Accountability
Hey everyone,
So in effort to back up what Trea mentioned tonight about accountability I wanted to share some quotes from Dr. Lawless' book Mentor. The book focuses more on the one on one mentoring/discipleship relationships that we hope to have in our churches today, but I think the same principles can be applied to our small group.
First, "In mentoring relationships [in our case deep relationships with another in small group] confession is essential - people need to be utterly honest. Spiritual full disclouser brings our sin out of the Enemy's darkness into God's light where we can deal with it through repentance and forgiveness."
"[Leaders and fellow believers] who grant grace to people who have failed aren't ignoring or negating the consequences of sin. Instead, they are modeling God's love to a fallen yet repentant people. Good [leadership and relationships] create an atmosphere for honest confession because the [person] knows that admitting the truth will not result in any less love or acceptance."
This sums it all up for me and I love this because I think that there is a lot of truth in the following quote, and I think that our small group is ripe for this. "In effective mentoring [whether it be more of a mentor-mentee relationship, or even peer-to-peer] safety in failure leads to less failure.
I think the point is that when we get to the point, as a small group, to honestly confess our struggles and sin in our life then we can experience God's grace through the love and acceptance of each other from the group as a whole. I think that this leads to killing sin with love.
Grace isn't so cheap that we can still live however we want; and it's not so costly that we have to try and earn it; IT'S FREE. Grace is free. And grace isn't just some religious idea that we have in talking about the Gospel.
Grace is God's intentional and personal decision to act on behalf of man to restore humanity back into relationship with him that occurs through a real man, Jesus Christ, who lived a real perfect life, and died a real and shameful death, so that at a real point in time in all of history something really happened that shapes the rest of eternity.
Can we get to the point as a group to be in the presence of Christ as he tells the woman caught in adultery "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more"?
I truly believe that when we are all humble enough to know that, as we said tonight, sin is tied to the flesh and there is a battle waging inside of us between good and evil, we will be much more vulnerable. The question in accountability is not so much whether someone has sin in their life. No, go to the book of James and be assured that their is sin in your life. If you think you have none, you decieve yourself and the truth is not in you. The question of accountability is how vulnerable are we willing to be?
To take that question even further: Do we desire Christ, and hate our sin so much, that we would expose it to Christ and another so that (as the quote said above) God's light can shine on it? When our sin is brought into the light, yes it's humiliating and uncomfortable, but when sin is exposed it gets killed. Only the power of God can kill our sin and it must be exposed for that to happen, and an incredible means by which God has blessed us with to expose our sin is relationships marked by love and acceptance within our small groups.
To make this real, I have had to do this recently in my own life. There is one guy in our small group that I meet up with regularly and we discuss what is going on in our lives. There was sin in my life that I was hiding for some time, and after it rotted enough away inside of me, I ran to God in confession and brokenness and went to my brother to do the same. His response to my confession: loving embrace and acceptance. As a result, I have been more equipped and motivated to fight against what I was once consumed in. How? Becuase what my brother demonstrated to me was a similar, but pale reflection of the loving embrace of Christ when we return to him from playing in mud puddles.
When our small group grows in the knowledge of grace we will be a more broken and contrite people. This will lead us to be people of prayer, repentance, love, acceptance, and long suffering. What a foundation for Christ to come into our group and our lives and dramatically transform us!
We don't have to hide anything. We can expose ourselves to each other because for those who are in Christ there is no condemnation.
To use a military analogy, when one person was failing or couldn't keep up we took that burden upon ourselves, because this person had become one with us and we were either all going to fail, or we were all going to succeed; no one gets left behind.
There is a depth to knowing Christ in our own lives that can only be achieved through exposing the darkness in our lives. And our small group is the place of love and acceptance that this can take place.
The question, again, is this: Are we willing to be exposed? Because exposure leads to a depth of relationship with Christ that has yet to be experienced.
We are on the verge. We are all in this together. We can go deeper!!
"For when I kept silent, my bones
wasted away
through my groaning all day
long.
For day and night your hand was
heavy upon me;
my strength dried up as by
the heat of summer. (Selah)
I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, 'I will confess my transgres-
sions to the Lord,"
and you forgave the iniquity of
my sin. (Selah)"
- Psalm 32:4-5
"But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the propitiation [the one has appeased God's wrath] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." - 1 John 2:1-2
So in effort to back up what Trea mentioned tonight about accountability I wanted to share some quotes from Dr. Lawless' book Mentor. The book focuses more on the one on one mentoring/discipleship relationships that we hope to have in our churches today, but I think the same principles can be applied to our small group.
