid life challenges.
Most church-to-church relationships have yet to mature.
Why is that? We let the enemy of God tempt us into immaturity, we chase our own agendas, and we resist the hard work of relationship, forgiveness and love.
We squawk at each other instead of seeing the beauty of another congregation of Christ-followers, regardless of how different from us they may appear.
Shame on us.
The outside world takes a whiff and smells too much garbage--too little camaraderie--and turns away once again.
Goodness, I bet God is tired of our immaturity. To explore how and why we resist growing up, perhaps it would be helpful to trace how we--as immature churches--handle a couple of specific areas.
I began this series referencing a two-fold topic that I purposefully didn't make clear:
Using the Message Translation, and
Acknowledging that we don't know how it all plays out.These are just samples of issues that ignite believer-against-believer, church-against-church. It would be helpful to see if our immaturity has embedded in it a root problem. If so, I'm sure God would have an app for that.
Tomorrow: The Holy Spirit App.
Comments are welcome at feedyourstrength@gmail.com.
