Two Sides to the Same Coin

We recently started meeting on Thursday nights at our new space and the Crave documentary was a perfect way to start us out, clarifying the direction we are moving at Genesis.

In the documentary we saw the importance of how leading a person to faith in Christ may begin first with simply joining them in their journey even as Jesus, unknown to the disciples at the time, joined them on the road to Emmaus. They soon found themselves in a

conversation with God, not even aware that God Himself was the One initiating that conversation.

It seems that many who follow Christ have embraced a certain method of communicating their faith that is often detached, judgmental, and really very different from what we read or see in Jesus himself and maybe instead of trying to win a debate and prove God to someone, we can hope to guide them to a place where they might meet and encounter God themselves.

Sunday morning was the flipside of Thursday’s coin as we are going through 1 Corinthians. It’s quite a contrast to go from journeying with people to find faith to disciplining someone in their faith; difficult unless you realize that the latter is dealing with family, which brings a whole new and complicated dimension to the situation.

It’s a hard sell in today’s society to see that the way we live affects those around us and when we think of a faith community it is usually more like an organization or club we attend than a family to whom we belong. And though we may romanticize the idea that when one person suffers we all suffer, we are not so quick to embrace the alternative that if we screw up, it screws everyone up, but that is exactly why Paul deals so strongly with the Corinthians; because we are not just a social gathering, we are family and what we do really affects those around us.

So Paul deals with serious moral issues and we have to ask ourselves how do we deal with these situations if we really are family? If a child gets hooked on drugs, does that affect the rest of the family? If a dad logs on to porn instead of showing affection to his wife and loving her, does that affect the rest of the family? If a wife flirts with another man and tries to seduce him, does that affect the rest of the family? Of course it does.

Our purpose is not to hunt down all the problems and condemn those who struggle or fall. Our desire is to live in relationship and when these kinds of issues show up, we, in humility, recognize how essential these people are and treat them as more important than ourselves. We do everything we can to strengthen and restore them, because they are our brothers, our daughters. This is exactly what Christ has done for us. He adopted us, made us family and relentlessly works in our lives for good.

So on one side of the coin we journey with a person to find faith

And on the other side we struggle with our family through faith.

Two sides of the same coin.