Does commitment to Christ mean commitment to each other?

For most of my life, and all of my life as a follower of Christ, I have been told I am too brash, I am too blunt, I can't control what I say...These statements preceded my reputation and when a person would meet me for the first time with a mutual friend, this was the initial thought. For so long I would try hard to change this about myself. I looked at this characteristic as a flaw, and only a flaw. In a lot of instances it was. For example, let me share one of the most embarrassing stories of my life:

I was working at the boys and girls club and I had an outstanding woman for a boss. She loved her family, her job, and her employees. She was jubilant, and had such a wonderful heart of gold. She was also a "little person" (dwarf). We were all at work chatting one day about the time that a new "Austin Powers" movie was coming out. I don't know if you remember, but their advertisement for it was full of midgets and dwarfs. And I said out loud, "I don't think I will be able to see that movie if it's full of midgets." And everyone looked at me with a look of horror. I could not backtrack or cover my tracks. The proverbial saying "I got my hand caught in the cookie jar." would ring true here. But, because of her gracious heart and compassion for others she forgave me and it was the end of it. This was something that to this day I still feel ashamed of, embarrassed that I would say anything like it!

So obviously there is a line we have to draw with our personalities so we do not step from the line of appropriate to inappropriate. Understandably, these lines are subjective. However, in general I struggled to the point where I felt like I needed to change who I was and who I was becoming. I would often ask the Lord, "WHy did you make me a passionate, upfront personality with a propensity to speak before I think?" I didn't understand the concoction cooked up by God that was me.

But were people wrong to instill this feeling of shame into me (whether intentionally or not)? I don't think so. Let me share a Bonhoeffer quote that resonates with me, and, I believe, represents the biblical idea of unity and community:

"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 Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity."(Life Together, 26). I think of Paul's analogy of the body in 1 Corinthians 12 when I read this quote. We are engineered to come together with all of our differences and NOT disregard those differences (weaker parts) because we don't like them. We must function as one body united to do the work of Christ!

Here's another one, " 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. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and and hope for it." (Life Together, 30). 1 John 1:7 says "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. " Fellowship as someone who "walks in the light" is clearly not an option, but a reality we enter when we chose to surrender to Christ.

Commitment to Christ does mean we have a commitment to each other as the church. I would be a fool if I thought I would get along with every single Christian out there, but that isn't the point. We aren't meant to get along with everyone, but to realize we have a common mission as members of this body, and we are called to forego our personal desires of what or who we like and dislike for the sake of His mission. A commitment to sacrificial love and Selflessness is the key in understanding how we grow a deeper and genuine community with Christ as our foundation. Consider I John 4:7-11  "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. " This passage starts and ends with a call to love as God loved. Be sacrificial in our dealings with each other. Interesting v. 11 says we ought to love as Christ did, this word for ought has an intrinsic meaning of obligation. We are obligated to display love the was God did, sacrificially. 

My encouragement for anyone who reads this is 2 fold: 1) Understand how God has wired you and be content with how you fit into the community of Christ. Understand that your wiring has a tendency to become tainted if not grounded by God. And, 2) serve the church body sacrificially. Don't continue to belittle the family of God with an assault of criticism and elitism. We are the church and we are called to sacrificially love one another with a truly genuine and deep commitment to each other.

Lastly, I would suggest picking up and reading "Life Together" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is an excellent and encouraging little book, and an easy read.