Simply Church

This book by Tony and Felicity Dale is an easy read at about 115 pages. The excerpt below comes from a chapter entitled You in Your Small Corner and I in Mine and talks about sharing ourselves with others.

It is hard to enjoy any sense of “community” when we see each other a couple of times a week for an hour or so, at the most.  It is wonderful when Christians, desiring to share their lives in more meaningful ways, begin to so order their priorities that they can spend time together.

In the New Testament, the believers not only shared their time but also their possessions. None of them said that anything they had was their own, but they shared everything. Many years ago, we were challenged by A. W. Tozer’s five vows, one of which was that we were never to own anything. This means that the Lord can do what He wants with my possessions. If He asks me to give something away, it is not mine to hold on to. The principle here is stewardship rather than ownership. I need to take good care of the things that are entrusted to me. I may need to think twice before lending out my possessions to people who I know will not return them in as good or better shape than they received them. But apart from that, my material goods are not my own. Think how many resources could be released into the kingdom if we shared, for example, our power tools, our lawn mowers, or our cars.

I (Felicity) will never forget another blessing that came our way. We were newly married and one of the people in the student church that we had helped to pioneer decided that we needed a car. Unbeknownst to us, she worked for the whole summer, and then presented us with her entire earnngs. Imagine how surprised we were, how unworthy we felt, but also what an incredible blessing it was! And looking back on what that car enabled us to do as newly married students in a busy medical school context, I can see that we were able to touch many more people because of the travel time saved. She really had made her gift to Christ, and we were enabled by her generosity to live our lives more effectively for the kingdom.

Sharing ourselves is often the most difficult thing to do. Paul could say in I Thessalonians 2:8, “We loved you so much that we gave you not only God’s Good News but our own lives, too.” In our culture it is not acceptable to show weakness. We all go around wearing masks. We wear the mask of a bright smile and “everything’s fine,” when actually our marriage is falling apart. Or maybe we don’t know how we are going to put food on the table this week, or we are scared that our kids are going out control, or we feel so depressed we don’t know if we are going to make it through the day. The contrast to what has become the norm is illustrated by a passage such as I John 1:7 that tells us “if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ is, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from every sin.” There is a transparency here, a willingness to let others see us as we truly are. Openness of this sort does make one liable to be hurt at times, but all loving relationships have the potential of causing hurt. Those we love the most have the greater capacity to hurt us. Does this mean that I won’t accept love because I refuse to risk hurt? Jesus loved us so much that He laid down His life for us. Love covers a multitude of sins. It also builds us up into a living demonstration of the body of Christ.

Do we feel safe sharing our innermost selves with a trusted brother or sister? It can take a lot of courage. Or from the other side, are we able to respect confidences and to love unconditionally without judging? The book of I John is full of passages that talk about the need for us to love one another. Time and again it asks how you can love God, whom you cannot see, if you do not love your brother. Our love for God is to be measured by our love for our brothers and sisters.

Are we prepared to rise up to the challenge of meeting the New Testament standard of building our church on relationships rather than just attending meetings or being part of the program? Are we willing to be inconvenienced in our personal lives to do this? Are we prepared to take the children of the single mom for a day so that she can get some time off, or to take time to visit the person who is sick or in prison?

In John 13:35 it says that the world will know that we are His disciples when we love one another. Is it currently that surprising that not only the world, but even many Christians are dropping out of involvement with the church because they cannot find any real relationships there?

Tony and Felicity Dale, Simply Church