Created for Community (HT: Paul Tripp)
Another great read by Paul Tripp:
I encourage you to read the entire article and I’ll tempt you with just a few excerpts (emphasis mine–don’t miss the bold paragraph!):
“People are created for community. We are made in the likeness of a God who not only is committed to community and calls us to community, but is Himself a community. He did not structure us to live in isolation and autonomy. He created us to live in two essential communities: a loving, worshipful, and dependent community with Him, and a loving, serving, interdependent community with one another. We will never be what we are supposed to be or do what we were created to do while living in isolation from worshipful friendship with God, and mutually-serving friendship with others …
Yet with all of our gratitude, it is important to recognize that there is something powerful inside each of us that drives us away from these two essential communities. That thing is sin. In its fundamental form, sin is anti-social. A verse in 2 Corinthians 5 captures this well: ‘And he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves … .’ He died for my sin—which causes me to shrink my life down to the size of…my life. Sin causes my thoughts and motives to be dominated by a powerful triad of self-focus: my wants, my feeling, my needs. Where sin reigns community struggles …
The lies of autonomy and self-sufficiency push us toward individualistic and private lifestyles …
We tend to live with big barriers between our public personas and our private lives. We do tend to live in networks of terminally casual relationships. Most of the people we think we know we don’t actually know. Yes, we know things about them, but would probably be shocked if we knew the struggles that regularly take place in the interior of their lives. Most of what we call fellowship is not fellowship at all. It is surface talk about things that don’t matter that allows us to maintain our privacy. So the couple who has been fighting on the way to church hits the front door with a smile, the mother who is frazzled takes a few minutes to get herself together. And when we arrive for public worship, nobody tells, nobody knows, and nobody helps.
Yet relationship—community—is at the very heart of Christianity. We are not just forgiven; we are welcomed into God’s family … And He warns us that this community is not a luxury for a few, but is essential for each one of us. He calls us to live as if we actually believe that our walk with Him is a community project …”