In the Diner

Pretty quiet this morning.

Mr. Wilson asked me about an article I am writing for the local paper. It’s done. But I keep forgetting to print it out to give it to him. Hopefully it will be a good presentation of the gospel that might be used by God to reach some people.

And Billy Joel is on the radio singing an appropriate anthem for modernity, including Christianity.

I don’t need you to worry for me ‘cause I’m alright.

I don’t want to you tell me it’s time to come home.

I don’t care what you say anymore this is my life.

Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

Many Christians have decided that their individual soul liberty should be individual sole liberty. They think that no one else has any right to speak into their lives. Oh, if you try, they will listen politely for a while. But they will leave, convinced that they are right, and that they do not need your advice. After all, they think, if you knew what they knew, you would see it their way.

They want the church because it salves their conscience on the weekend. They do not want the fellowship—the sharing of life—that comes along with it.

What a lack of humility it requires to refuse to listen to fellow believers. It denies the work of God through the body of believers. It denies that God may be at work in someone else’s life to teach them things that they in turn can teach you. And it denies them their place of ministry in the lives of fellow believers.

In an age of independence, we need to recover the biblical ideals of true fellowship that allows others to speak into our lives, and we must receive such messages with humble graciousness, grateful to God that he has placed us in a body of imperfect people who care about other imperfect people. They might be wrong when they speak into your life. But they deserve a thoughtful and discerning hearing.

It isn’t your life, not even if you write a really cool sounding song about it.

It belongs to God, and he has placed people in your life through the church that he intends to use to help grow you, to set you apart from a hostile world (which is what “sanctification” means).

We need to learn to have a “humble mind” toward other believers, not just to serve them, but to let them serve us, even when it gets personal.