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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people.
‘I will sow them among the people: and they shall remember me in far countries’ (Zech. 10.9).
The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and
strength to the believer.
It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians
praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.
The Christian in exile is comforted by a brief visit of a Christian brother, a prayer together and a brother’s blessing; indeed, he is strengthened by a letter written by the hand of a Christian.
Seminarians before their ordination receive the gift of common life with their brethren for a definite period.
Through and in Jesus Christ
But God has put this Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others.
a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.
The more genuine and the deeper
our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through
Not an Ideal but a Divine Reality
Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream.
The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian...
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to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should b...
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Just as surely God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great general disillusionment with others, with Christians in...
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By sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief per...
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God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.
Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight,
begins to grasp in faith the promise that ...
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The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a commun...
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A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Chri...
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Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished...
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He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ...
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God ...
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visionary dr...
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it makes the dreamer proud and ...
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The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, ...
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He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuse...
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Even
When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.
If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification.
Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his
spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature.
Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.
A Spiritual not a Human Reality
In the community of the Spirit there burns the bright love of brotherly service, agape; in human community of spirit there glows the dark love of good and evil desire, eros.
Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons.
Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them.
In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic. Christian Church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church.
The
exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful at this point.
Morning does not belong to the individual, it belongs to the Church of the triune God, to the Christian family, to the brotherhood.
At the threshold of the new day stands the Lord who made it.
The Secret of the Psalter
The Man Jesus Christ, to whom no affliction, no ill, no suffering is alien and who yet was the wholly innocent and righteous one, is praying in the Psalter through the mouth of his Church. The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus
