Embrace truth; embrace love.

Every now and again one of us tiny, insignificant human beings stumbles upon something profound. Mine came by way of friendships, the show Hoarders, church hopping, reading of the gospel with revelation of the Holy Spirit and the song “Torches Together”.

The summary of my serendipitously profound encounter is this: human beings are incredbily fragile. It is no wonder we needed a savior. Also, it is so perfect that Christ our savior urged us to live in peace and unity with one another because it is in building up the church—the body of Christ—that we learn his nature.

My mind dwells on the building in Ephesians:

by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Ephesians 2: 15-22

When the church joins in unity it will be such that those outside the body of Christ will not understand but accuse and debase our reputations in the world. Right now it’s more like we ruin our own reputations by not living up to the standard Christ set but bickering amongst ourselves over congregational differences. It’s quite beautiful that even if the church is unified, individually we can still be messy people with addictions, suicidal tendencies and fears; but then Christ gives us the way to change all that while still being a part of something that is holy. He makes us holy the minute we accept him, it just takes us time to find out individually how to move in the “new man” skin.

When one is a child all of his basic skills come so easily, even while he is at his most fragile physical state of being—completely dependent on his mother and father. As he gets older, he believes he is independent. He no longer needs mother and father to make him breakfast, dress him in the morning, or tuck him in at night. When one is born again, it is as if spiritually he must learn all of the most basic skills over again. This can only be done in progression, and we all start off in different lanes of the race track because of the baggage we acquire in life. More importantly, this can only be done in humble surrender. We must recognize our need for the Heavenly Father’s help.

The song “Torches Together” confronts the fear of those who are reluctant to be a part of the church becuase they have been burned by conflict within the church. The song quotes part of this passage in the gospel of Luke:

But the Pharisees and experts in the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John. “To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other: ” ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry.’ For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.” ‘But wisdom is proved right by all her children.”

Luke 7:30-35

We’re no better than the Pharisees and lawyers when we try and impose our own view of perfection on the body of Christ. Even in Jesus’ dying, his ugly and shameful death—do we not find beauty in that? Why then should we shut out those who do not fit our expectations from the start and refuse to play along with our legalistic views? It’s this kind of attitude that drives people away from the church with the desire to have nothing to do with it. Why should we pretend we have any power to force others to change? Christ transforms us to his image, it’s a slow process but we all get there. Heaven forbid we forget that we were one just as clueless as the man next to us on the pew and fail to have compassion for him.

Returning to the verse in Ephesians, Christ reconciled our sin consequences to the law by carrying out the law. Because of the law, man was divided from man. The Jews thought that the Christ would return to take down the Roman government. But after trial from both the Jews and the Romans, he willingly gave his life at the hand of Roman authority at the violation of Roman law; then he ransomed the captives from hell and rose again. Thus he defeated the law with peace and obedience to God’s will. Jesus desired for all men to live in unity as one body made holy by his one flesh. He knew that the church would face opposition when it followed this path because it would be going head-to-head with the very legalistic ideas in which we have taken comfort. But it’s no contest when every single person in that church body has the Spirit of God dwelling in and among them. The earth is creaking like rotten floorboards under the weight of this struggle. We know how it is going to end, but we cannot afford to get sidetracked. It is the very thing of the enemy to divide Christians on meaningless nonsense and all the while make us into repulsive hypocrites of our very faith.

As people—as a church, we’re a wreck, but we’re a family. Society has been decomposing slowly as we isolate ourselves. Many of us don’t want anything to do with our own flesh and blood anymore, and there’s little opportunity to grow or even maintain health in that state because we need each other. We’re so fragile. The body of Christ is no different. Without each other we lose sight of what is important—without each other we die.

I discovered this while living alone for merely a week. I was fine, just fine. But, I found myself unmotivated to even feed myself until my stomach growled in pain. All those times I took for granted when my mother asked me to eat when I hadn’t eaten all day yet professed that I wan’t hungry. While talking with some friends, we had all confessed that we felt no fear for our own lives, only each others’. Perhaps there is a holy sort of fear in genuine love—not the fear from the enemy that constricts us, but that draws us closer to each other and turns us back to our loving heavenly Father.

There’s a real beauty in our fragility. When you see people like those on that show Hoarders who are literally buried alive by thier loneliness (many of them living alone without a guest over a decade), or a widower who just deteriorates and dies after his wife is gone. It’s heart breaking. Sometimes it may seem easier to live without others because we’re free to make our own decisions and there are no conflicts, but it’s that mindset that ushers in the worst kind of cancer. I confess, confrontation makes me feel my humanity and it gives me a peculiar sort of satisfaction. Grace. I feel the need for it. And the moment I need it, I know God is providing it in abundance. These experiences that we all go through validate all the more our spiritual depravity—our need for a savior. We need him not only for freedom from our sin, but from ourselves also. His glory is the best kind of distraction. As we behold, so we become. We are not glasses, being either full or empty at any one time; but rivers, curiously full and empty at the same time (Christianity is full of paradoxes).