First, "In mentoring relationships [in our case deep relationships with another in small group] confession is essential - people need to be utterly honest. Spiritual full disclouser brings our sin out of the Enemy's darkness into God's light where we can deal with it through repentance and forgiveness."
"[Leaders and fellow believers] who grant grace to people who have failed aren't ignoring or negating the consequences of sin. Instead, they are modeling God's love to a fallen yet repentant people. Good [leadership and relationships] create an atmosphere for honest confession because the [person] knows that admitting the truth will not result in any less love or acceptance."
This sums it all up for me and I love this because I think that there is a lot of truth in the following quote, and I think that our small group is ripe for this. "In effective mentoring [whether it be more of a mentor-mentee relationship, or even peer-to-peer] safety in failure leads to less failure.
I think the point is that when we get to the point, as a small group, to honestly confess our struggles and sin in our life then we can experience God's grace through the love and acceptance of each other from the group as a whole. I think that this leads to killing sin with love.
Grace isn't so cheap that we can still live however we want; and it's not so costly that we have to try and earn it; IT'S FREE. Grace is free. And grace isn't just some religious idea that we have in talking about the Gospel.
Grace is God's intentional and personal decision to act on behalf of man to restore humanity back into relationship with him that occurs through a real man, Jesus Christ, who lived a real perfect life, and died a real and shameful death, so that at a real point in time in all of history something really happened that shapes the rest of eternity.
Can we get to the point as a group to be in the presence of Christ as he tells the woman caught in adultery "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more"?
I truly believe that when we are all humble enough to know that, as we said tonight, sin is tied to the flesh and there is a battle waging inside of us between good and evil, we will be much more vulnerable. The question in accountability is not so much whether someone has sin in their life. No, go to the book of James and be assured that their is sin in your life. If you think you have none, you decieve yourself and the truth is not in you. The question of accountability is how vulnerable are we willing to be?
To take that question even further: Do we desire Christ, and hate our sin so much, that we would expose it to Christ and another so that (as the quote said above) God's light can shine on it? When our sin is brought into the light, yes it's humiliating and uncomfortable, but when sin is exposed it gets killed. Only the power of God can kill our sin and it must be exposed for that to happen, and an incredible means by which God has blessed us with to expose our sin is relationships marked by love and acceptance within our small groups.
To make this real, I have had to do this recently in my own life. There is one guy in our small group that I meet up with regularly and we discuss what is going on in our lives. There was sin in my life that I was hiding for some time, and after it rotted enough away inside of me, I ran to God in confession and brokenness and went to my brother to do the same. His response to my confession: loving embrace and acceptance. As a result, I have been more equipped and motivated to fight against what I was once consumed in. How? Becuase what my brother demonstrated to me was a similar, but pale reflection of the loving embrace of Christ when we return to him from playing in mud puddles.
When our small group grows in the knowledge of grace we will be a more broken and contrite people. This will lead us to be people of prayer, repentance, love, acceptance, and long suffering. What a foundation for Christ to come into our group and our lives and dramatically transform us!
We don't have to hide anything. We can expose ourselves to each other because for those who are in Christ there is no condemnation.
To use a military analogy, when one person was failing or couldn't keep up we took that burden upon ourselves, because this person had become one with us and we were either all going to fail, or we were all going to succeed; no one gets left behind.
There is a depth to knowing Christ in our own lives that can only be achieved through exposing the darkness in our lives. And our small group is the place of love and acceptance that this can take place.
The question, again, is this: Are we willing to be exposed? Because exposure leads to a depth of relationship with Christ that has yet to be experienced.
We are on the verge. We are all in this together. We can go deeper!!
"For when I kept silent, my bones
wasted away
through my groaning all day
long.
For day and night your hand was
heavy upon me;
my strength dried up as by
the heat of summer. (Selah)
I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, 'I will confess my transgres-
sions to the Lord,"
and you forgave the iniquity of
my sin. (Selah)"
- Psalm 32:4-5
"But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the propitiation [the one has appeased God's wrath] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." - 1 John 2:1-2
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